THE EXPONENTIAL FESTIVAL
JANUARY’S BROOKLYN-BASED THEATRE FESTIVAL
~ A pleasure, a mess, a thrill, and a dream. ~
MISSION
Exponential is a month-long January festival dedicated to New York City-based artists working in experimental performance. The participants in this multi-artist, multi-venue festival are committed to ecstatic creativity in the face of commercialism. Exponential is driven by inclusiveness and a diversity of artists, forms, and ideas coupled with utopian resource-sharing, mentoring and the championing of risky, rigorous work in eclectic fields.
HISTORY
The Exponential Festival is a volunteer-run performance festival for New York City based artists and Brooklyn venues described by Greenpointers as an “annual wintertime new-work bonanza.” Since 2016, we have presented hundreds of productions made by thousands of working-class artists, attended by tens of thousands of New Yorkers, on an annual budget at or below $150K. Our work has been lauded by The New Yorker, Vulture, American Theatre Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and The New York Times, whose chief theatre critic Helen Shaw described Exponential as “where you go to see [performance] in [its] purest and most inventive state.”
Exponential is dedicated to creating the conditions for the next big thing, recentering our artistic ecosystem on locals, paying working-class artists and subsidizing their productions with free resources like promotion, photography, videography, insurance and more, in order to help artists take root in NYC. In an interview with Culturebot, alumni Derek Smith said, “What Exponential…does with the resources they have is kind of unheard of across the city."
Founded by Theresa Buchheister at DIY punk club The Silent Barn, Exponential strives to program a festival of multidisciplinary NYC artists representing Brooklyn in its great diversity: presenting as many queer artists as not, as many women and non-binary artists as not, and as many artists of color as not.
Exponential is the place to find your favorite artist’s favorite artist. Our roster is full of creators who have gone on to redefine the city’s cultural ecosystem, like Alex Tatarsky, Ike Ufomadu, Salomé Egas, Lisa Fagan and Lena Engelstein, Christina Tang, Elinor T Vanderburg, Marissa Joyce Stamps, SB Tennent, Aeon Andreas, Evan Silver aka Tiresias, Kyoung Park, Modesto “Flako” Jimenez’s Oye Group, Cristina Pitter, ellpetha tsivicos and Camilo Quiroz-Vasquez, Theresa Buchheister and Title:Point, Normandy Sherwood and Nikki Calonge, and many more.