REDCAT’s Annual New Original Works Festival transforms REDCAT into a summer laboratory premiering new contemporary dance, theater, music and multimedia performances.
This year’s festival launches nine new works by Los Angeles emerging and mid-career artists who are re-defining the boundaries of contemporary performance to invent hybrid artistic disciplines, re-imagine traditions
and confront urgent issues.
All artistic teams receive free rehearsal space, technical support, and artist fees.
“On the pulse of cutting-edge contemporary performance” – LA Times
“The odds of seeing something amazing are pretty good.” – Los Angeles Magazine
“This is the festival that keeps weird, live performance relevant, dangerous and alive.” – KPCC FM
“See what’s cutting-edge in the city’s vibrant performing arts scene.” – Time Out LA
REDCAT, CalArts’ downtown center for contemporary arts, presents the 15th annual New Original Works (NOW) Festival, a three-week celebration of Los Angeles’ vibrant community of artists creating new contemporary performance work, July 19 to August 4, 2018. Patrons can see all three weekends with a $40 festival pass. Individual programs are priced at $20.
REDCAT becomes a creative laboratory to research and create new projects with an emphasis on interdisciplinary collaborative works launching the very first performances of wide-ranging new works created by Los Angeles-based creative teams.
NOW is the only program of its kind in Los Angeles, offering production support for the creation of new works. In the months prior to the festival the artists receive free rehearsal space on stage at REDCAT and receive production fees, technical support, design and dramaturgical support, as well as high-quality video and photography of their new work.
NOW has become renowned as an important catalyst for artists launching new ideas and has launched more than 120 new productions in the past 14 years.
REDCAT Executive Director Mark Murphy, who oversees the annual festival together with Associate Director Edgar Miramontes, describes the summer festival as “a vital boost for experimentation by artistic teams encouraged to take risks and blur the distinctions between traditional artistic disciplines.”
Miramontes adds, “The Festival gives artists a critical infrastructure to develop new performances, especially for dance artists, because REDCAT is uniquely equipped for dance.”
The 15th NOW fest features many movement/dance based works that utilize innovative visual technology. There are several original music compositions by LA composers — some performed live, as well as a vibrant mix of emerging artists and creative teams early in their careers, as well as more established artists who continue to test the boundaries of their art forms through these innovative collaborations.
Each of the three weekends – July 19-21, July 26-28, and August 2-4 – features a triple bill of three premieres in a shared evening. Each program is premiered on Thursday evening and repeated Friday and Saturday evenings at 8:30 pm.
Artists and collaborators participating in the unique program for the creation of adventurous new performances include:
Week One: July 19–21
Live music is featured in each of the new projects premiering in the first week of the New Original Works Festival with a program of works by Jasmine Orpilla with Peter Deguzman, Miwa Matreyek with Morgan Sorne, Jmy James Kidd and Tara Jane O’Neil.
Jasmine Orpilla with Peter Deguzman: How Many Years Did We Fight the Beast Together
A unique soprano arrangement with kulintang gongs merges with Pangalay dancers in shadow, as composer/singer Jasmine Orpilla revisits timeless Filipino traditions in collaboration with Peter Deguzman, artistic director of Malaya Filipino-American Dance Arts. Activist poet Carlos Bulosan inspires the ritualized operatic performance deconstructing the Filipino body via food, indigenous dance and languages, and ancient, cyclical music.
Miwa Matreyek with Morgan Sorne: Eat Your Young
Blending fantastical animation with live shadow play, ingenious animator/performer Miwa Matreyek pushes the boundaries of realism in this collaboration with sound artist Morgan Sorne and his otherworldly five-octave vocal range. In the visual kaleidoscope of complex shape-shifting imagery of the anthropocene, Matreyek’s cinematic work Eat Your Young is accompanied live by Sorne’s song of the same name.
Jmy James Kidd and Tara Jane O’Neil: solid, like a rock
22 Sunland dancers give ecstatic life to a bold and fleshy choreographic event created by Jmy James Kidd with composer and instrumentalist Tara Jane O’Neil. To a compelling score for effect-manipulated solo bass, the performers wildly bound through the air or slither on the ground, relishing a connection to nature and spirit through an unguarded, purely female expressive vocabulary with an allied group of humans.
