Aug. 17-19, Aug. 24-26, Aug. 31-Sep. 2, 2023 @ 8:30 pm PT
REDCAT proudly presents the 20th annual New Original Works (NOW) Festival, a celebration of Los Angeles' vibrant community of artists creating new performance work, over three weekends this summer: Aug. 17-19, Aug. 24-26, Aug. 31-Sept. 2, 2023.
This year’s festival showcases nine new works by Los Angeles artists who are redefining the boundaries of contemporary performance, reinventing disciplines, reimagining traditions, and confronting today’s most urgent issues. With a sharp interest in rituals, fantasies, and memories, these works use history and technology to formulate diverse, other-worldly futures that provide a counterpart to our reality while allowing us to examine the injustices around us.
Week One: Aug. 17-19, 2023
The 20th Annual New Original Works Festival kicks off with a program of works by JOJO ABOT, Tuixén Benet (‘20), and Jordi & Cade & Ironstone. With a sharp interest in rituals, fantasies and memories, these works use history and technology to formulate diverse, other-worldly futures that provide a counterpart to our reality while allowing us to examine the injustices around us.
JOJO ABOT: A GOD OF HER OWN MAKING
A GOD OF HER OWN MAKING is an immersive spatial opera performed by interdisciplinary artist, vocalist, and composer JOJO ABOT. Accompanied by voices, dancers, and mesmerizing visuals, JOJO ABOT explores the power of new and ancient technologies for collective healing by drawing from her own heritage as an Ewe woman from West Africa. From these influences and histories, a new kind of ritual is born, one that leads to a trance-like realm in which the senses awaken and portals open to the divine.
Tuixén Benet: Some more
Some more is a dance performance by choreographer and filmmaker Tuixén Benet (Film/Video MFA 20) that explores the process of mortality, while being concerned with the concept of eternity. In a world of mass shootings and police violence, pandemics and catastrophic events, where cascades of deaths are treated as statistics, is the reality of death being processed by those who simply hear about it on the news? Benet’s work will stop time to examine the choreography of a dying body and how it relates to its surroundings, to nature, to animals and to you.
Jordi & Ironstone with Cade & Mx. Matías: 2300 She
Jordi, Ironstone, Cade, and Mx. Matías — four transgressive performers of vast imaginations — conjure a queer fever dream drenched in new music, efficient scenics, slaughterhouse fashion, and original choreography in 2300 She, a vision of the future that transcends description and language. According to the World Economic Forum, women will achieve equal pay for equal work in the year 2276. Set twenty-four years after such “equality” has been achieved, this collaboration is a clarion call, a cry that erupts to examine our impending imperial wasteland destiny.
NOWWeek One will be presented as one shared program of triple bills on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
Please note: A GOD OF HER OWN MAKING contains nudity and strobe lights; Some more contains fast-paced camera movements and recreations of death; 2300 contains nudity and mature content.
Week Two: Aug. 24-26, 2023
The 20th Annual New Original Works Festival continues with a program of works by Vanessa Hernández Cruz, Melissa Ferrari (‘19), and Kevin Williamson. With a sharp interest in rituals, fantasies and memories, these works use history and technology to formulate diverse, other-worldly futures that provide a counterpart to our reality while allowing us to examine the injustices around us.
Vanessa Hernández Cruz: Exhale Static, Inhale Fumes
Exhale Static, Inhale Fumes, by Disabled dance artist and activist Vanessa Hernández Cruz, is a solo dance work that examines the contradiction of over-consuming social media to the point of feeling isolated and disconnected. Inspired by Cruz’s own experience with social media, screens and technology, as someone who counts on it as a way of survival like others in the Disabled community, this work ponders how technology can expand human connection, even if in today’s reality, we mostly communicate through our screens.
