REDCAT Announces Winter/Spring 2022 Season

Ringing in a hopeful 2022, Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT), CalArts' downtown center for contemporary arts, will kick off a full year of live performance and art. Through performances, screenings, and exhibitions, REDCAT will once again welcome in-person audiences-as well as online audiences around the world-from January through June 2022.

"The performances, exhibitions, screenings, and conversations in REDCAT's new season continue to be guided by our commitment to supporting artists, and to sharing transformative work with our varied audiences," said João Ribas, REDCAT's Steven D. Lavine Executive Director and Vice President for Cultural Partnerships. "REDCAT has always engaged innovative voices from L.A. and beyond with a mission to nurture and further the art of our present. As we've begun to gather and share art and performance together again, artists are once again leading us to novel directions and insights into what performance, art, storytelling, and innovation can be."

"Though vital to our field, experimentation is not always an equitably distributed resource. Creating opportunities for artists to experiment is crucial to our future," said Edgar Miramontes, Deputy Executive Director and Curator. "As the artists of our new season lead us in exciting directions, REDCAT remains as resolute as ever in the commitment to the diversity, equity, access, and inclusion that experimentation and innovation requires."

The new season sees the triumphant return of two live performances originally scheduled to appear at REDCAT in 2020: New York-based performance ensemble Elevator Repair Service with their powerful new adaptation, Baldwin & Buckley at Cambridge, March 3-5; and writer/composer Dahlak Brathwaite's Try/Step/Trip, a spoken word, multi-character musical performed through the language of step dance, March 24-26.

Kicking off a season of remarkable theater, critically-acclaimed theater artist and Guggenheim Fellow Kaneza Schaal exorcises the ghost of King Leopold II through a tour-de-force performance Jan. 20-22. Actress and artist Sola Bamis presents The Tutorial, an original work deconstructing Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye, April 21-23. Mark-n-Sparks present The Most Beautiful Home...Maybe on May 19-21, part of a multi-year, multi-platform experiment to influence housing policy through art and dialogue. And on June 9, REDCAT presents The Baptism, a three-part poem and tribute to the legacies of civil rights leaders John Lewis and C.T. Vivian, written and performed by poet and artist Carl Hancock Rux and featuring two short films directed by seminal artist Carrie Mae Weems.

On Feb. 4-6, Doris Duke Award-winning dancer, choreographer, and director Faye Driscoll brings Thank You For Coming: Space-a conjuring of the transformative powers of presence, and of absence-to the REDCAT stage. And March 27 through May 14, REDCAT's annual Studio series returns, after a two year absence, to present a diverse program of multidisciplinary works-in-progress from Los Angeles artists.

The season's music programming features dynamic performances from prolific jazz artist Georgia Anne Muldrow on Jan. 28; a double-bill exploring future and ancient indigenous ideas with Elisa Harkins and interstellar synths, hymnal vocals, and tropical beats by Anna Luisa Petrisko on Feb. 18; German-born sound artist Florian Hecker on March 12; Futures of Music explores various possible futures in performing and experiencing music on Jan. 15; Los Angeles composer and musician Derrick Skye on April 2; a new one-man opera by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Du Yun, presented with LA Opera, on April 13-17; Pan Afrikan People's Arkestra, celebrating 60 years of revolutionary music, on June 4; and GRAMMY Award-winning PARTCH Ensemble with two world premieres June 17-18.

Incredible conversations take the REDCAT stage with Care and Repair, a one-day festival-like gathering from CalArts' MA Aesthetics and Politics program on Jan. 14; New York Times bestseller and MacArthur "genius" writer Maggie Nelson on Jan. 17; and Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and author Hilton Als on Feb. 25. And in partnership with LA Phil, on March 31, REDCAT presents a multimedia artist talk with Christine Sun Kim, exploring concepts of sound from her perspective as part of the Deaf community; and on May 1, a live taping of the queer/woman-of-color-driven Generation X podcast, Waiting to X-hale, with hosts Karen Tongson and Wynter Mitchell-Rohrbaugh.

