REDCAT: The fifth annual NOW Festival encourages risk and invention to foster new dance, theater, music and hybrid performance works from artists throughout Los Angeles. For three weeks beginning in July, REDCAT launches innovative and interdisciplinary projects that bend traditions and investigate new visions of work for the stage.

Rosanna Gamson / World Wide: Tov
Influential choreographer Rosanna Gamson is known for layered and literate works of dance theater that are visually evocative, emotionally powerful and deftly crafted. Her newest dance threads the histories of her Polish Jewish ancestors with the fate of the tarpan horse--a breed that exists now only in a “recreated” form--to examine reinvention, regeneration and the groundless optimism invoked by the phrase “Gamzu l’tovah,” or “This too is for the good.”

“This choreographic provocateur and her superb collaborators should not be missed.” L.A. Weekly

Anne LeBaron / Douglas Kearney: Sucktion
Award-winning composer Anne LeBaron and provocative writer Douglas Kearney present the story of a woman’s cyber-erotic transformation from abject housewife into a self-sufficient cyborg in this theatrical song cycle. Written for the ensemble soNu, Sucktion features a female vocalist supported by percussion, laptop and a musical appliance as it traces the radical reinvention of one woman’s persona via the subversive use of a vacuum cleaner.

“Uncommon imagination and technical skill.” The Washington Post

Kristina Wong: Cat Lady
Animal psychics, aggressive pick-up artists and musty cat ladies come together in the hilarious and slightly frightening mind of writer and performer Kristina Wong. With incisive wit and delectable comic timing, Wong bends the parallel worlds of the pathetically lonely into an intersection of characters living at the margins of gender and society, while boldly attempting connection with the opposite sex, confronting inter-species betrayal, and seeking solace and celebrity on reality TV.

“Brutal but hilarious … a woman who takes life’s absurdities very seriously.” East Bay Express

See: http://redcat.org/season/0708/dan/now3.php ($)

See the complete 2008 NOW Festival schedule: http://redcat.org/season/0708/dan/now.php