Week Two: July 26–28
New Original Works Festival continues with works by KyungHwa Lee, Sebastian Hernandez and Milka Djordjevich.
KyungHwa Lee: Malleable Bodies: Flusser, Plasticity, and the Corset
Inventive media and performance artist KyungHwa Lee explores contemporary themes of embodiment, displacement, and the “ideal body” in an installation created with new technologies including 3-D printing and virtual reality. The performance contemplates the body as architectural and malleable as six performers actualize this ideal, while projections capture historical progressions of representation.
Sebastian Hernandez: Hypanthium
Named for the part of a rose that holds nectar, Hypanthium is an experimental collage of actions and movements grappling with notions of sisterhood, space, power and survival amidst memories of ancestral trauma. With sensuality, fierceness and hints of wry humor, three performers synthesize a pseudo kinship of queer femme moving bodies in Los Angeles while recognizing the intensity of a hegemonic project that tries to assimilate them.
Milka Djordjevich: CORPS
Commanding and irresistible percussive marching music in the spirit of a drum corps surrounds an ensemble of women in choreographer Milka Djordjevich’s new collaboration with composer Chris Peck. The contrapuntal beats infuse vivid movement that is at times militaristic, ritualistic, or athletic, as performers engage in repeated compulsory actions that evolve into a beautifully woven movement score of methodical formations that become a feminine procession of collective power.
Week Three: August 2–4
The 15th Annual New Original Works Festival closes with works by Rachel Mason and Oguri, CARLON and Christine Marie.
Rachel Mason and Oguri: Singularity Song
With a large scale video environment, Rachel Mason creates a virtual black hole, where her song cycle becomes a score for gravitational waves, and renowned dancer and choreographer Oguri inhabits a dimension beyond earth. Mason was inspired by her interviews with some of the most provocative thinkers about the physics of black holes and the poetics of visualizing such immense phenomena.
CARLON: fold, unfold, refold
In a dramatic visual landscape dominated by oversized sheets of cardboard, Jay Carlon and his athletic dancers may seem protected by the soft material, but their impact on the surface is powerfully amplified by composer Alex Wand, who manipulates and weaves the intensified sounds into an aural soundscape. Combined with high-velocity movement, it compellingly confronts the overwhelming impact of disturbing and fractured memories.
Christine Marie: Shadow in Stereo: Antiquated A.R.
Light artist Christine Marie draws the audience into an immersive world dominated by 30- foot tall figures that come to vivid 3-D life in choreography created with collaborator Genna Moroni. Viewed through your fashionable 3-D glasses, the exquisite ensemble of performers seems to do the impossible—reach out live—yet Marie uses a non-digital stereo imaging technique she reinvented by drawing on ancient and spellbinding effects, each beautifully revealed.
The New Original Works Festival is made possible by generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rosenfeld Fund for Special Projects, and REDCAT Circle donors.
TICKETS & INFORMATION
REDCAT’s 15th Annual New Original Works (NOW) Festival 2018
Dates & Times:
Program 1:
JASMINE ORPILLA WITH PETER DEGUZMAN; MIWA MATREYEK WITH MORGAN SORNE;
JMY JAMES KIDD AND TARA JANE O’NEIL
Thursday, July 19 at 8:30 pm
Friday, July 20 at 8:30 pm
Saturday, July 21 at 8:30 pm
Program 2:
KYUNGHWA LEE; SEBASTIAN HERNANDEZ; MILKA DJORDJEVICH
Thursday, July 26 at 8:30 pm
Friday, July 27 at 8:30 pm
Saturday, July 28 at 8:30 pm
Program 3:
RACHEL MASON AND OGURI; CARLON; CHRISTINE MARIE
Thursday, August 2 at 8:30 pm
Friday, August 3 at 8:30 pm
Saturday, August 4 at 8:30 pm
Ticketing:
$20 general [$16 for members/students]
$40 festival pass [See all three programs for $40]
Seating is general admission and tickets are available for purchase in person at REDCAT Box Office, by phone at 213-237-2800, or online at redcat.org. 631 West 2nd St. Los Angeles, CA 90012.
