REDCAT Announces Winter/Spring 2021 Season

Embarking on what promises to be another unprecedented and groundbreaking year, Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT), CalArts' downtown center for contemporary arts, is proud to announce its second all-virtual season of artistic exploration and experimentation.

Through streaming performances, screenings, conversations, and exhibitions, REDCAT will continue to reach audiences around the world with a program of innovative visual, performing, and media arts running January through June 2021.

"Given the current moment, the work of artists takes on an even greater urgency," said João Ribas, REDCAT's new Steven D. Lavine Executive Director and Vice President for Cultural Partnerships. "We must allow art and artists to lead us into ways of thinking, making, and acting for a better, more just and more equitable world. REDCAT is deeply committed to serving as a creative nexus for artists to engage thoughtfully, critically, and transformatively with our audiences and communities."

REDCAT's Deputy Executive Director & Curator Edgar Miramontes added, "As a presenter, REDCAT is a facilitator of experiences, and whose experiences we elevate is a question we should always be asking ourselves -- especially now, as the inequities experienced by our Black and Brown brothers and sisters and other marginalized communities have become impossible to deny."

Although REDCAT will gladly return to live in-person performance when it's possible, the season offers an opportunity to support artists from all over the globe by showcasing their work virtually, amplifying their experiences to Los Angeles and beyond.

REDCAT's Winter/Spring 2021 season welcomes three International Artists: Chilean actor Francisco Reyes with his critically-acclaimed one-person show (with puppets), Yorick, La Historia de Hamlet Feb. 12-14; Indonesian choreographer and dancer Rianto exploring history, culture, and gender through dance and film with Hijrah Feb. 18-20; and April 10-11, internationally renowned Chilean playwright and director Guillermo Calderón with The Second Life of Dragón, a reformatted version of his newest work for our current circumstances of confinement.

Internationally acclaimed theater company Elevator Repair Service recreates a profoundly relevant 1965 confrontation in a work-in-progress showing of Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge on April 23-25.

Launching the season, on Jan. 15, REDCAT kicks off "Black Motion Pictures," a series of interviews with radical Black creatives about race, performance, and representation conducted and curated by artist Gabrielle Civil.

The season sees two other exciting REDCAT conversations: with CalArts MA Aesthetics and Politics Theorist-in-Residence McKenzie Wark on Jan. 20 and CalArts 2021 Katie Jacobson Writer-in-Residence and current U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo on March 23.

A very musical spring at REDCAT includes performances by torchbearers of Chicago's innovative jazz scene Artifacts Trio (Feb. 27); Global Studios and Audiotopias, a project exploring virtual hybridity and musical collaboration with artists from around the world (March 13); stuttering, Afro-Caribbean composer, performer, and writer JJJJJerome Ellis with a new piece commissioned by REDCAT (April 3); soprano and sound artist Micaela Tobin with an immersive, experimental opera (May 1); and GRAMMY Award-winning PARTCH Ensemble with seven new works (June 4-5).

The season also includes two works rescheduled from last spring and reimagined for a virtual stage: Dohee Lee's ritual shamanic experience of music and dance, MU/a??: 9 Goddesses, March 19-20, and Rosanna Gamson/World Wide's dark dance/theater prequel to Hansel and Gretel, Prelude to Sugar Houses, June 10-12.

Mixing ritualistic and visceral movement, sound, video, and text, Jessica Emmanuel's new solo dance work,ˈkwir?"/, considers a dystopian world live from the REDCAT stage March 4-6. And following the success of the livestreamed CalArts Winter Dance Concert, CalArts Dance returns April 29-30 with new work that expands the digital platform.

A living and moving score and endurance mediation on current times, taisha paggett presents com.pleats.we (housecoat) May 10-22, during which the dance artist and choreographer will live at REDCAT under the surveillance of a 24/7 livestream.

And closing out the 17th annual New Original Works (NOW) Festival -- a celebration of Los Angeles' vibrant community of artists creating new contemporary performance works -- on Jan. 28-30, REDCAT will present the world premieres of new works from artists DaEun Jung, Maria Garcia and Samantha Mohr, and Genna Moroni (rescheduled from December 2020).

The season's Film/Video programming comes from all corners of the cinematic and geographical world, from queer cinema to Indigenous culture, Latin American animation to female filmmakers from Post-Soviet Russia and feminist film collectives from South Korea, experimental filmmaking across the globe and so much more. Across ten screenings, organized by CalArts faculty Bérénice Reynaud and Eduardo Thomas with a dazzling array of guest curators, the season features films by Aquelarre Gonzo Camarena, Hyun Jin Cho, COUSIN, Mariah Garnett, Sky Hopinka (2020 recipient of The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts in Film/Video), Fernanda Pessoa, Ekaterina Selenkina, Eduardo Williams, and others.

The season will also celebrate the May opening of Aria Dean: 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 that's just the beginning for this even more extraordinary season at REDCAT. For dates, details, or ticketing information, see below or visit redcat.org.

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