2020 New Original Works (NOW) Festival artist Simone Moore. Photo by Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine.
Featuring artists including Patrisse Cullors, Dahlak Brathwaite, Miguel Gutierrez, Paul Outlaw, Daniel Corral, Gabrielle Civil, Ulrike Ottinger, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, and more
Including the 17th annual New Original Works (NOW) Festival, spread across three weekends
Celebrating the new exhibition, Inside Out & Upside Down: Posters from CalArts 1970-2019, through a series of virtual tours, online programming, and new publications
LOS ANGELES (Sept. 16, 2020) -- In this wildly unprecedented year, Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT), CalArts’ center for contemporary arts in downtown Los Angeles, is proud to announce its first-ever all-streaming and virtual season of experimentation, discovery, and lively civic discourse online this fall. Through streaming performances, exhibitions, screenings, and more, REDCAT will reach audiences around the world with a program of groundbreaking visual, performing, and media arts.
“As part of these performances and programs, we are developing new ways of making, acting, and sharing together, so we can continue to uplift, amplify, and engage today’s innovative voices,” said João Ribas, REDCAT’s new Steven D. Lavine Executive Director and Vice President for Cultural Partnerships, about his first season with REDCAT. “Despite the changes, what remains steadfast is our commitment to artists, and to equity, social justice, and promoting intersectional voices and perspectives, a mission given further urgency in the context of Black Lives Matter, the ongoing struggle for transgender equality, and the impact of climate change.”
Ribas continued, “We eagerly await when we’re able to welcome our community back to REDCAT and safely share the communal experience of discovery and wonder. Until then, we continue to work with flexibility, creativity, and determination, so that we may continue to engage the art of the present with you.”
REDCAT’s Fall 2020 season sees two new, incredibly timely and politically relevant events: Los Angeles artist, organizer, and founder of Black Lives Matter Patrisse Cullors will share Malcolm X Revisited, a new commissioned video work recorded exclusively for REDCAT on Oct. 2-3; and Oct. 22-24, 28-31, artist Paul Outlaw‘s BigBlackOctoberSurprise, a solo meditation on isolation, imprisonment, and Blackness in America, in the final week before “The Most Important Election in Our History.”
Fall also includes two works rescheduled from the spring and reimagined for our new normal: on Nov. 14, musician Daniel Corral and performer Alexander Gedeon present Concerto for Having Fun with Elvis on Stage, a reimagined “ghost opera” of the vilified recording, before a screening of Corral’s video piece, Count In!; and on Dec. 18-19, choreographer Miguel Gutierrez, accompanied by the Slutinos, the Sad Latino Boys Backup Singers, performs SADONNA: The Brown Ambition Tour, a cabaret homage to the pop icon.
And on Dec. 4-5, CalArts Dance returns to REDCAT -- virtually -- for an ambitious, multi-track, online experience synthesizing the embodied memories of CalArts faculty and students and imagining new dances in new forms through new technologies.
On Friday, Sept. 18, REDCAT kicks off “Black Motion Pictures,” a series of interviews with radical Black creatives about race, performance, and representation conducted by artist Gabrielle Civil. The season sees two other only-at-REDCAT panel conversations: a discussion on the current state and future possibilities of theater and performance led by REDCAT’s Deputy Executive Director & Curator Edgar Miramontes on Oct. 16; and a two-night reflection on art and activism in the work of writer/composer Dahlak Brathwaite Nov. 20-21.
For the first time ever, REDCAT’s 17th annual New Original Works (NOW) Festival will move to the fall, spread across three weekends in October, November, and December. The festival, a celebration of Los Angeles’ vibrant community of artists creating new contemporary performance works, will take place Oct. 8-10, Nov. 5-7, Dec. 10-12, 2020 (with three artists presented each weekend). Streaming live from the REDCAT stage, NOW Festival 2020 will premiere new dance, theater, music, and multimedia performances from artists Davia Spain, Simone Moore, Alex Alpharaoh, Primera Generación, Xiaoyue Zhang, randy reyes and Bapari, DaEun Jung, Maria Garcia and Samantha Mohr, and Genna Moroni.
