Patrisse Cullors, Dahlak Brathwaite, Miguel Gutierrez, Paul Outlaw, Daniel Corral and more will be featured in the upcoming season.
In this wildly unprecedented year, Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT), CalArts' center for contemporary arts in downtown Los Angeles, has announced 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.
New Black Wave
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
Black Motion Pictures
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?
Ulrike Ottinger
Exile Shanghai
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
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
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
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
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.
Patrisse Cullors
Malcolm X Revisited
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.
NOW Festival Week 1
Davia Spainnow is the time to dream
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
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.
Christine Panushka
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.
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.
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.
NOW Festival Week 2
Primera GeneraciónFascination
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
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.
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.
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.
Nicolás Pereda
Fauna
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
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
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.
NOW Festival Week 3
DaEun JungThe Clamor of the Excluded
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
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.
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