Announcing REDCAT's 2017 NOW Festival Line Up

REDCAT, CalArts' downtown center for contemporary arts, announces the 14th annual New Original Works (NOW) Festival, a three-week celebration of Los Angeles' vibrant community of artists creating new contemporary performance works. This year's festival runs over three weekends: Thursday to Saturday, July 27-29, August 3-5 and August 10-12 at 8:30 pm. Each weekend premieres a triple bill, presenting a shared evening of dance, theater and multimedia work. Each program is premiered on Thursday evening and repeated Friday and Saturday evenings.

REDCAT's annual NOW Festival launches the first performances of a wide range of new works created by Los Angeles-based artists and creative teams. REDCAT becomes a creative laboratory to research and create new projects with an emphasis on interdisciplinary collaborative works. NOW is the only program of its kind in Los Angeles, offering sustained support for the creation of new works for 14 years. NOW has become renowned as an important catalyst for artists launching new ideas and has launched more than 100 new productions.

REDCAT Executive Director Mark Murphy, who oversees the annual festival together with Associate Director Edgar Miramontes, describes the summer festival as "a vital initiative for experimentation by artistic teams encouraged to take risks and blur the distinctions between traditional artistic disciplines." Miramontes adds, "The Festival addresses a critical need for an infrastructure to develop new performances, especially for dance artists."

The 2017 three-week festival features nine new works by the Los Angeles dance, theater, music and multimedia performing artists listed below.

Week One: July 27-29

Jessica Emmanuel: Witnessing Her

Jessica Emmanuel's commanding presence and starkly impassioned movements capture the essence of the vicarious trauma triggered by images, sounds, stories and details of senseless black deaths. A seemingly viral wave of violence belies the deeply personal impact of each confrontation, each bullet and each chalk outline.

Stacy Dawson Stearns: LOVE GASOLINE!

Bessie Award-winner Stacy Dawson Stearns constructs a scintillating mix of video and highly visceral movement theater to probe the erotic machine of Marcel Duchamp's famously unfinished The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (or the Large Glass). LOVE GASOLINE!unveils the humorous complexity of desire using five eloquent performers, punctuated by bursts of original music, "readymade" sounds, and vivid film sequences.

Nancy Keystone: Untitled Communion

Whiplashed by the accelerating waves of madness in a tumultuous political time, Nancy Keystone and cross-disciplinary collective, Critical Mass Performance Group - take the audience on a whirlwind journey that careens between resistance, fun, panic, thrashing and persistence. Fueled by Jacob Richard's live music, it is a boisterous cri-de-coeur that also features "sparkles and communion."

Week Two: August 3-5

Nickels Sunshine: Take Me With You

With smart, lush movement and a notably contemporary "corps de ballet," Nickels Sunshine beautifully crafts a non gender conforming homage to the distinctive techniques and choreographic styles of such canonical dance pioneers as Vaslav Nijinsky and Martha Graham. Nickels rejoins with the fearless Jmy James Kidd - along with Barry Brannum, Alexx Shilling, Bernard Brown and Maya Gingery - to re-imagine the poetics of movement in shared spaces.

Megan Fowler-Hurst, Mackenzey Franklin and Sarri Sanchez (TBOL): A Dismal Glimpse at a Script We Create to Keep Us Moving Forward

Three adventurous collaborators blend capricious theatricality with nuanced choreographic non-sequiturs, working under the collective name Tales Between Our Legs (TBOL). Their satirical multimedia exploration draws from the vocabulary of dance theater, sitcoms and even post-performance discussions to cleverly exploit the contrast between what people say and what they really mean.

Vivian Bang: Can You Hear Me / LA 92

Incisive writer/performer Vivian Bang, one of the original members of New York's explosively antic Big Art Group, turns her focus to interrogating L.A., where she now has a thriving TV/film career. Bang poignantly re-visits a forgotten history of the 1992 L.A. riots, as recalled from the perspective of Korean-Americans she researched to create this revealing live documentary that poetically captures a crucial historic moment.

Week Three: August 10-12

Luis Lara Malvacías and Jeremy Nelson: C

In movement rich with rhythmic juxtapositions, Luis Lara Malvacías and Jeremy Nelson navigate a domestic environment, evoked by furniture and décor, in their collaboration C. Video imagery on multiple surfaces enhances this astute exploration of time-the latest in a series of highly structured improvisational duets they are creating-one for each letter of the alphabet: A to Z.

Gina Young: BUTCH BALLET

BUTCH BALLET is writer and director Gina Young's love letter to female masculinity. A series of private moments and pedestrian "dances" for a cast of butch, gender nonconforming and nonbinary performers (with no actual ballet involved!), BUTCH BALLET is a movement-theater piece of minimalist vignettes tackling softness and hardness, otherness and belonging, love and desire, butch iconography and of course... swimwear.

Timur and The Dime Museum: Artaud in the Black Lodge

Artaud in the Black Lodge explores the imagined psychic connections between Antonin Artaud, William S. Burroughs and David Lynch. Drawing from the worlds of heavy metal and electronica, composer David T. Little, collaborates with librettist/poet Anne Waldman, director Lydia Steier and operatic rock band Timur and The Dime Museum.

TICKETS & INFORMATION
REDCAT's 14th Annual New Original Works (NOW) Festival 2017
https://www.redcat.org/festival/new-original-works-festival-2017

Dates & Times:
Program 1:
Thursday, July 27 at 8:30 pm
Friday, July 28 at 8:30 pm
Saturday, July 29 at 8:30 pm

Program 2:
Thursday, Aug 3 at 8:30 pm
Friday, Aug 4 at 8:30 pm
Saturday, Aug 5 at 8:30 pm

Program 3:
Thursday, August 10 at 8:30 pm
Friday, August 11 at 8:30 pm
Saturday, August 12 at 8:30 pm

Ticketing:
$20 general [$16 for members/students, $14 CalArts]
$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.

REDCAT's Box Office is open Tuesdays through Saturdays from noon until 6 pm, or two hours prior to curtain. Group, member, student and CalArts faculty/staff discounts available.

Location:
631 West 2nd St. Los Angeles, CA 90012

Press comps and Artist Interviews are available by contacting
Kelly Hargraves, khargraves@calarts.edu, 213-237-2873.

ABOUT REDCAT | THE ROY AND EDNA DISNEY/CALARTS THEATER
REDCAT, CalArts' downtown center for contemporary arts, presents a dynamic and international mix of innovative visual, performing and media arts year round. Located inside the iconic Walt Disney Concert Hall complex in downtown Los Angeles, REDCAT houses a theater, a gallery space and a lounge. Through performances, exhibitions, screenings, and literary events, REDCAT introduces diverse audiences, including 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.

GENERAL INFORMATION
For current program and exhibition information call 213-237-2800 or visit www.redcat.org.

Location/Parking: REDCAT is located in downtown Los Angeles inside the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex with a separate entrance at the corner of West 2nd and Hope Streets. Parking is available in the Walt Disney Concert Hall parking structure. $9 event rate or $5 for vehicles entering after 8:00 pm on weekdays.
Street Address: 631 West 2nd Street, Los Angeles CA 90012.

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