“The NOW Festival creates opportunities for artists that are all too rare. This year, the Festival takes on greater opportunity and urgency: supporting and keeping artists working safely in these uncertain times,” said Miramontes. “It is especially important to have artists lead us and move us forward using this vital initiative of experimentation and development where artists share their unique perspectives, giving us an opportunity to view this changing world in real time and in different and imaginative ways.”
NOW Festival 2020 was organized by Edgar Miramontes with artists in the community, including Carole Kim, Jasmine Orpilla and taisha paggett.
From evolution of queer media in China to BIPOC filmmakers pushing cinema’s conceptual boundaries, the Fall 2020 Film/Video program reflects the complexity of today’s independent and radical film communities. The season’s ten screenings, both classics and world premieres, organized by film critic, curator, and CalArts faculty Bérénice Reynaud with a dazzling array of guest curators, include films by Kevin Jerome Everson, Ulrike Ottinger, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Christine Panushka, Nicolás Pereda, Popo Fan, Kahlil Joseph, and more.
Launched on Aug. 25, the fall season will see continued celebration for the new exhibition, Inside Out & Upside Down: Posters from CalArts 1970-2019. Organized by Michael Worthington, CalArts Graphic Design Faculty, with REDCAT Assistant Gallery Curator Carmen Amengual, and designers and CalArts alumni Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton and Silas Munro, this comprehensive retrospective provides an in-depth look at an unseen history of CalArts and graphic design practice. Featuring over 300 posters surveying the work of important figures in Southern California graphic design from the last half century, the exhibition reveals the role of the CalArts Poster Archive in the history of contemporary design. Virtual exhibition walkthroughs, along with a newly conceived publication and a series of conversations reveal CalArts’ role in the history of contemporary design, while offering a critical engagement with questions of race and representation in the design field.
And that’s just the beginning. For dates, details, and ticketing information, see below or visit redcat.org.
REDCAT FALL 2020 EVENT LISTINGS:
Sept. 14, 2020
Presented in collaboration with Hello Benjamin Films
“New Black Wave” showcases films by Black filmmakers who push cinema’s conceptual and aesthetic boundaries to explore deep-rooted emotions within the African diaspora. These films challenge us to consider how the performance of intimate rituals addresses a legacy of racial trauma. Celebration and mourning coexist as individuals devise strategies to mask or confront their pain through color or lack thereof. The program includes Alone (2017) by Garrett Bradley, the North American premiere of Recovery (2020) by Kevin Jerome Everson (2016), Untitled (2019) by Bradford Young, and T by Keisha Rae Witherspoon (2019), among others. In person, via Zoom: co-curators Solomon Turner and DaManuel Richardson; filmmakers Everlane Moraes (with translate Thalma de Freitas) and King Ali Emeka; moderated by Bérénice Reynaud
Sept. 18, 2020
Organized by Gabrielle Civil, “Black Motion Pictures” is a series of Zoom interviews with radical Black creatives about race, performance, and representation conducted between June 2–14, 2020. Spanning a broad range of topics—Black punk music, heritage sites, re-enactments, queer ancestors— the series launches with artist Anna Martine Whitehead. Who are you today and what do you do? Can you think of a performance--Black or otherwise--whatever that means--that has meant a lot to you? How is Black performance marked or archived? How does Black performance relate to time (to historicity or ephemerality)? What is a Black performance still? How does Black performance matter? What is a Black motion picture?
