REDCAT Presents The 21st Annual New Original Works Festival

Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater will present the 21st annual New Original Works Festival, a celebration of Los Angeles' vibrant community of artists creating new performance work, over three weekends this fall: Nov. 7-9, 14-16, 21-23, 2024.

This year's festival showcases nine new works by Los Angeles artists who are redefining the boundaries of contemporary performance, reinventing disciplines, reimagining traditions, and confronting today's most urgent issues. Committed to an investigation of history and contemporary norms, these nine works use humor, improvisation, and multidisciplinary collaboration to disrupt power dynamics, craft collective rituals of care, and build new modes of community abundance. 

NOW Festival 2024 was organized by Katy Dammers, REDCAT's Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Performing Arts, with Rolando Rodriguez, Administrative Manager. Participating artists were selected through an open application process helmed by a committee of artists and NOW Festival alumni including NOW alumni Marissa Brown (NOW ‘21) and Emily Mast (NOW ‘12 & ‘16).

In the spirit of the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), REDCAT's parent institution, the NOW Festival has served as a catalyst for creativity and new ideas for more than two decades. Each year, NOW Festival premieres new and innovative work in contemporary dance, theater, music, and multimedia performance by Los Angeles-based artists. All artistic teams receive production, technical support, and artist fees. Since the first edition in 2004, NOW Festival has presented the work of over 200 artists who continue to be seen on stages throughout the U.S. and abroad. 

Each of the three festival weekends features a triple bill of world premieres in a shared evening. Each program will premiere on Thursday evening and repeat Friday and Saturday at 8:30 pm. Performances will also be livestreamed each Saturday evening during the festival's run. Patrons can also purchase a pass to attend all three weekends of the festival, both in-person and virtually.

Week One: Nov. 7-9, 2024

Eliza Bagg, Rohan Chander, George R. Miller: 7 Early Songs

7 Early Songs is an opera song cycle created by composer-performers Eliza Bagg and Rohan Chander in collaboration with director George R. Miller. Framed by celebrated composer Alban Berg's rarely-staged song cycle of the same name, Sieben frühe lieder (1905-1908), this new work interweaves Berg's music with new arrangements of the existing material for voice, electronics, and synthesizers, along with entirely new compositions by Bagg and Chander. Miller stages the work as a series of poetic tableaux, tracing the lonely narrator's shadowy visions—the sound of a sweet voice, a surveilling gaze, a day of white chrysanthemums, or the sun's heat—as they process the banality of daily life and the urgency of the threats around them.  

Bernard Brown: Sissies: Something Perfect Between Ourselves

Choreographer Bernard Brown spotlights a community of seven Black and Brown men, accompanied by a live DJ, Defacto X, in an uplifting dance performance that celebrates the Black Gay bar as a Queer haven. Taking its title–Sissies: Something Perfect Between Ourselves–from the disco-era ballad by Black Queer music icon Sylvester and Marlon B. Ross's text Sissy Insurgencies: A Racial Anatomy of Unfit Manliness, this work conjures a future where Queer Men of Color craft their own narratives as central to society. While they swirl, swish and kiki through disco and R&B songs highlighting the lost generation of Queer icons who changed the world, Brown prompts a reconsideration of understandings of masculinity, sexuality, and connection through embodied discourse, text, and sonic power.

Meena Murugesan: Dravidian Futurities: Chapter II

Dravidian Futurities: Chapter II dives into the deep indigo waters where the Bay of Bengal, Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea meet. Meena Murugesan investigates the space where a sunken landmass once connected South India and Sri Lanka to Africa to consider the connections across dark melanin, caste abolition, syncretic spiritual systems, and earth-reverent rituals. Together with an ensemble of diasporic artists based in Los Angeles, they craft a surreal visual art, movement, and music ritual to re-earth ethical possibilities of being together. 

Week Two: Nov. Nov. 14-16, 2024

Ajani Brannum: CONGRESS

As a national mythos slides into decay, CONGRESS builds a crypt for its ghosts. In this performance, five (alleged) men move, speak, and sing as representatives of both themselves and their historical inheritances. They conjure and confront patriarchy's ghosts—descending into the space where social violence takes physical, psychic, and energetic shape. This theatrical convening extends Ajani Brannum's investigation into what performers do on behalf of those who witness them. Part ceremony and part town hall, this interdisciplinary performance draws the audience in to confront bodily forms of oppression and remake the roles that hold together a suffering society. 