Melissa Ferrari: Relict: A Phantasmagoria
Artist and educator Melissa Ferrari’s (‘19) Relict: A Phantasmagoria is an experimental documentary performed with antique magic lanterns and digitally projected hand-drawn animation. Invoking the history of magic lantern phantasmagoria as an exercise in belief and perception, this work stays true to its history, structured as a series of vignettes that navigate through various landscapes and contemporary mythologies. Nestled in a collage of audio interviews, recent creationist sermons and excerpts of pseudoscientific wildlife documentaries, Ferrari considers the zeitgeist of pseudoscience, fake news, religion, and documentary ethics collapsed within contemporary cryptozoology.
Kevin Williamson: Safe and Sound
Saturated hues flood the dance floor in choreographer Kevin Williamson’s Safe and Sound, a meditation on self-preservation and solidarity where bodies morph through emotional states to combat anti-LGBTQ aggression. Shifting from punctuated tones of grief, abandonment and anger, to fluid strength and communal pleasure, this ode to alternative nightlife spaces is a sensual journey accompanied by a sound score from Anna Luisa Petrisko, film interludes by Taso Papadakis, and fashion designed by Kelsey Vidic.
NOWWeek Two will be presented as one shared program of triple bills on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Exhale Static, Inhale Fumes will be presented with surtitles.
Please note: Exhale Static, Inhale Fumes contains loud and distorted sounds and glitching effects; Relict: A Phantasmagoria contains gunshot sounds; Safe and Sound contains nudity and mature content.
Week Three: Aug. 31-Sept. 2, 2023
The 20th Annual New Original Works Festival concludes with a program of works by Erica Bitton (‘10), Mark Golamco, and Huntrezz Janos (‘18) and Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou. With a sharp interest in rituals, fantasies and memories, these works use history and technology to formulate diverse, other-worldly futures that provide a counterpart to our reality while allowing us to examine the injustices around us.
Erica Bitton: Vacuum Girl
Vacuum Girl is a live presentation of a television pilot written and performed by Erica Bitton (‘10) that follows Jane, a 31-year old Jewish actor living through consistent, surreal dissociations in New York. What begins as a clear “tell me if you see what I see” tale, soon blurs the lines of theater and film, of writer and character, as Bitton speaks every line spoken by every character while behind a booth with LED lights and a mixing board. It is a fast and fluid, meticulously-timed story—and Bitton is in complete control of it.
Mark Golamco: The Ghost of Ted Dragon
The Ghost of Ted Dragon is a comedic, cabaret-style performance with original music by multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Mark Golamco, who embodies ballet dancer Ted Dragon and his lover, the painter Alfonso Ossorio–a New York City love story that spanned decades. Written from Golamco’s perspective as a queer Filipino artist, Golamco sings and plays viola, electric guitar and harp, while accompanied by an ensemble of dancers. The diaristic performance evokes traditional folk-music storytelling, classic ballad-love songs, and rock and roll to create a living gay history, demonstrating the importance and bittersweet longing of connecting with our long-departed queer ancestors.
Huntrezz Janos and Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou: DENTAXUVIA
DENTAXUVIA is a multi-layered performance that fuses the unique artistic visions of Huntrezz Janos (‘18) and Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou by using technology, sculpture, and poetry to conjure a fragmented futuristic scene of ecocyberfeminist insurgents. In this sci-fi explosion of visuals, the tangible meets the intangible as Huntrezz and Antigoni perform in wearable sculptures and as avatars in their virtual world. The result is an act of queer resistance that transports audiences on a supernatural journey and ignites belief that anyone can shed old skins and reclaim agency in the face of oppressive regimes.
Week Three will be presented as one shared program of triple bills on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. DENTAXUVIA will be presented with surtitles.
Please note: Vacuum Girl contains strobe lights and mature content; DENTAXUVIA contains nudity.
Each of the three festival weekends features a triple bill of world premieres in a shared evening. Each program will premiere on Thursday evening and repeat Friday and Saturday at 8:30 pm. Performances will also be livestreamed each Saturday evening during the festival’s run. Patrons can also purchase a pass to attend all three weekends of the festival, both in-person and virtually.
CalArts community members receive discounts on all REDCAT shows! Tickets can be purchased at the REDCAT Box Office or by visiting the link provided.
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