Black Motion Pictures Series:
Oct.14, 2020: Artist and designer Kelly Walters
Nov. 13, 2020: Film curator and programmer Jheanelle Brown
Dec.16, 2020: Performance artist Sola Bamis
Sept.19, 2020
Ulrike Ottinger
During “her long and splendid career” (New Yorker) spanning nearly five decades, legendary German auteur Ulrike Ottinger has run the gamut from flamboyant, cutting-edge fictions (Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press, 1984) to groundbreaking documentaries, such as Taiga (1992) or Exile Shanghai (1997, 280 min.). Shot by Ottinger herself, the film conjures memories of Jewish immigrant lives in Shanghai—from Sephardim in the mid-19th century, to Russian emigrés escaping pogroms, to Europeans fleeing the Shoah. Unexpected versions of utopias emerged—such as the existence of a queer scene or the opening of Viennese-style pastry shops in the ghetto where the community was confined during the Japanese occupation. Ottinger composes a fascinating mosaic by interweaving interviews with six expatriates, rare archival material (visual and musical) and meditative, long takes searching the cosmopolitan city for traces of synagogues, schools and salons. In person, via Zoom: Ulrike Ottinger
Sept. 21, 2020
All the Reasons
“All the Reasons” presents short films made by moving image artists who play with embodiment, queerness, identity, sexuality and the grotesque. By turns pornographic, silly, anxious, titillating, and horrifying, these works look at the world askance, while dealing with the messiness of having a body. Co-curated by two moving image artists, the selection aims at shifting the films’ usual screening conditions (galleries or museums) to an innovative online single-channel viewing experience. Made from outsiders’ perspectives, not to fit spectators’ expectations but to create discomfort, these pieces are now transported to another setting where they don’t necessarily “belong.” The title of the program is loosely inspired by 100 Reasons—a provocative 1991 collaboration between Sheree Rose, Bob Flanagan and Mike Kelley. Other titles include: Patty Chang’s Eels (1999) and Michael Robinson’s Onward Lossless Follows (2017). In person, via Zoom: co-curators Mariah Garnett and Aimee Goguen, filmmakers TBD
Sept. 26, 2020
REDCAT is proud to present a selection of films by the 2019 recipient of The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts in Film/Video Beatriz Santiago Muñoz—including Nocturne (2014), Playa Negra (2014) and Gosila (2018). Santiago Muñoz has created a body of trenchant, poetic work thoroughly dedicated to imagining not only a decolonized Caribbean but alternative modes of vision and representation. Influenced by Boalian theater, experimental ethnography and feminist film histories, she has likened her way of working with non-actors to musical improvisation, ritual, dance and psychoanalytic sessions. Her work has been shown internationally at the Tate Modern, the New Museum, the Whitney Biennial and Pérez Art Museum Miami, among others. In person, via Zoom: Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
Sept. 30, 2020
Radical Design Issues: Building Consent, Dissent & Protest
Moderated by Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton, this salon will discuss the various ways panelists artist Sarah Faith Gottesdiener, professor Daniela Marx, and designer Mindy Seu each use graphic design -- uniquely and sometimes in an unorthodox manner -- as a tool to address and challenge the status quo in regards to the archive, design education, and protest. This is the second of a series of conversations that critically address the exhibition Inside Out & Upside Down: Posters from CalArts 1970-2019 in relation to issues of inclusion and representation in the field of graphic design and graphic design education.
Oct. 2-3, 2020
Patrisse Cullors
From the Crenshaw Dairy Mart artist collective focused on trauma-induced conditions of injustice to scripting the season finale of Good Trouble on Hulu, a show about communities of color, women, queer, and trans folk living in Los Angeles, artist, organizer, and freedom fighter Patrisse Cullors thrives on speaking out through art alongside other inspiring creators. Patrisse relies on art to reflect social spaces in ways that words fall flat. REDCAT is proud to present the premiere of Cullors’ Malcolm X Revisited, a new commissioned video work recorded exclusively for REDCAT. Malcolm X Revisited explores the iconic historical figure, Malcolm X, and the current impact of the movement for Black lives.
Oct. 8–10, 2020
NOW Festival Week 1
Davia Spain
This is for Davia
Musician and performance artist Davia Spain takes a deep dive into a journey of self-actualization. She asserts that there is a connection between self-love and ecological justice. Is it ever a good time to say ‘enough is enough’? As the Earth begins its process of breaking up with humans, are we too being forced to look at the cycles we need to break? Will returning to our bodies, our memory, our true power heal our festering wounds; ergo, easing life in 2020? Will the destruction of “life as we know it” lead to a better existence for us all? Spain hopes that by harnessing creative energy she can transmute chaotic energy and find peace in this storm.
Simone Moore
The Divorce Comedy: A spiritual study
Actress and writer Simone Moore’s The Divorce Comedy: A spiritual study is an exploration into the absurdity, isolation, and loss of identity of an Afro-Jamaican immigrant woman’s experience in marriage and divorce. With an original short by cinematographer Arthur Jafa, this excerpt of her one-woman show incorporates video, photography by Barron Claiborne, Afro-Caribbean dance, singing, reggae DJ-ing, and text that conjures the Dance-Hall Queen vs. Proper Church Lady archetypes present in Jamaican culture, indicts colorism within the Caribbean community, rings the alarm bell on our current mental state, and doles out her grandmother’s method for healing the Diasporic soul.