Organized by CalArts faculty Bérénice Reynaud and Eduardo Thomas, the season features an unparalleled slate of screenings of film and video work by Candidates For Humanity, Andrés Di Tella, Dana Berman Duff, Mara Fortes, Kahlil Joseph, Adam Khalil, Petna Ndaliko Katondolo, Los Otros, and a program of films by Indian filmmakers Priya Sen, Sarah Naqvi, and Suneil Sanzgiri. On Jan. 5, REDCAT will also present the premiere of artist Sharon Lockhart's new film EVENTIDE in an evening curated by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer and featuring a musical special guest.

Additionally, the season sees the live return of CalArts' beloved student showcases with CalArts Film/Video Showcase April 27-30; and CalArts Spring Dance May 6-7.

The season also continues CPT Reversal, a new installation from Black Quantum Futurism, the interdisciplinary creative practice between artists Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips. "CPT" is commonly understood as the acronym for "Colored People's Time," oftentimes a negative stereotype, but also a cultural understanding that events and experiences do not adhere to strict schedules and linear time. In physics, the same acronym stands for "charge, parity, and time reversal," a fundamental symmetry of laws that holds for all physical phenomena. Intrigued by this double meaning of "CPT," Black Quantum Futurism seeks to examine time and temporality at various scales and dimensions--personal, interpersonal, communal, global, and cosmic time--and their connections and reverberations through new and rearranged videos, collages, maps, sounds, and other visual works.

Opening on May 28, American Artist: Shaper of God, is an exhibition consisting of a new video and sculpture conceived for REDCAT, taking inspiration not only from Octavia E. Butler's novels, but from her own life. As a descendant of African-Americans that migrated to the enclave of Pasadena, and growing up in the 1950s, when Pasadena's own rocket science legacy was beginning, along with Los Angeles becoming the capital of science-fiction, Butler's legacy is one of unacknowledged overlaps and connections. This exhibition has been developed in conversation with classmates and scholars of Butler and Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in an attempt to give breadth to Butler's legacy. Shaper of God observes how Butler's writing tapped into the vital heartbeat of American history.

And that's just the beginning for this extraordinary season at REDCAT. For dates, details, or ticketing information, see below or visit redcat.org.


REDCAT WINTER/SPRING EVENT LISTINGS:

November 6, 2021-March 5, 2022

Black Quantum Futurism
CPT Reversal
Black Quantum Futurism is an interdisciplinary creative practice between Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips, weaving quantum physics with Afrodiasporic concepts of time, ritual, text, and sound. Their work creates counter-chronologies and grandmother paradoxes and envisions Black quantum womanist futures that rupture exclusionary versions of history and future. This practice spans writing, music, film, visual art, and creative research with a focus on recovering, collecting, and preserving communal memories, histories, and stories. Through its work and alongside collaborators, Black Quantum Futurism aims to develop and enact a new spatiotemporal consciousness.

CPT Reversal examines time and temporality at various scales and dimensions-personal, interpersonal, communal, global, and cosmic-and their connections and reverberations. The title of the exhibition comes from the acronym commonly understood as "Colored People's Time," oftentimes a stereotype of Black people as chronically late, but also a cultural understanding that events and experiences do not adhere to strict schedules and linear time. In physics, the same three letters stand for "charge, parity, and time reversal," a fundamental symmetry of laws that holds for all physical phenomena. Throughout the exhibition, Black Quantum Futurism aims to make visible the temporal meridians that connect, distort, and mirror each other, depending on one's arrival or location on the timeline.

