REDCAT, CalArts' downtown center for contemporary arts, presents the 15th annual New Original Works (NOW) Festival, a three-week celebration of Los Angeles' vibrant community of artists creating new contemporary performance work, July 19 to August 4, 2018. Individual programs are priced at $20.
REDCAT becomes a creative laboratory to research and create new projects with an emphasis on interdisciplinary collaborative works launching the very first performances of wide ranging new works created by Los Angeles-based creative teams.
NOW is the only program of its kind in Los Angeles, offering production support for the creation of new works. In the months prior to the festival the artists receive free rehearsal space on stage at REDCAT and receive production fees, technical support, design and dramaturgical support, as well as high quality video and photography of their new work. NOW has become renowned as an important catalyst for artists launching new ideas and has launched more than 120 new productions in the past 14 years.REDCAT Executive Director Mark Murphy, who oversees the annual festival together with Associate Director Edgar Miramontes, describes the summer festival as "a vital boost for experimentation by artistic teams encouraged to take risks and blur the distinctions between traditional artistic disciplines."
New Original Works Festival continues with works by KyungHwa Lee, Sebastian Hernandez and Milka Djordjevich.
KyungHwa Lee: Malleable Bodies: Flusser, Plasticity, and the Corset
Inventive media and performance artist KyungHwa Lee explores contemporary themes of embodiment, displacement, and the "ideal body" in an installation created with new technologies including 3-D printing and virtual reality. The performance contemplates the body as architectural and malleable as six performers actualize this ideal, while projections capture historical progressions of representation.
Sebastian Hernandez: Hypanthium
Named for the part of a rose that holds nectar, Hypanthium is an experimental collage of actions and movements grappling with notions of sisterhood, space, power and survival amidst memories of ancestral trauma. With sensuality, fierceness and hints of wry humor, three performers synthesize a pseudo kinship of queer femme moving bodies in Los Angeles, while recognizing the intensity of a hegemonic project that tries to assimilate them.
Milka Djordjevich: CORPSCommanding and irresistible percussive marching music in the spirit of a drum corps surrounds an ensemble of women in choreographer Milka Djordjevich's new collaboration with composer Chris Peck. The contrapuntal beats infuse vivid movement that is at times militaristic, ritualistic, or athletic, as performers engage in repeated compulsory actions that evolve into a beautifully woven movement score of methodical formations that become a feminine procession of collective power.
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Week Three: August 2-4The 15th Annual New Original Works Festival closes with works by Rachel Mason and Oguri, CARLON and Christine Marie.
Rachel Mason and Oguri: Singularity Song
With a large scale video environment, Rachel Mason creates a virtual black hole, where her song cycle becomes a score for gravitational waves, and renowned dancer and choreographer Oguri inhabits a dimension beyond earth. Mason was inspired by her interviews with some of the most provocative thinkers about the physics of black holes and the poetics of visualizing such immense phenomena.
In a dramatic visual landscape dominated by oversized sheets of cardboard, Jay Carlon and his athletic dancers may seem protected by the soft material, but their impact on the surface is powerfully amplified by composer Alex Wand, who manipulates and weaves the intensified sounds into an aural soundscape. Combined with high-velocity movement, it compellingy confronts the overwhelming impact of disturbing and fractured memories.
Christine Marie: Shadow in Stereo: Antiquated A.R.
Light artist Christine Marie draws the audience into an immersive world dominated by 30- foot tall figures that come to vivid 3-D life in choreography created with collaborator Genna Moroni. Viewed through your fashionable 3-D glasses, the exquisite ensemble of performers seems to do the impossible-reach out live-yet Marie uses a non-digital stereo imaging technique she reinvented by drawing on ancient and spellbinding effects, each beautifully revealed.
The New Original Works Festival is made possible by generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rosenfeld Fund for Special Projects, and REDCAT Circle donors.
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REDCAT's 15th Annual New Original Works (NOW) Festival 2018
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