Full Program Announced for 5th Annual LAX Festival

Los Angeles Performance Practice (LAPP) announces the full program for the Los Angeles Exchange [LAX] Festival, 5th Ed. Presented October 5-15, 2017 at multiple locations across downtown Los Angeles, the LAX Festival puts Los Angeles-based artists front-and-center, presented in dialogue with projects by guest artists from a select city of exchange-this year with artists and organizations based in Mexcio City. Launched in 2013 and now in its fifth edition, the LAX Festival gathers adventurous audiences for ten days of inspiring performances, including new dance, experimental opera, interactive theater, literary performance and much more.

Festival passes start at $60 and offer the best deal for multiple events. Single tickets range from $12-$45, plus the Festival offers free chats and late night happenings. Festival tickets and passes are on sale now at www.performancepractice.la/festival.

LAX is a rich immersion into a new generation of contemporary performance creators that features world and local premieres, alongside previews of new works in development. With 12 featured projects and more than 40 performances, the Festival engages Los Angeles audiences in an exploration of a diverse range of performance practices in the city, and beyond.

The full experience is fueled by conversations, special events, parties and more that activate five venues, in honor of our 5th anniversary: The Theatre at Ace Hotel, Los Angeles Theatre Center, Bootleg Theater, Automata and the Bob Baker Marionette Theater.

Beginning this year, LAPP focuses each Festival on an exchange platform with a selected city. In 2017, the platform highlights current artistic practice in Mexico City with three projects developed with artists based there, and programs that connect audiences, curators and organizations through performances, dialogues and artist-to-artist interactions that encourage reciprocal inquiry. The exchange platform sparked the re-naming of the festival from Live Arts Exchange to the Los Angeles Exchange, placing exchange at its core, while maintaining our signature LAX Festival shorthand.

The Los Angeles Exchange [LAX] Festival, 5th Ed. made possible with support from Automata Arts, Bootleg Theater, City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Creative Capital, Chocolate Factory, Los Angeles Theatre Center, Skirball Cultural Center, The Theatre at Ace Hotel, and the New England Foundation for the Arts' National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, along with generous individual donors.

Full project descriptions and artist information follows these event details.

DATES
:: Los Angeles Exchange [LAX] Festival, 5th Ed.
:: October 5-15, 2017

VENUES
:: AUTOMATA // 504 Chung King Court, Los Angeles, CA 90017
:: BOB BAKER MARIONETTE THEATER // 1345 W 1st Street, Los Angeles, CA 90026
:: BOOTLEG THEATER // 2220 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90057
:: LOS ANGELES THEATRE CENTER // 514 S Spring Street, Los Angeles, CA 90013
:: THE THEATRE AT ACE HOTEL // 933 S Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90015

EVENT LINKS AND RESOURCES

• LAX Festival Schedule By Day

CONTACT
For inquires about press access to performances, to schedule artist and curator interviews, or other questions, contact George Lugg at 213-446-9556 or george@losangelesperformancepractice.org.

LAX FESTIVAL 2017 // ARTIST & PROJECTS

Milka Djordjevich // ANTHEM
Oct 11-13 at Bob Baker Marionette Theater

Questioning contemporary dance's predisposition towards neutrality, authenticity and the de-sexualization of the female body, ANTHEM embraces theatricality, virtuosity and sass. The work weaves together existing and imagined vernacular dance styles to explore labor, play, and feminine-posturing.

FULL DETAILS

Jessica Emmanuel // WITNESSING HER + DECOLONIZE THAT MIND (work in progress)
Oct 7 at Bootleg Theater

In two sections her current untitled work-in-progress, Jessica Emmanuel confronts the way the viral circulation of violences can both illuminate and belie the profound personal impact of each confrontation, each bullet and each chalk outline.

FULL DETAILS

d. Sabela grimes // ELECTROGYNOUS
Oct 13-15 at Bootleg Theater

Through a synthesis of ancient AfroFuturistic soundscapes, video projection and kinetic poetics, ELECTROGYNOUS circulates speculative realities that counter historically imposed notions of femininity and masculinity, while placing liberated Black bodies at the center of the works "now."

