REDCAT Announces The 8th Annual New Original Works Festival

REDCAT kicks off its fall season of contemporary visual, performing and media art with its eighth annual New Original Works Festival. Throughout the month of September, REDCAT will serve as a vibrant performance laboratory where Los Angeles artists will gather to push the boundaries of creative expression in new dance, theater, music and multimedia performance works. This year's three-week festival will launch eight innovative new projects over three consecutive programs September 8-24, 2011.

"We are excited to see the truly interdisciplinary collaborations that fuel these projects: master musicians collaborating with a contemporary choreographer, object-theater artists joining forces with art-rock bands, a theatrical performance created in partnership with a filmmaker," remarks REDCAT's Associate Director George Lugg, who oversees the New Original Works Festival. He adds, "This range of investigation demonstrates the diversity of artistic approaches and aesthetic influences that inspire artists across the city."

Since REDCAT's inception, its New Original Works Festival has served as an integral part of REDCAT's mission to support the creation of new performance work by Los Angeles-based artists. The artists in this year's Festival are rooted in an impressively wide-range of traditions: alt-country, Persian and electro-acoustic music; dance from African, post-modern, social and theatrical forms; stop-motion animation and silent film; experimental, puppet and object theater. From the roots of these traditions, through collaboration and experimentation, they delve into new and vital directions in live performance.

Sharing the REDCAT stage for three daring and distinctive programs over three consecutive weeks, this year's festival features:

WEEK ONE
Thursday, Friday, Saturday, September 8, 9, 10

Marissa Chibas: Clara's Los Angeles

"Chibas touches the human need to know who we are and where we come from." -Los Angeles Times

Marissa Chibas kicks up the dust on Los Angeles history as Clara, a disoriented flapper who awakes after a wild night at the Ambassador Hotel, in 1926, to find she has danced her way into a new century. Performing live and on film, Chibas playfully integrates silent cinema shot by John Hawk with live music inspired by the Roaring '20s as Clara attempts to find her way in the modern city. Wandering to her old haunts-Olvera Street, The Vista Theatre-Clara reveals the rich historic influences to be found in a city often blind to its own past.

Cindy Derby: Edward's House of String

"Skillful performance ... with real emotional content." -The Edinburgh Guide

A modern fable from puppeteer Cindy Derby, Edward's House of String is a moving and mysterious performance in which stop-motion animation, live puppetry and hand-crafted scenic elements create potent images that delve into realms of psychological loss. While unraveling threads and rustling trees, Derby manipulates the lonesome Edward and the world that surrounds him to illuminate the unseen forces that shape his existence. In doing so, she speaks to the power that even the dimmest memories have to influence and transform the psyche.

Lucky Dragons: Actual Reality

"Lucky Dragons have managed to create a completely new strand of West Coast American psychedelia." -Frieze

Inquiring into the complexities of digital mediation, composer Luke Fischbeck of Lucky Dragons gathered thousands of Google Alerts for the seemingly redundant phrase "actual reality" as the basis for his latest multichannel composition. The score features an ensemble of acoustic musicians distributed throughout the theater who are met with spatialized amplified sound as Fischbeck generates a matrix of software-driven cancellations and reinforcements to engage the audience in a participatory act of listening and orientation.

WEEK TWO
Thursday, Friday, Saturday, September 15, 16, 17

Robert Cucuzza: Cattywampus

"A master of mayhem ... delirious theatrical anarchy." -The New York Times

In this backwoods reinvention of August Strindberg's classic Miss Julie, writer and director Robert Cucuzza hones an essential tale of class and power, and stages it in modern-day Appalachia. Cucuzza and his collaborators orchestrate a multidisciplinary approach highlighted by distinctly American forms-country-western music written and performed by Juli Crockett, line dancing choreographed by Jordana Che Toback-that binds Strindberg's characters, both the rich and the poor, by exposing their shared vulnerability in a time of economic collapse.

Rosanna Gamson/World Wide: Layla Means Night

"Rich and delicious ... deconstruction as Turkish Delight." -Village Voice

Serving up horrific melodrama as dance-theater divertissement, choreographer Rosanna Gamson and her company World Wide take on the tale of Scheherazade, the cunning bride from One Thousand and One Nights whose skills as a storyteller saved her from a murderous husband. Layla Means Night cleverly employs hyped-up spectacle, along with enticements, misdirections and artful games of smoke-and-mirrors, to craft an intricate exploration of violence, complicity and our insatiable desire to be entertained, set to a live score by master musicians Houman Pourmehdi and Pirayeh Pourafar.

WEEK THREE
Thursday, Friday, Saturday, September 22, 23, 24

Tandem & Timur and the Dime Museum: Zoophilic Follies

"A flamboyant performer ... Bekbosunov knows what his audience likes and he is a brilliant architect of tension." -LA Weekly

Two adventurous ensembles combine forces to concoct a new puppet opera that probes the mythic mind of Daedalus, the legendary inventor and craftsman who fashioned both the Labyrinth of the Minotaur and Icarus' faTed Wings. Timur Bekbosunov and his band the Dime Museum recount the tale in twisted, Kurt Weill-inspired songs written by Daniel Corral, while puppet theater company Tandem animates objects and shadows to illuminate the complexities of a mind capable of true innovation, yet unable to foresee the flaws in his grand plans.

Michel Kouakou/Daara Dance: Sack

"A luscious dancer ... playing with identity and displacement." -The New York Times

Gliding between movement derived from both traditional and contemporary African dance, Michel Kouakou performs a powerful solo that connects the everyday to realms of the unknown, the dark and the dead. Kouakou's sharp and precise dancing shifts from segments of high-speed choreography to taut moments of suspension, as a swaying burlap sack looms, serving as a metaphoric vessel for what weighs in the balance between the seen and the unseen.

Victoria Marks: Smallest Gesture/Grandest Frame

"Marks is one of L.A.'s best-kept secrets ... Intelligent, complex and witty work." -The Village Voice

In Smallest Gesture/Grandest Frame, Alpert Award-winning choreographer Victoria Marks sets the intimacy of the small gesture against a larger canvas of collective action to consider loneliness and loss, as well as life fully lived. Sometimes isolated, sometimes melded into formal lines, nine dancers swiftly move from one formation to another as they shed and reveal individual movements-a nuzzle at the neck, a collapsing body-to create archeological artifacts that layer the dance.

TICKETS & MORE INFORMATION

REDCAT's NEW ORIGINAL WORKS FESTIVAL 2011 runs September 8-24 2011 at REDCAT. Each program is performed on three consecutive evenings and performances take place Thursday through Saturday at 8:30 p.m. Tickets for individual performances are $18 with student discounts available. Festival passes are also available through the box office for $36. 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 www.redcat.org.

REDCAT is located at the corner of W. 2nd and Hope Streets, inside the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex in downtown Los Angeles (631 West 2nd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012).

The festival is funded in part with generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts.

ABOUT REDCAT

The Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) is an interdisciplinary contemporary arts center for innovative visual, performing and media arts located in downtown Los Angeles inside the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex. Through performances, exhibitions, screenings, and literary events, REDCAT introduces diverse audiences, students and artists to the most influential developments in the arts from around the world, and gives artists in this region the creative support they need to achieve national and international stature. REDCAT continues the tradition of the California Institute of the Arts, its parent organization, by encouraging experimentation, discovery and lively civic discourse. For more information about REDCAT and its programming, visit www.redcat.org.

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