January 5, 2022

Sharon Lockhart
EVENTIDE
In what is both a culmination and a departure, Sharon Lockhart's latest film, EVENTIDE (2022), is a meditative, non-narrative long-shot that uses choreography to explore landscape, communal relations, solitary searching, psychic endurance, and the play of light moving through darkness. Locating drama in the real-time shift of evening fading into night, this is perhaps Lockhart's most optical and painterly moving image to date, composing figures, scenography, and soundscape into allegory and abstraction. The artist's investment in forms of dance in previous works is felt here too as the initial appearance of an individual slowly builds into a culture and a gathering. An astounding number of stars emerge bright in the dusking sky, blazing as a distant corollary to the growing constellation of roving bodies scanning the rock-strewn beach by cell phone light for what we do not know. The streaking of shooting stars and gliding of satellites throws the otherwise measured pace into relief. Shot on the Swedish coast with a close-knit group of friends Lockhart has been involved with for years, EVENTIDE is concerned with grieving and the future.

January 14, 2022

Care and Repair
Join the MA Aesthetics and Politics program (School of Critical Studies, California Institute of the Arts) for a one-day line-up of reflections and performances on the themes of care and repair. Creative thinkers and critical artists will join forces in a focused but festival-like gathering to experiment with different forms of presentation, attention, and debate. Under pandemic conditions, and with topics ranging from land acknowledgment to architecture and the ethics of care, neoliberalism and the imperative to "take care of yourself", climate-change and the post-critical turn to repair, this event will feature contributions by among others Églantine Colon, Anders Dunker, Stephanie Mei Huang, Jia Yi Gu, Nick Nauman, Manuel Shvartzberg Carrío, Theresa Ambo, Kelly Stewart, Lucinda Trask, Damon Young, Dimitri Chamblas, Amy Howden Chapman/ Mireya Lucio, and Maggie Nelson. Audience participation expected.

January 15, 2022

Futures of Music
Futures of Music, presented by the Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts, explores various possible futures in performing and experiencing music. To reflect the most recent changes and developments in musical expression, performance formats, practices, distribution, audiences, and reception, Futures of Music is imagined as a starting point for re-evaluating approaches to music education and cutting-edge experimentation in a wide range of genres and cultures. The program for the festival transforms REDCAT into a multi-dimensional space beyond the hierarchical structure of stage and audience, authorship and perception, presence and virtual performance, and includes performances, conversations, and an international online conference.

January 17, 2022
Maggie Nelson
CalArts' MA Aesthetics and Politics Theorist in Residence
Maggie Nelson is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, including the New York Times bestseller and National Book Critics Circle Award winner The Argonauts (2015), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011; a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Bluets (2009; named by Bookforum as one of the top 10 best books of the past 20 years), The Red Parts (2007; reissued 2016), and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (2007). Her most recent book, a work of cultural criticism titled On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, was published in September 2021. Her poetry titles include Something Bright, Then Holes (2007) and Jane: A Murder (2005; finalist for the PEN/ Martha Albrand Art of the Memoir). She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, an NEA in Poetry, an Innovative Literature Fellowship from Creative Capital, and an Arts Writers Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation. In 2016 she was awarded a MacArthur "genius" Fellowship. She currently teaches at USC and lives in Los Angeles.

January 20-22, 2022

Kaneza Schaal
KLII
KLII exorcises the ghost of Belgium's King Leopold II through a mytho-biographical performance by theater-maker Kaneza Schaal. Designed and codirected by Christopher Myers, KLII draws on Mark Twain's King Leopold's Soliloquy (1905), a fictional monologue written after Twain's visit to the Congo Free State, and Patrice Lumumba's 1960 independence speech in the Congo. Increasingly our demons are invisible-long-hidden racism and misogyny, misinformation, even the virus. How do we handle these threats, which are as central to our everyday life as they are hidden? Schaal and Myers propose an exorcism in theater, starring one of the villains of the 19th century whose actions resonate through the present day.

January 28, 2022
Georgia Anne Muldrow
Georgia Anne Muldrow not only creates jazz music - she's lived it since birth. Her father, Ronald Muldrow, played alongside Eddie Harris while her mother, Rickie Byars, performed as lead singer of Roland Hanna's New York Jazz Quartet and Pharoah Sanders Ensemble. Following in her parents' footsteps, she has collaborated with famed musicians including Robert Glasper, Adrian Younge, Ambrose Akinmursire, Justin Brown's Nyeusi, and Keyon Harrold. Jyoti is a name bestowed upon her by the late great Alice Coltrane.

