Downtown Urban Arts Festival (DUAF) is a five-week annual multi-disciplinary arts event with cultural offerings in theater, film, music and poetry held during the spring at renowned venues in downtown Manhattan, NYC. DUAF treats New Yorkers, East Coasters and tourists to the best of new groundbreaking theater and film from around the world. Writers from America’s burgeoning multicultural landscape and from around the world have the opportunity to share their stories that interpret our history and our times.
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CREATIVE. VIBRANT. PASSIONATE. These words aptly describe the past performances, as well as the future direction, of DUAF. Its founding program is its Theater series, formerly know as Downtown Urban Theater Festival/DUTF, which was created in 2001 with the purpose to build a repertoire of new American theatre that echoes the true spirit of urban life and speaks to a whole new generation whose lives defy categorizing along conventional lines. That purpose has been realized many times over, as over 150 writers have created and refined their work for the stage and thousands of inspired audience members have applauded their performances. Theater was inaugurated in 2002 at the HERE Arts Center in SoHo to help revitalize the NYC downtown arts scene, which was experiencing a severe downturn due to the WTC disaster. Theater has been recognized as “one of the world’s best festivals for new works” and described as “not only prestigious, but a slice of heaven for playwrights who want the chance to freely express themselves.” (Lisa Mulcahy, Theater Festivals, Allworth Press, 2005)

The Downtown Urban Arts Festival brings six weeks of multi-disciplinary cultural offerings to lower Manhattan, including theater, film, music and poetry. We caught up with the theater artists whose work will be featured this week at Cherry Lane Theatre. Nako Adodoadji, The Protest Tuesday, May 16 at 7:00 p.m. Tell us about your show. Featuring live music that fuses together jazz and hip hop, THE PROTEST is a mash up of physical, devised and testimonial theatre that explores the economic, political and social landscape of an America on the cusp of revolution. What have been the most exciting things about seeing your show jump from the page to the stage? Working with the cast and musicians in rehearsals has been an amazing experience.  Because of the devised nature of the show, there are certain sections of music and choreography that were not pre-set before rehearsals, so we are literally creating orchestration and choreography during each rehearsal with the cast.  It makes the show extremely unique to the actors and musicians, and the personal archives they each bring to the development process.  This is a very special and intuitive group of artists, and I’m excited to continue dis …Read more