Alex Alpharaoh
O-Dogg: An Angeleno Take on Othello
Performance artist Alex Alpharaoh’s bold reimagining of Shakespeare’s Othello is set in Los Angeles’ Koreatown during the 92’ Uprising. O-Dogg, the Afro-Latino leader of LOKs Crew is preparing to leave the street life behind with his new bride, Desireé Park. When the riots begin, his Father-In-Law’s liquor store becomes threatened. Jay, the owner of Jay’s Liquor refuses to spray “Black Owned” on his boarded windows in spite of O-Dogg pleading. When Eye-G discovers that O-Dogg is handing LOK to Cash-O, Eye-G sets a deadly plan into motion.
Oct. 12, 2020
Presented in collaboration with Los Angeles Filmforum
Now is the time to dream. Now is the time to fortify our imaginative armament and take back what is ours. Now is the time to journey deep within ourselves and excavate that which they may seek to extinguish. Now is the time to take flight, chase the celestial message, and embody liberation.The films presented herein are imaginative in their daring and fullness, but also grounded and assured in their terrestrial obligations. These filmmakers and artists orbit the archive but push past their limitations: rebuilding them, deconstructing them, critically fabulating them in service of Black people. The program includes works by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and Rabz Lansiquot. In person, via Zoom: curator Jheanelle Brown; filmmakers Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and Rabz Lansiquot
Oct. 16, 2020
Liveness: Reflecting on the Current State and Future Possibilities of Performance and Theater
In a time of uncertainty and disruption in the fields of performance and theatre, there is a necessary call to reflect, reassess, and to ask: what do we hold onto, what do we let go of? What can we learn from this moment, and how will it change what we make, how we work? Organized and moderated by REDCAT’s Deputy Executive Director & Curator, Edgar Miramontes, these questions will lead a discussion with artist taisha paggett, artist & Associate Curator of Performance & Public Practice at MCA Chicago, Tara Aisha Willis and artist Lars Jan.
Blood of the Family Tree (World Premiere)
Hand-drawn and hand-colored over several years, Christine Panushka’s Blood of the Family Tree (2020, 63 min.) poetically delves into the intimate connections created by a rare disease between generations of women. Panushka’s animation films have been screened in Japan, Italy, France, Germany, Brazil, Switzerland, Holland, England, Poland, Canada and the United States. They have won numerous awards, including the Aspen Filmfest Grand Prize and a San Francisco International Film Festival Golden Gate Award. Her work explores the female psyche and uses stillness and small gestures to describe internal emotional and spiritual states. The creator of the award-winning website Absolut Panushka, she has curated animation programs and been a juror for numerous international animation festivals. A graduate of the CalArts Experimental Animation Program, she became associate director of that program in the 1990s and has been a professor at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts since 1997. In person, via Zoom: Christine Panushka
Oct. 21, 2020
Teaching What to Who: Graphic Design Education & Pedagogy
The CalArts Graphic Design Programs have a notorious history as a radical site of design pedagogy. A roster of dynamic and risk taking faculty created a tendency to attract students who are upstarts in their own right and often go into teaching in their own radical and influential ways. In this moment of collective educational crisis, Yasmin Khan Gibson, Joe Potts, Lauren Williams moderated by Silas Munro will question the lineages of their own education, discuss pedagogical damage, explore what is critical to teach now, and speak to the legacy of radical education that evolved out of CalArts. This is the third of a series of conversations that critically address the exhibition Inside Out & Upside Down: Posters from CalArts 1970-2019 in relation to issues of inclusion and representation in the field of graphic design and graphic design education.
Oct. 22-24 and 28-31, 2020
Paul Outlaw
BigBlackOctoberSurprise
As the nation goes to the polls to elect the Most Powerful Man in the World™, Black Americans continue to face disenfranchisement, inequality and the constant threat of violent death. In the final week before The Most Important Election in Our History™, Paul Outlaw’s solo performance is a meditation on isolation, imprisonment and imperiled Blackness in America — not only in this year of COVID and insurrection, but throughout the history that began in the holds of the slave ships. As befits its Kafkaesque roots, this new online work, directed by Sara Lyons and from the creative team behind the upcoming BBC (Big Black Cockroach), is a hybrid provocation combining live and filmed performance.