FULL DETAILS

Sylvan Oswald + Jessica Fleischmann // HIGH WINDS
Oct 9 at Bob Baker Marionette Theater

Writer Sylvan Oswald makes his Los Angeles performance debut with an live adaptation of his new book, High Winds-a collaboration with graphic designer Jessica Fleischmann-about a trans man whose insomnia sparks a fantastical search for his estranged half-brother through hallucinatory desert landscapes.

FULL DETAILS

Poor Dog Group // GROUP THERAPY (preview)
Oct 14 at Bootleg Theater

L.A.'s celebrated theater ensemble previews a new work of documentary theater that delves into 16 hours of the Group's actual transcribed therapy with a licensed professional in an uncensored-sometimes funny, sometimes poignant-work of live art.

FULL DETAILS

Tamara Cubas + Teatro Línea de Sombra // LA BRISA
Oct 12-15 at Los Angeles Theatre Center

In a work that resists the conventions of both dance and theater, director Tamara Cubas and her cast of four women excavate the elusive history of La Brisa, an infamous bar in Ciudad Juárez in the 1990s, that served as a haven of cultural resistance and fierce activism.

FULL DETAILS

Zoe Aja Moore + Liz Toonkel with Amanda Jane Shank // LULU
Oct 3-9 at Automata

This multi-platform performance adapts Frank Wedekind play Lulu into a series of episodes that explore sexuality, intimacy and domestic locations. Different each time, Lulu offers a voyeuristic access to the bedrooms of women across Los Angeles, staged as a photo shoot that further explores the male gaze.

FULL DETAILS

Graham Reynolds + Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol // PANCHO VILLA FROM A SAFE DISTANCE
Oct 10 at The Theatre at Ace Hotel

Austin-based composer Graham Reynolds leads a rousing experimental chamber opera that pays tribute to a revolutionary figure, and sonically traverses both Mexican and American perspectives to create a borderless dialogue about the shared histories of Mexico and the United States.

Co-presented by the Skirball Cultural Center.

FULL DETAILS

Pentimento / Isabel Toledo // PLAY
Oct 12-15 at Automata

Created by Mexico City based ensemble Pentimento, PLAY is an interactive audio-guided performance that invites 10 audience members into a playfully accelerated process of actor training. In just eight brief lessons PLAY asks: Can an untrained viewer be transformed into a prepared actor in a mere 45 minutes?

FULL DETAILS

szalt dance co. // MARSHMALLOW SEA
Oct 6-8 at Bootleg Theater

MARSHMALLOW SEA, the latest evening-length work from choreographer Stephanie Zaletel and her company of six dancers, reflects on water and its symbols to explore fluidity and force, sustenance and submission-offering an overwhelming surge of memories, disrupted.

FULL DETAILS

No)one. Art House + Amie Cota // Any Place But Here
Oct 8 at Bootleg Theater

Themes of home and identity are reflected throughout this tale of the Great Migration, a 60-year span in which 6 million African-Americans left the South. Amie Cota and Christopher Bordenave use original song and movement to chart one man's journey, in which hope served as a guiding force to navigate a divided country.

Curated by Jessica Emmanuel as part of her Human Stages project

FULL DETAILS

Gina Young + Guests // SORORITY
Oct 11 at Bootleg Theater

Curated by host Gina Young, SORORITY is a wild, high-minded performance party centered on the work of women, trans and queer performers. SORORITY features experimental works-in-progress, script-in-hand readings, theatrical situations and vulnerable solo work.

FULL DETAILS

ABOUT LOS ANGELES PERFORMANCE PRACTICE

Los Angeles Performance Practice is a non-profit organization devoted to the production and presentation of contemporary performance by artists whose work advances and challenges multi-disciplinary artistic practices.

Our mission is to support a unique and diverse constellation of artists and audiences through the active creation and presentation of groundbreaking experiences that use innovative approaches to collaboration, technology and social engagement. Anchored in Los Angeles, our artists and projects have national and global reach.

Across a range of platforms and partnerships, we build an active network of contemporary practitioners-curators and producers, artists and designers, audiences and patrons-all leveraged in service to the ideas and issues of our time.

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