REDCAT New Original Works Festival Premieres 9 New Contemporary Performance Works

REDCAT, CalArts' downtown center for contemporary arts, presents the 16th annual
New Original Works (NOW) Festival, a three-week celebration of Los Angeles' vibrant community of artists creating new contemporary performance work, July 25 to August 10, 2019.

REDCAT's Annual New Original Works Festival transforms REDCAT into a summer laboratory premiering new contemporary dance, theater, music and multimedia performances. This year's festival launches nine new works by Los Angeles emerging and mid-career artists who are re-defining the boundaries of contemporary performance to invent hybrid artistic disciplines, re-imagine traditions and confront urgent issues. All artistic teams receive free rehearsal space, technical support, and artist fees.

REDCAT Associate Director Edgar Miramontes, who oversees the annual festival, describes the summer festival as "a vital initiative for experimentation and development that nurtures the creation of new interdisciplinary performances where artists share their unique perspectives, giving us an opportunity to view a changing world in different and imaginative ways. The artistic teams are encouraged to take risks as they blur the distinctions between traditional artistic disciplines to devise new forms - and it is always fun to experience the results." Miramontes adds, "The Festival creates opportunities for the artists that are all too rare. There is a great need for infrastructure to develop new performances, so NOW tries to address that need each summer."

In the spirit of CalArts, REDCAT's parent institution, the New Original Works Festival serves as a catalyst for creativity and new ideas. Over its 16 year history, the program has launched over 120 works by an impressive list of artists who continue to be seen on stages throughout the U.S. and abroad.

Each of the three weekends features a triple bill of three premieres in a shared evening. Each program is premiered on Thursday evening and repeated Friday and Saturday evenings at 8:30 pm.

Week One: July 25-27 The 16th Annual New Original Works Festival kicks off with a program of works by Sola Bamis; zach dorn and Danielle Dahl; Katherine Helen Fisher andAndrew Ondrejcak.
Week Two: August 1-3 The New Original Works Festival continues with works by Paul Outlaw; Kate Watson-Wallace, Hprizm and Verónica Casado Hernandez; Alexandro Segade and Amy Ruhl.
Week Three: August 8-10 The New Original Works Festival closes with works by Source Material, Austyn Rich and Jesse Bonnell.

Details are below:

Week One: July 25-27
The festival kicks off with a program of works by Sola Bamis; zach dorn and Danielle Dahl; Katherine Helen Fisher and Andrew Ondrejcak.

Sola Bamis: The Tutorial Part II: The White Tears Tea Steam
Performance artist Sola Bamis presents The Tutorial Part II: The White Tears Tea Steam, a continuation of her revolutionary skincare routine and digital litany for Womanist survival. Mixing infamous tweets, personal videos, and original text, Bamis introduces her new digital alter ego @racheldolezall, who provides insight to the makings of a Strong Black Woman-delivering a 28-day regimen for improved complexion, an explosive critique of Hollywood colorism, and a vital prescription for blk women's self-love and expression.

zach dorn and Danielle Dahl: Sponge Hollow
Visual and performing artist zach dorn artfully manipulates a table-top platform filled with elaborate cardboard dioramas and a Lionel train set in Sponge Hollow, a multimedia live-action graphic novel. Accompanied by composer Danielle Dahl, live projected video seamlessly invites audiences to venture into a Florida swamp and witness the destruction of a tourist-ridden town from the window of the moving O-scale train. Along the way, we encounter the world's largest sponge and a man obsessed with the television drama Gilmore Girls.

Katherine Helen Fisher and Andrew Ondrejcak: The Muses
Pulsating to the imagistic nature of Helado Negro's cosmic synth-folk sounds, choreographer Katherine Helen Fisher's new work The Muses renders a suite of lush and riotous dances that conjures a communal space in celebration of the divine feminine. The Muses combines visuals by inventive artist Andrew Ondrejcak, whose works link historical art objects with contemporary iconography, often with a queer perspective on classical forms.

Week Two: August 1-3

The New Original Works Festival continues with works by Paul Outlaw; Kate Watson-Wallace, Hprizm and Verónica Casado Hernandez; Alexandro Segade and Amy Ruhl.