Nov. 5–7, 2020
NOW Festival Week 2
Primera Generación
Nepantla
Through a series of movement-based explorations and rasquache play, Primera Generación Dance Collective’s (PGDC) — Alfonso Cervera, Irvin Gonzalez, Patricia “Patty” Huerta, and Rosa Rodriguez-Frazier— new multimedia work, Nepantla, re-imagines the desmadre (messiness) that reflects, generates, and questions the flux of their Mexican American identities. PGDC strategically navigates culturally-iconic images, stereotypes, and rituals to visibilize the harsh realities and imaginative potentials of Mexicanidades in the U.S.
Xiaoyue Zhang
Little Red Book, or Plural Body
Little Red Book, or Plural Body is an experiment of bodies in performative spaces to look carefully at the interactions in which individual bodies, collective identity, and ideology are connected within the cultural space of China and beyond. Focusing on the practices and disciplines that Chinese bodies assimilate in the process of socialization, modernization and globalization, Xiaoyue Zhang and her onstage collaborators explore the political and cultural pressures and conflicts within their bodies, and how they, as artists and movers, take them in, rebel against them, and move forward with them.
randy reyes + Bapari
Real Talk # 1 (Pt. 2) | Vectors of Adverse Desires con un poco de tu disco stick
Part grief party, part protest, part prayer, part f*** you, leave me alone, I need to take a nap now, Real Talk # 1 (Pt. 2) | Vectors of Adverse Desires con un poco de tu disco stick is a solo performance framed as an “excavation site” where randy will dive into their personal beliefs on ritual, intimacy, pleasure, and the erotic. randy will activate principles of contemporary dance, Qi energetics, endurance art, and structured improvisation, against the pulsating music composed by Bapari in service of constructing and deconstructing physical and sonic terrains through the use of objects (i.e. toyz) whose traces will be left behind as slippery sculptures only to be shifted again through their sweaty body and persistent repetitive subtle gestures.
Nov. 9, 2020
Presented in collaboration with Hello Benjamin Films
Recent short films take you on an unexpected journey from India to Haiti and from Argentina to Thailand, as they strive for contemporary modes of expression to explore distance, desire and spirituality. Protagonists navigate harrowing and surreal scenarios built around the past, generating ecstasy in their pursuit of freedom or paradise. Through radical manipulations of analog and digital material, these films describe an oneiric world of longing, rooted in a desire to experiment with film language. Titles include: Les îles (Islands) by Yann Gonzalez (2017), Monster God by Agustina San Martín (2019), And What Is the Summer Saying by Payal Kapadia (2018), and Second Generation by Miryam Charles (2019).This program contains sexually explicit content. For mature audiences only. In person, via Zoom: curator Rajee Samarasinghe; filmmakers Payal Kapadia, Agustina San Martín, Miryam Charles and Davor Sanvincenti
Nov. 14, 2020
Daniel Corral and Alexander Gedeon
Concerto for Having Fun with Elvis on Stage and Count In!
Having Fun with Elvis on Stage is a 1973 album collaged entirely from Elvis speaking on stage between songs at live concerts — no music. One reviewer wrote: “hearing it is like witnessing a car wreck, leaving onlookers too horrified and too baffled to turn away.” Concerto for Having Fun with Elvis on Stage reimagines this vilified recording as the libretto for a sort of ‘ghost opera’ — creating a memetic hologram of the endless purgatory of celebrity afterlife. Concerto for Elvis is the first in a series of collaborations between Corral and Gedeon, in which four 20th century American male icons are dismantled through collage, color constancy, and racialized representation. Members of the Now Hear Ensemble perform composer Corral’s original live musical score along with the original LP as if they were the pit orchestra for opera or musical theater. Meanwhile, Alexander Gedeon’s ‘Elvis’ persona becomes a vehicle to explore all things banal and absurd in pop idolatry.
Concerto for Having Fun with Elvis on Stage will be preceded by a screening of Count In!, Daniel Corral’s video piece combining the voice of Poly Styrene [from 1970’s British punk band X-Ray Spex] with musical minimalism and hypnotic color.
Nov. 18, 2020
Where is the Black in Graphic Design at CalArts?