Sophia Cleary: Read The Room

Framed as a theatrical rehearsal between an Actor and her Director, Read The Room reconsiders these roles and their relationship to the audience in an unsettling, comedic, and outrageous experience. Interdisciplinary artist Sophia Cleary investigates the tension between script and improvisation in theater and the illusion of control in a performance that embraces liveness: you cannot fast forward or rewind–you can only move without knowing what comes next. This two-hander play manifests as a metaphor for the contemporary climate where fact and fiction are no longer discernible and investigates what laughter seemingly condones–ultimately calling attention to what contracts can be upended rather than being consumed as spectacle. 

Tijuana Dance Company: Salón México

The Tijuana Dance Company presents Salón México, an examination of the borderland staged in a dance hall. Directed and choreographed by Dulce Escobedo, this dance theater piece reveals the stories and complex interactions that pulse through Tijuana's nightlife. An intricate choreography of identity, power, and survival emerges as individuals carve out spaces for personal and collective expression on the dance floor. 

Week Three: Nov. 21-23, 2024

Bret Easterling: On Second Thought

In this new dance, choreographer Bret Easterling asks: What might we create if we went with our second thought? Refuting the logic of “first thought, best thought”, On Second Thought draws attention to bias and patterns as improvisational structures and set choreography combine to break habits and inhabit new terrain. In a world trapped in trends and stuck in systems of harm, Easterling devises a new mode of decision-making and artistic exploration to craft different potentials and imagine liberatory futures. 

Mallory Fabian: I Hate Women

I Hate Women is an energetic multidisciplinary performance that uses dance, theater, text, boxing, and murder ballads to study the complexities of platonic relationships between women—relationships that often go deeper than romantic connections. Created by Mallory Fabian, this quartet explores these intimate friendships by examining internalized personal and collective misogyny, patriarchy, and homophobia. Embracing sisterhood and rehabilitating competition, this work seeks to dismantle stereotypes that shape interactions amongst women.

Kensaku Shinohara: tired music concert

In tired music concert, Kensaku Shinohara incorporates dance and music to explore his firsthand experience as a father, interdisciplinary artist, and immigrant in the United States. Accompanied by a sound score created by the manipulation of ordinary objects, Kensaku's experiences are shared and embodied by performers in a series of athletic movement scores. Examining stereotypes around masculinity and Asian men, this performance invites audience engagement in a reminder that community is built collectively. 

TICKETS & INFORMATION:

REDCAT's 21st Annual New Original Works (NOW) Festival

Week One: Aug. 17-19, 2023 (Program One)
Eliza Bagg, Rohan Chander, George R. Miller: 7 Early Songs
Bernard Brown: Sissies: Something Perfect Between Ourselves
Meena Murugesan: Dravidian Futurities: Chapter II

Thursday, Nov. 7 at 8:30 p.m. (in-person)
Friday, Nov. 8 at 8:30 p.m. (in-person)
Saturday, Nov. 9 at 8:30 p.m. (in-person and online)

7 Early Songs is presented in German.

Please note: 7 Early Songs contains strobe lights.

Week Two: Nov. 14-16, 2023 (Program Two)
Ajani Brannum: CONGRESS
Sophia Cleary: Read The Room
Tijuana Dance Company: Salón México

Thursday, Nov. 14 at 8:30 p.m. (in-person)
Friday, Nov. 15 at 8:30 p.m. (in-person)
Saturday, Nov. 16 at 8:30 p.m. (in-person and online)

Salón México is presented in Spanish. 

Please note: CONGRESS contains mature content; Read the Room contains mature content and loud sounds; Salón México contains mature content, loud sounds, and strobe lights.

Week Three: Nov. 21-23, 2024 (Program Three)
Bret Easterling: On Second Thought
Mallory Fabian: I Hate Women
Kensaku Shinohara: tired music concert

Thursday, Nov. 21 at 8:30 p.m. (in-person)
Friday, Nov. 22 at 8:30 p.m. (in-person)
Saturday, Nov. 23 at 8:30 p.m. (in-person and online)

Please note: I Hate Women contains mature content; tired music concert contains nudity, mature content, and loud sounds.

Ticketing:

$25 for General admission ($20 virtual)
$20 for REDCAT members and students ($16 virtual)
$13 for CalArts students, faculty and staff ($10 virtual)
$50 Festival pass (in-person or virtual) 

Tickets can be purchased at redcat.org/now24

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