PhysFestNYC 2026: January 8-18 at Stella Adler Center for the Arts, NYC\

PhysFestNYC is a community-led festival that celebrates, enriches, and envisions our field of physical theater. As an annual gathering, the festival will provide space for practitioners, audiences, and the physical-theater-curious to share in presented works, diverse workshop offerings, and community-building events. Together, we will deepen our understanding and appreciation for what physical theater can be.

This is the first Physical Theater Festival in NYC, and the second of its kind in the USA. In 2024 and 2025, we hosted 7 events per day over 10 days at Stella Adler Center of the Arts, presenting over 145 artists and issuing 1,600 tickets annually. Artists made 100% of their own box office. Years 1 and 2 were made possible by hundreds of donors who, together, contributed $42,000 to launch the fest.

With your help, we will be able to make PhysFestNYC a sustainable annual event!

Donations $1 - $999: You are a Festival Supporter! Enjoy a special welcome when you come to PhysFestNYC in January.
Donations $1,000 - $4,999: You are a member of the Founding Circle! Enjoy a free festival pass in 2026.
Donations $5,000+: You are a Founding Partner! Enjoy a free festival pass for all fests to come.

What is Physical Theater?

Physical Theater is any performing art form that centers the body in space. This includes Dance Theater, Commedia dell’arte, Clown, Mime, Butoh, Mukabhinaya, and limitless genre-mixing or -defying styles. As a field, it tends to be experimental, innovative, and genre-breaking, and its methods are increasingly used in larger commercial productions. Despite this, physical theater practitioners are under-resourced and often siloed in their practice. We seek to create a festival that opens pathways of communication and opportunities for shared resources, thereby supporting artists in their work and deepening their impact.

What do we mean by a Community-Focused Festival?

Horizontal Leadership. Instead of being led by a singular party, the leadership team of the festival consists of various cohorts in order to better reflect the varying desires and perspectives of the physical theater community.
Access and Inclusion. Though we all have a body in common, those bodies are incredibly diverse in shape, politicization, performance style, lived experience, ability, etc. We want PhysFestNYC to be an accurate reflection of the range of practitioners in our field, as well as a rich space for discourse that pushes us toward increased inclusion field-wide. All parts of the festival will be designed with access and inclusion in mind. Your donations make this happen.
Responsive Planning. We began developing the festival in 2022, highlighted by various open events for community input. With a tiered rollout, the festival’s design was an emergent response to the desires, ideas, and needs of those in the physical theater community and its audiences. We are continuing this precedent in 2026.

Check out our Concept Note for more details!

https://www.physfestnyc.org/s/PhysFestNYC-Concept-Note-2025-1.pdf

PhysFestNYC 2026

The Third-Annual Physical Theater Festival in NYC

Team Members