In this salon, organized in conjunction with the exhibition Inside Out & Upside Down: Posters from CalArts 1970-2019, designers and CalArts alumni Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton and Silas Munro will gather with former classmates and colleagues Lorin Brown and Cameron Ewing to discuss their experiences as Black graphic designers and educators. This is the final public talk of a series of conversations that critically address the exhibition in relation to issues of inclusion and representation in the field of graphic design and graphic design education.
Nov. 20–21, 2020
In Conversation with Dahlak Brathwaite: Try/Step/Trip
In advance of the streamed version of Try/Step/Trip, on Friday, November 20, writer and composer Dahlak Brathwaite and director Roberta Uno join choreographers Toran X. Moore and Freddy Ramsey Jr. alongside artist/organizer Dr. Shamell Bell for a discursive conversation about art and activism as a vital component of the work. Inspired by Brathwaite’s own history, Try/Step/Trip layers characters, poetic verse, and dialogue over the content of songs to create a theatrical piece that blurs the lines between hip-hop and dramatic performance. The group will discuss their work in light of the events of 2020 and the Black Lives Matter Movement.
Nov. 23, 2020
Nicolás Pereda
Coming to REDCAT after premiering at the Toronto Film Festival, Fauna (2020, 71 min.) recasts the signature actors of award-winning director Nicolás Pereda’s past films onto a narrative maze of opaque dialogues and in-between lines. At an unnamed mining town in contemporary Mexico, a humdrum family gathering unravels a complex exposé of social role-play. Built on a keen sense of the theatrical and the methodical camera work of long takes and succinct movements, Fauna is a haunted portrait that comments on both individual and collective dynamics at the edge of the macabre and the tragicomic. Pereda’s work has been the object of thirty-five retrospectives worldwide, and has been presented at major international film festivals, including Berlin, Cannes, Locarno, Rotterdam and Venice. In person, via Zoom: curator Eduardo Thomas; director Nicolás Pereda
The next night, on Saturday, November 21, excerpts from both Try/Step/Trip and Brathwaite’s solo performance, Spiritrials, presented at REDCAT in 2017, will be screened. An artistic conversation with Brathwaite, Uno, Moore, and REDCAT’s Deputy Executive Director & Curator Edgar Miramontes will follow, discussing the process, approach, aesthetics and collaboration necessary to develop a devise ensemble work (Try/Step/Trip) from a solo work (Spiritrials).
Nov. 30, 2020
To Be Young, Queer and Chinese
Presented in collaboration with Love Queer Cinema Week (formerly Beijing Queer Film Festival)
Love Queer Cinema Week was funded in 2001 by university students as the first LGBTQ film festival in mainland China. There it remains one of the few grassroots events involved in independent queer film screenings and cultural exchange, providing a platform for sexual and other minorities worldwide. It has hosted international guests, offered travel grants to young Chinese participants. It has created ties with queer film festivals/events in Brazil, Belgium, Italy and Denmark, and the Berlinale Teddy Awards. Often harassed by the authorities and forced to change locations, the festival has survived as a site of resistance for social, cultural and artistic fluidity. Three festival organizers will hold a panel discussion on the evolution of queer media in China. Also: screening of Popo Fan’s The Drum Tower (Gu Lou Xi, 2019) and others. In person, via Zoom: Curator on Duty Jenny Man Wu (rotating position), committee members Yang Yang and Popo Fan
Dec. 4-5, 2020
CalArts Winter Dance: Repertory/Trajectory
In partnership with REDCAT, CalArts Dance presents an ambitious, multi-track, online experience. Synthesizing the embodied memories of our faculty and students, we imagine new dances in new forms through new technologies. Join us for an immersive, digital performance charting our personal and shared histories with fresh insights through cutting-edge cartographies. 20/20 Hindsight and foresight.
Dec. 10–12, 2020
NOW Festival Week 3
DaEun Jung
Byoul Part 1: 246 at 40
What would happen if the conventional flow of Korean dance is disrupted? Prompted by this question, dancer-choreographer DaEun Jung has built a compositional system inspired by Merce Cunningham’s “chance operation” and the Korean alphabet, Hangul. Assigning the segmented moves of classical Korean dance to each morpho-syllabic block of the alphabet, Byoul Part 1: 246 at 40—consisting of 246 syllables, moves, and beats at 40 bpm—finds Jung, pansori singer Melody Shim, and sound composer Daniel Corral exploring concurrences of rigor upon arbitrary, spontaneity upon rules, flow upon interruption, dependency upon idiosyncrasy, and the conditional upon the absolute.
