Special Presentation Tracks
Every year, a small number of artists are selected to present bold, groundbreaking new work in our Special Presentation Tracks at the festival. These are curated pathways that celebrate vision, voice, and virtuosity across identity, form, and experience. The 2026 tracks are shaped by a powerhouse panel of artists, producers, and field-shifting cultural leaders. Their selections are in. The artists have been chosen. Explore their shows below, as well as the panelists who selected them!
BIPOC New Work Award
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Analisa Raya-Flores
In an evening of drag, clown, and desperation, Señor Babyhead presents his Día de Muertos Especial. It’s a journey across the Sonoran Desert in which Babyhead encounters artifacts, mirages, and spirits.
Who is Señor Babyhead? Only Mexico’s most (washed up) famous sitcom star, desperate to stay relevant and avoid becoming an artifact, himself.
It’s an hour of crooning, crawling, and implicating the audience in a dangerous game, or as Theater Beyond Broadway put it, “An act of defiance disguised as cabaret.”
New Work by Circus Artists of Color (CSAW Award)
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Tim Air-Walker
AFRO is a solo juggling show that pays homage to the past, critiques the present, and speaks of a brighter, more optimistic future for Black people in the United States.
This show explores some of the challenges and struggles that many of them faced in order to gain access to jobs in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics).
Not only is AFRO a tribute to Black culture, but it's also an adventure through time and space accompanied with a bunch of fun and interesting contemporary juggling tricks!
Performances for Young Audiences Development Cohort
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Conrad Junior
The SUNDIAL Center for the Advancement of HUMAN / NATURE is a place to get healthy. Conrad Junior is a talk show hosts who suffers from Shadow Addiction Disorder (SAD), an affliction common to entertainers and also normal people.
The show is a single hour of visitation.
When he’s sober, he’s finding natural answers to human questions using short doc segments, songs, immersive tech, and live interview. Here at the SUNDIAL center, CJ can explore his personal and familial history with addiction, and to get clean the absolute worst way: live for a studio audience.
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Jonah Godfrey & Michael Amendola
“What would you sacrifice for love?”
Volpe & Líadan unearths the epic tale of two unlikely lovers on a perilous quest to steal a legendary Chrômivâl from the tyrannical shadow-lord Âyneråkt the Only. Part fantasy-heist, part fireside ballad, this immortal story of mortal sacrifice sings of shadows and stars, tricksters and beasts, and the consequences of reaching beyond one’s fate.
Featuring the wordplay of Dóla the Bard, the music and direction of Jónah the Troubadour, and a seasoned ensemble of performers, the production weaves original folk song, puppetry, and stylized physical theater to summon an otherworld of magical creatures and unforgettable characters.
Volpe & Líadan is recommended for ages 10 and up (including immortals).
Content advisory: This production contains themes of death and mortality, and some moments of stylized fantasy violence.
SWANA Award
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Armaghan Fakhraeirad
Echoes of Dammām is a multimedia storytelling performance that follows fragmented stories gathered around dammām, a ritual drumming practice from Bushehr, a port city in southern Iran.
On stage, live narration moves alongside projected video, field recordings, and layered sound. Drums, voices, images, silence, and memory appear in fragments, tracing how grief, resistance, and the struggle for freedom can live inside sonic and bodily practices. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in Bushehr, the performance does not tell a single linear story. Instead, it creates an intimate audiovisual space where ritual mourning, Black musical heritage, histories of circulation and loss, and personal memory echo through one another.
Echoes of Dammām shows how a drum can carry memory, grief, resistance, and traces of collective life beyond a certain ritualistic and regulated setting.
Immersive Award
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Kym Priess
Loser Lion Party Bus is an interactive, looper-pedal-driven clown-rock joyride from award-winning multidisciplinary troublemaker Kym Priess (“Hawk”), supporting actor in Connor Storrie’s upcoming film, leader of art-rock spectacle band STUNTDRIVER and Special Presentation Immersive Track winner at Cannonball Hub. Following a breakout run at Edinburgh Fringe and tours throughout the US and UK, Priess brings audiences aboard a surreal party bus powered by rock ’n roll, absurd comedy, and cathartic audience participation.
Fresh off the Vegas wrestling circuit, Loser Lion (he/him) is a washed-up performer trapped inside his lion-suited alter ego—fake fur, fake chest, red bikini bottoms, and bare legs—desperately reinventing himself in the party bus business.Audiences become passengers in a face-to-face cathartic ride where the “gas pedal” is a live vocal looper, beers flow, and his inflatable lover rides shotgun through surreal dream sequences, air-drumming breakdowns, rock anthems, beer-chugging contests, ass-shaking competitions, a FaceTime call with a mysterious sensei, and an unexpectedly moving moment featuring a cassette tape from his bronco-riding father.
Part buffoon show, part rock concert, and part emotional transformation, Loser Lion Party Bus spirals through failure, ego, grief, ambition, and the absurd pressure to “make it” in a world obsessed with hustle. Born from pandemic isolation, loss, and the relentless pursuit of creative dreams, the show builds toward an explosive communal release—a celebration of resilience, connection, and trusting the adventure of life.
A real-life stunt driver, Peaches tour alum, and Texas-born, LA-based clown-rock musician, Priess creates a feral, genre-smashing performance in the lineage of absurdist comedy, punk rock, and immersive theater.
Described as a “hallucinogen-fueled joyride” by Majestic Repertory Theatre’s Artistic Director, Troy Heard, and praised by Broadway Baby for earning “its place among purveyors of the absurd,” Loser Lion Party Bus lands somewhere between The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Pee-wee’s Playhouse by way of a roadside Vegas breakdown. Feel seen. Maybe heal a little. All aboard.
https://linktr.ee/kympriess -
MAZEL
★ Cannonball Immersive Award Winner 2026 ★
“Bonkers & sublime…a trembling channel to the cosmic imbecile” - Alex Tatarsky
What does mysticism have to do with recess? Is quantum superposition the cause of your suffering? Do you really know your ABC’s?
