REDCAT Announces Fall 2021 Season

Making its triumphant return to live performance and art, Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT), CalArts' downtown center for contemporary arts, is proud to announce its Fall 2021 season. Through live and streaming performances, screenings, and exhibitions, REDCAT will once again welcome in-person audiences-while also reaching online audiences around the world-September through December 2021.

"As we begin to gather together again, this season is guided by the urgency of performance in engaging the complexities of our shared moment. As we move back into the fullness of art's public life, we are as resolute as ever in our commitment to artists, and to uplifting the voices and perspectives that continue to define experimentation in the present," said João Ribas, REDCAT's Steven D. Lavine Executive Director and Vice President for Cultural Partnerships.

This season's programming continues REDCAT's commitment to the art and artists of the global majority and its multiplicity of intersections, and the way these inform and lead toward imagining and creating a more just world. REDCAT returns to live performance with notions of presence and of art as inherently collaborative and collective, further affirming the importance of liveness that the past year has taught.

The exciting new season features world premieres from three of L.A.'s most exciting artists: choreographer, performer, and educator Milka Djordjevich's CORPS, exploring how labor and gender are addressed under the lens of regimented movement on Nov 11-13; extreme vocalist, improviser, and intermedia artist Carmina Escobar's Bajo la Sombra del Sol / Under the Sun's Shadow, a performative hypertextural scenic work staged at Mono Lake, California, Nov. 18-20; and Dec. 16-18, artist Nao Bustamante's The Wooden People, which layers ancient myths on the familiar melodrama of the telenovela.

Presented as part of The Sharon Disney Lund Dance Series, the season welcomes a host of original dance programming. Kicking off the season, on Sept. 16-18, performers and choreographers jumatatu poe and Jermone Donte Beacham explore J-Sette, a performance style practiced widely among majorettes and drill teams at historically Black colleges and universities, as well as teams of primarily queer men who compete at gay clubs and pride festivals. After last year's blockbuster virtual performance, CalArts Dance returns to REDCAT for its annual Winter Dance Concert Dec. 3-4.

And from Dec. 9-11, REDCAT presents What Remains, a collaboration between world-renowned poet and MacArthur Fellow Claudia Rankine and choreographer and Guggenheim Fellow Will Rawls. Inspired by Rankine's texts on racial violence-Citizen (2014) and Don't Let Me Be Lonely (2004)-the result is a performance at the edge of dance and poetry that meets and challenges the erasure of Black citizens with its own immersive disturbances. What Remains premiered at Danspace Project (NYC) in 2018 and has been presented at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Yale Repertory Theatre, and Walker Art Center.

The season's music programming sees performances from internationally renowned bass player Mark Dresser and Canadian jazz heavyweights the Jeremy Ledbetter Trio as part of the Angel City Jazz Festival on Oct. 1. And on Oct. 30, Philadelphia-based Moor Mother (aka Moor Mother Goddess or MMGz) brings her visceral blend of social issues, hardcore electronics, and intense poetry to the REDCAT stage with collaborator Vitche-Boul Ra in recognition technology.

The 18th annual New Original Works (NOW) Festival-a celebration of Los Angeles' vibrant community of artists-returns with nine new works by local artists continuing to redefine the boundaries of contemporary performance. Back in person, NOW will unfold over three weekends, and feature a triple bill of performances each night on Oct. 7-9, Oct. 14-16, and Oct. 21-23.

Organized by CalArts faculty Bérénice Reynaud and Eduardo Thomas, the season features new films by Lebanese artist Haig Aivazian, queer Afro-Puerto Rican artist Macha Colón, acclaimed director Bill Morrison, groundbreaking women animation artists from Japan, a one-of-a-kind live Halloween and Día de los Muertos celebration from curator and historian Abraham Castillo Flores, and the return of one-day contemporary artists' cinema series, Murs Murs.

Throughout the fall, REDCAT will present a comprehensive look at Karrabing Film Collective, an Indigenous media group based in Australia's Northern Territories that uses the creation of film, and art installations, as a form of Indigenous grassroots resistance and self-organization. Surveying their existing films to date, the program at REDCAT will run throughout the fall, on Sept. 22, Oct. 27, and Nov. 22.

The season also continues the ARTFORUM "Must See" exhibition of Suite!, a newly commissioned work by prolific Los Angeles- and New York-based artist, writer, and curator Aria Dean. Co-commissioned by REDCAT and the Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève, Suite! is a film and installation that stars a chorus line of Kudzu plants occupying digitally rendered versions of Dean's installation: a darkened chamber with a curved screen at one end, and a black and white checked floor that gives the optical illusion of a sunken hole.

And on Nov. 6, REDCAT opens CPT Reversal, a new installation from Black Quantum Futurism, the interdisciplinary creative practice between artists Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips. CPT is commonly understood as the acronym for "Colored People's Time," oftentimes a negative stereotype, but also a cultural understanding that events and experiences do not adhere to strict schedules and linear time. In physics, the same acronym stands for "charge, parity, and time reversal," a fundamental symmetry of laws that holds for all physical phenomena. Intrigued by this double meaning of CPT, Black Quantum Futurism seeks to examine time and temporality at various scales and dimensions--personal, interpersonal, communal, global, and cosmic time--and their connections and reverberations through new and rearranged videos, collages, maps, sounds, and other visual works.

And that's just the beginning for this extraordinary season at REDCAT. For dates, details, or ticketing information, see below or visit redcat.org.

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