Maria Garcia and Samantha Mohr
Laocoӧn with Cabiria at 9
Maria Garcia’s Laocoön with Cabiria at 9 is a one-woman show led by Vatican Museums tour guide Cabiria, who in a nightmare, is confronted with a Trojan Soldier sharing her reflection. Brought to life by choreographer and performer Samantha Mohr, Cabiria’s obsession with the story of the Trojan Horse and the priest Laocoön sends her on a liminal journey of humiliation, pain, banishment, death, and love. Stuck between history and myth, Cabiria’s investigation of the Trojan war explores the designation of “foreign” bodies as dangerous, devious, and in need of discipline.
Genna Moroni
More
Employing unapologetically “ugly,” yet beautiful and raw physicality, dancer, choreographer, and artistic director of G.U.M. collective Genna Moroni’s More invites viewers into the vacuum of female relationships. Slipping between different worlds, stories and perspectives with no clear end in sight, More creates a labyrinth. The audience will have the opportunity to both witness and sense the effort, disappointments and complexities expressed in movement. Layered with music by Adam Starkopf, Moroni and her team of dancers explore the ever-evolving and shifting nature of relationships, inspiring us to find ourselves and leaving a lasting sense that there is still “more.”
Dec. 14, 2020
7 films, 6 decades, 7 countries
Voices and visions of peoples on the edge and over the edge
Starting with a first presentation at the 2008 Oberhausen Film Festival, Sherry Millner and Ernie Larsen—artists, filmmakers, writers, educators, troublemakers—have curated and exhibited multiple programs of short films that critically and/or actively represent resistance to power all over the world. Carried out over decades as the project Disruptive Film, the duo’s groundbreaking research demonstrates not only the variety of everyday resistance strategies but also a surprising diversity of experimental approaches to short-form nonfiction media. Their selection for REDCAT includes Crowded by Alonzo Crawford (1978), shot in a Baltimore jail; Xochimilco, 1914 by Los Viumasters (2010) from Mexico; Crude Living on Oil in Syria by Rozh Ahmad (2014); and their own How Do Animals and Plants Live? (2020), shot in a destroyed migrant squat in Greece. In person, via Zoom: co-curators Sherry Millner and Ernie Larsen
Dec. 18-19, 2020
Miguel Gutierrez
SADONNA: The Brown Ambition Tour
SADONNA is exactly what it sounds like: sad versions of Madonna songs. In the form of a cabaret concert conceived as a poignant homage to the pop icon, Miguel Gutierrez reinterprets Madonna’s big successes in a melancholic way, accompanied by the Slutinos, the Sad Latino Boys Backup Singers. In this music project, choreographer Miguel Gutierrez shows just how tiny the spiritual distance is between the international pop superstar, who grew up in Bay City, Michigan and himself, an international experimental itinerant artist who grew up in Colonia, New Jersey. Performed with reverence and delicateness, Sadonna ekes out the melancholy cry for help hidden within Madonna’s uplifting lyrics.
For more information, press comps, or artist interviews, please contact Katie Dunham at redcatpr@calarts.edu.
REDCAT, CalArts’ downtown center for contemporary arts, is a multidisciplinary center for innovative visual, performing and media arts in the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex. Through performances, exhibitions, screenings and literary events, REDCAT introduces diverse audiences, students and artists to the most influential developments in the arts from around the world, and gives artists in this region the creative support they need to achieve national and international stature. REDCAT continues the tradition of the California Institute of the Arts, its parent organization, by encouraging experimentation, discovery and lively civic discourse.
California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) has set the pace for educating professional artists since 1970. Offering rigorous undergraduate and graduate degree programs through six schools—Art, Critical Studies, Dance, Film/Video, Music, and Theater—CalArts has championed creative excellence, critical reflection, and the development of new forms and expressions. As successive generations of faculty and alumni have helped shape the landscape of contemporary arts, the Institute first envisioned by Walt Disney encompasses a vibrant, eclectic community with global reach, inviting experimentation, independent inquiry, and active collaboration and exchange among artists, artistic disciplines and cultural traditions.