Enter the psychotic portal of the primordial preschool prophet. Journey through timespace on the wings of a demented fractal, in search of the ancient origin of light. Why do things have holes? Why don’t we fund public education? Is the universe a human centipede? All life’s questions, answered! An epic work of social-political-cosmic commentary.
Endoscopic cameras, electrocution contraptions, dirt piles, and squeaking pigs await. The quantum-clown-electro-opera of the micro and macro-cosmos. Endure the orgy of ecstasy, agony, and neverending existence.
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING:
“An extraordinary rising star of the Philadelphia Avant Garde”
“Watching their work brings you into another plane of existence”
“Spellbinding, boundary-crossing, haunting”
“This literally rewired my brain”
“Gloriously messy, insanely generous”
“Fearless, otherworldly, darkly whimsical”
“I fear that Mazel is a genius…”
“Psychotic…brilliant…inspiring”
“You HAVE to go” -
Andrew Watring with Upstream Performance Collaborative
"The Adoption Game" is America’s one-and-only adoption-themed game show, and tonight, you’re part of the live studio audience!
Hosted by the dazzling Andre Devon, this spectacular, interactive solo performance invites audiences into a world of applause signs, prizes, games, commercial breaks, and more.
This immersive solo performance blends satire and social experiment into a darkly funny, provocative spectacle about transracial adoption, belonging, and the politics of ownership: who tells the story?
Join us for three world-premiere performances of this riveting new play, written and performed by Andrew Watring, directed by Rayne, and produced by Upstream Performance Collaborative through Cannonball’s Immersive Track Cohort.
Philadelphia Theater Company Text and Dramaturgy Cohort
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ON THE ROCKS
As a series of grisly murders rocks Second Swamp County, the local teenagers in ASS2MOUTH are drawn into a torrid web of sex, death, and serial killers in this gay coming-of-age nightmare.
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Yu.S.Artistry
Echoes of Tranquility is an interdisciplinary performance experience combining contemporary dance, live piano, and a lecture on Japanese philosophy and aesthetics. Created by choreographer Yuki Ishiguro in collaboration with pianist Yuko Gordon, the work explores concepts such as Ma (space and interval), Yūgen (subtle mystery), and ritual embodiment through movement, music, light, and silence.
Inspired by the historical exchange between Eastern and Western art, the performance blends contemporary dance with Japanese aesthetics to create a poetic and meditative theatrical experience. Audiences are invited not only to watch the performance, but also to engage with the philosophical ideas that shaped its creation. -
little ghost party
For the first time ever at Haverford Middle School, three students interrogate all of the action that traditionally took place offstage in Ancient Greek tragedy: Oedipus stabbing his eyes out after hearing the truth that he murdered his father and married his mother, Medea killing her children to get revenge on her husband Jason, and the women of Thebes tearing Pentheus apart after being driven mad by Dionysus.
The young theatre historians hop in and out of the different characters and stories of the Greeks to win the praise of their English teacher–Mr. Moscow. As they delve deeper and deeper into exploring these unthinkable acts, however, they confront the challenges of their own lives in and outside of school - fashion malfunctions, bullying, and, at its worst, the fear of gun violence.
True to the little ghost party form, much of the play is performed on a tiny stage.
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Savannah Reich
The Professor gives an excruciatingly detailed lecture on 1993's Groundhog Day while slowly losing control of the classroom, losing the thread of what they meant to say, and losing their grip on reality. A tour de force monologue for one talking clown (like Groucho) and one silent clown (like Harpo).
Content warning: Academia, arts education, missing dongles, PowerPoint, teaching the worst class of your life.
A new play by Savannah Reich (Oedipus in Seattle, What is the Butt Game), directed by Francesca Montanile Lyons (Vile, Clowncuterie). Starring Hannah Gold as The Professor and Alex Braslavsky as Sam the TA.
Live Wire Award
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Bao Nguyen
Do it for me is a wet, one-person performance that explodes ideas of gender and domestic labor through the act of washing laundry, crawling around, cursing dry people, and throwing wet clothes into the air. This is what happens when doing laundry is too much and the performer is mad.
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Andie Flores
GIRL is brand new here. She was born from a butt. She’s part girl, part something else, and she is trying to understand how it all works. GIRL wants to walk and tries to talk. She falls in love with a self-ordering food kiosk. She needs your help. No really. Explain it to her like she's GIRL.
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James Gentile
Gut Healthy probes the insanity of algorithmic repetition, wellness culture, and digital noise through clowning, harsh sound, and experimental media loops.
Equal parts absurd, unsettling, and hilarious, this performance invites you to buckle up for a roller-coaster ride through the digestive tract of the internet.
Prepare to be sucked into an infinite social media vortex as Jesha screams at you about her sourdough bread!
2026 Special Presentation Tracks Panelists
The 2026 tracks were shaped by a powerhouse panel of artists, producers, and field-shifting cultural leaders. Explore the panelists below!
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Jessy Gruyver
Rodrick Edwards
Danielle Currica
Angel Edwards
Wilma Rep -
Fabulous panelists to be shared soon!
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Fabulous panelists to be shared soon!
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Fabulous panelists to be shared soon!
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Philadelphia Sensory Theatre
Philly Young Playwrights -
Nick Gillette
Donna Oblongota
Patrick (additional details soon!) -
Alex Tatarsky
Crackhead Barney
Anh Vo
Chris Gwillim