Paul Outlaw: BBC (Big Black Cockroach)
Inspired by Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. A white, cis, heterosexual, Tr*mp-supporting American woman awakens to find herself transformed into what she considers a monstrous vermin-an African-American man. Directed by Sara Lyons, Paul Outlaw's BBC (Big Black Cockroach) is an evocative live-action horror movie and a farce about black virility, white fragility, gender confusion, internalized homophobia and misogyny.

Kate Watson-Wallace, Hprizm and Verónica Casado Hernandez: kim.
Kate Watson-Wallace's new performance work functions as a live collage for an ensemble of female/femme performers-an investigation of notions and experiences of desire, contagion, failure, ritual, pleasure and the ecstatic. In collaboration with composer Hprizm and visual artist/dramaturge Verónica Casado Hernandez, kim. is a conversation with the body in movement as it channels the act of dressing and undressing as pleasure, confrontation, joy and disruption.

Alexandro Segade and Amy Ruhl: Popular Revolt
Are we willing to put in the work? In Popular Revolt, interdisciplinary artists Alexandro Segade and Amy Ruhl use office technologies to perform a brainstorming session where participants develop a "socialism app." Using sensitivity training modules as narrative structures, Popular Revolt makes Marxist theater via motivational speeches and motion graphics, attempting to muster revolutionary fervor in the suffocating embrace of Neoliberalism.

Week Three: August 8-10

The New Original Works Festival closes with works by Source Material, Austyn Rich and Jesse Bonnell.

Source Material: A Thousand Tongues
Source Material's new music-theater work A Thousand Tongues, performed by Nini Julia Bang and directed by Samantha Shay, is an eruption of visuals born from the sounds of a tapestry of traditional music from all over the world. With a pristine, sparse, and yet oceanic symbolic visual landscape, A Thousand Tongues explores isolation, the unknown, vulnerability and the veil between this world and the other.

Austyn Rich: BL**DY SPAGHETTI
Sensing an end is near, two sailors in a highly-charged room refuse to communicate with each other in this fervent and virtuosic new performance work by Austyn Rich. Remembering and honoring black and brown troops who were front-lined, BL**DY SPAGHETTI celebrates companionship, self-worth, death and unspoken love to be something worth feasting over.Jesse Bonnell: Paradise Island
Part retrospective and part future-bending reinvention, Jesse Bonnell's Paradise Island brings new life to texts written by Richard Foreman, one of America's most influential experimental artists. Paradise Island explores, through a contemporary lens, notions of paradise, shifting between the everyday events of a cafe in Paris and the euphoric nature of the sublime hidden rhythms of the unknown. The work marks a departure for theater artist Bonnell, who is a co-founder of the daring performance ensemble Poor Dog Group.

TICKETS & INFORMATION
REDCAT's 16th Annual New Original Works (NOW) Festival 2019

Dates & Times:
Week One: July 25-27
Program 1:

Sola Bamis: The Tutorial Part II: The White Tears Tea Steam
zach dorn and Danielle Dahl: Sponge Hollow
Katherine Helen Fisher and Andrew Ondrejcak: The Muses

Thursday, July 25 at 8:30 pm
Friday, July 26 at 8:30 pm
Saturday, July 27 at 8:30 pm

Week Two: August 1-3
Program 2:

Paul Outlaw: BBC (Big Black Cockroach)
Kate Watson-Wallace, Hprizm and Verónica Casado Hernandez: kim.
Alexandro Segade and Amy Ruhl: Popular Revolt

Thursday, Aug 1 at 8:30 pm
Friday, Aug 2 at 8:30 pm
Saturday, Aug 3 at 8:30 pm

Week Three: August 8-10
Program 3:

Source Material: A Thousand Tongues
Austyn Rich: BL**DY SPAGHETTI
Jesse Bonnell: Paradise Island
Thursday, August 8 at 8:30 pm
Friday, August 9 at 8:30 pm
Saturday, August 10 at 8:30 pm

Ticketing:
$20 general [$16 for members/students]
$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, and two hours prior to curtain. Group, member, student and CalArts faculty/staff discounts available.

Location:
631 West 2nd St. Los Angeles, CA 90012
Located in the Walt Disney Concert Hall

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