Intersections Festival Fires Up Feb. 14
By • February 12, 2026 One Comment 343
This year’s Intersections Festival at the Atlas Performing Arts Center — cultural hub of the H Street Corridor, northeast of Capitol Hill — is a month of convention-defying dance, theater and music, 35 shows in all.
Intersections fires up this Saturday with “Sex Monster,” a Valentine’s Day cabaret that comes with a warning: “This act contains mature content, and is not appropriate for children or pearl-clutchers.” Theater artist Jenna Murphy and jazz musician Amy K Bormet collaborated on the songs, which are monster-specific (King Kong? Gengar? Megan? Seraphina Morningstar?).
While the festival is a showcase for LGBTQ entertainers — including singers Ari Agha (Feb. 22), Adam “Lemonboy” Greczkowski (Feb. 28); Miss Kitty (March 1) and Dana Nearing (March 8) and the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, DC (March 7), the Atlas’s commitment to contemporary dance is front and center.
On the way to Intersections’ closing show, Tonia Ford Vines’s gospel comedy “The Church Bizness Meeting,” on Sunday, March 15, more than a dozen dance companies will perform: Glade Dance Collective (Feb. 15), Deviated Theatre (Feb. 20), Moore Contemporary Theatrics (Feb. 21), Galaxy Movement Duo (Feb. 27), Capitol Movement Inc. (Feb. 27), Carter Williams Dance Theatre (Feb. 27), Darby, Fujimoto and Umami Playground Dance Inc. (Feb. 28), Elements Dance Company (March 1), Anushka Raje & Co-Choreographers (March 6), Percussion Discussion (March 7), Furia Flamenca Dance Company (March 8), Aerial Ignition (March 13) and Textures Dance Theatre (March 14).
There is also a raft of fringe-style theater, such as: Flame & Forté’s burlesque show “The Faces of Satine” (Feb. 21); Osama Mahmoud Ashour’s “uncomfortably funny solo show,” titled “My Name Is Not Bin Laden” (Feb. 22); “Recess” by Kate Mullis and Melissa Wilson, in which adults portray fifth-graders (March 1); Jaemi Theatre’s “Baal,” described as “a dystopian developmental staged reading set in a city plagued by slime rain and strict reproductive control” (March 6); “Seeing Maya” by Joseph Bardin, Raghad Almakhlouf and Lisa Hodsoll, set in Tel Aviv during the Gulf War (March 8); and Antoine Lee’s “Clocked In,” a musical comedy about American work culture (March 8).
Located at 1333 H St. NE in a converted 1938 movie theater, the Atlas is not only home to Mosaic Theater Company and, starting this year, Constellation Theatre Company, but to Capital City Symphony, which will offer a concert called “Hope” during the festival on Saturday, Feb. 21. Assistant Conductor Johannes Visser will conduct the program, featuring Leroy Anderson’s “Fiddle Faddle,” Sergei Prokofiev’s “Lieutenant Kijé Suite” and “Stick Season,” a piece by J. Clay Gonzalez in which each of the five movements “illustrates a different wintry experience.”
Other musical events: Afro-Indigenous artist Carly Harvey’s “Blues at the Crossroads,” which incorporates dance (Feb. 22); a performance by guzheng player Qi Yu and her quartet, fusing jazz with traditional Chinese music (Feb. 28); and a two-part concert by Project Fusion Saxophone Quartet, alone and with the Good Beats Ensemble (March 1).
Also part of Intersections, the Atlas will host a Free Family Fun Day on Saturday, March 7, with crafting stations and interactive performances led by the Great Zucchini.
How to choose? “I always tell people not to overthink it,” said Jarrod Bennett, the center’s executive director since 2024. “Intersections is designed for discovery, so take a chance on something you might not normally see.” Calling Intersections, first held in 2010, a “choose-your-own-adventure festival,” he advised: “Talk to other audience members, build your own path through the festival and say yes to the unexpected.”
Capitol Movement Inc. will perform at the Intersections Festival on Feb. 27.
Bennett said he was especially looking forward to the return of last year’s four Atlas Arts Lab fellows. “It is thrilling to see how these pieces have evolved and grown.”
Launched in 2023, the Atlas Arts Lab provides each fellow with rehearsal space for up to nine hours per week to develop a performance at the Atlas. Fellows receive a $1,500 performance stipend and 50 percent of the box office proceeds. Each fellow is also required to propose and create a community engagement event outside of the Atlas.
Though the National Endowment for the Arts terminated its grant in support of the Atlas Arts Lab, the program is expected to continue with private funding.
The four fellows and their shows at this year’s Intersections Festival are: Soulmatic, with “Time Machine” on Feb. 22; Shawn Shafner, with “Sheldon Feldman Sings the Songs They Told Me Not to Sing” on Feb. 27; A.J. Collabs, with “Color Me (Curly): Detangled Stories” on March 6; and Rawra, with “Joanie’s World” on March 7.
“Time Machine,” created and performed by Rashaad Hasani Pearson and his daughters Ayanna Mahal and Malaya Iman (Soulmatic), “explores Black American Freestyle Dance as a living archive of memory, rhythm and resilience.”
In the cabaret “Sheldon Feldman …,” Shafner plays “a tone-deaf septuagenarian” character that he “based on real men’s accounts of what it was like being queer and closeted in the post-World War II era.”
“Color Me (Curly): Detangled Stories” is a multidisciplinary performance that delves into “the complex cultural, emotional and political landscape of Black hair.”
Finally, the Joanie in the soft-rock musical “Joanie’s World” — with a book by Iara Rogers Benchoam — is the “inner drag monster” of Frida, “a 27-year-old late bloomer who hides their eating disorder relapse in porcelain sanctuaries (aka bathrooms).”
One more show, hard to classify: “Sowt al Ard (The Sound of the Earth)” — performed by singer, cellist and dabke dancer Fairouz Foty, the Malikat Al Dabke all-women troupe she founded and singer and oud player Fuad Foty — “weaves together opera, Arabic instrumentation, Levantine dabke, projections and sensory immersion to explore ancestral memory, identity, grief and interconnection” (Feb. 20).
Depending on the show, general admission tickets are $29.75, $36.75 or $42.75. Intersections Festival passes are available for $74.75 (any three shows), $93.75 (any four shows) and $105.75 (any five shows).
Way out, man!