The newest Jyoti music arrives after many monumental years for Muldrow. Her most recent solo album Overload - released on Flying Lotus' label Brainfeeder - earned her a 2020 Grammy nomination and landed on year-end lists for Pitchfork, Bandcamp, and The A.V. Club. 2019 saw Georgia perform at numerous Jazz Festivals around the globe: Nublu Jazz Festival (Brazil), Portland Jazz Festival (Portland, US), Bric Festival (Brooklyn, US), Blue Note Tokyo (Japan), New York Winter Jazz Festival and the DC Jazz Festival to name a few.

January 31, 2022

Films by Petna Ndaliko Katondolo
Petna Ndaliko Katondolo is an award-winning filmmaker, educator, and farmer from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His multigenre works are acclaimed for their decolonial Ejo Lobi (Africanfuturistic) style, which engages historical content to address contemporary sociopolitical and cultural issues. The evening comprises the first two parts of the Triptych, a project of recoding aesthetics - a representational practice rooted in Katondolo's indigenous understanding of time and space. Matata (2019) draws up an inventory of Africa and the legacy of its representations; Kapita (2021) is inspired by the official job title given to Congolese charged with enforcing their white master's bidding over their fellow Congolese on sites of capitalist extraction and production. Also shown: Jazz Mama (2010) and Lamokowang (2004).

February 4-6, 2022

Faye Driscoll
Thank You For Coming: Space
Faye Driscoll's Thank You For Coming: Space is a shared rite of passage- a conjuring of the transformative powers of presence, and of absence. Space unfolds within an intimate installation, wired for sound and upheld by pulleys, ropes, and the weight of others, where Driscoll appears alone with the audience. Through an alchemy of body, object, voice, and live sound, she builds a moving requiem for the human body and conjures a world that is, like ourselves, alive and forever changeable. At the center of the work is the human body-built for action, self contained, and driven by its longing for the felt world. Space speaks in bewilderment. It conjures the inevitable forces of loss and grief, and asks: How do I reproduce you, talk about you, now that you are gone?

February 14, 2022

Candidates For Humanity
A miscellany of shorts ranging from obscure internet musings to institutional cartoons to experimental documentary to musical numbers, this program offers a meditation on the probationary and pending, acting and reflecting on the comedy of the "appeal"-a qualification to prove a bona fide existence to an authority. The "document" (the paper, the written word, evidence) has inextricable links to the formation of the nation state, the formation of visibility within bureaucratic law and the idea of the "right to exist." An appeal for what? To humanity, to comedy, to basic existence within our own bodies, within country lines. An appeal to who? To our real community: to those who see us and know us, to those that don't, to those who put us in danger.

February 18, 2022

Elisa Harkins: Wampum / a??a??a?? a?-a??a??a?-
Anna Luisa Petrisko: Green and all the Colors
Elisa Harkins and Anna Luisa Petrisko share the REDCAT stage in this double-bill evening exploring future and ancient indigenous ideas. In Wampum / a??a??a?? a?-a??a??a?-, Elisa Harkins sings in a combination of Cherokee, English, and Muscogee (Creek) to electronic dance music, some of which is inspired by sheet music of Indigenous music notated by Daniel Chazanoff during the 20th century. As an act of Indigenous Futurism, it combines disco and Indigenous language in an effort to alter the fate of these endangered languages through active use. The intention of the Wampum / a??a??a?? a?-a??a??a?- performance is to create a metaphorical peacekeeping agreement that is between the people watching the piece, regardless of tribe or race.

Using vintage analog gear and video synthesis to create hypersaturated worlds, Anna Luisa Petrisko and special guests will transform the REDCAT stage into a sonic and visually immersive set, performing songs from her 2018 "tropical new age pop" album, Green, as well as new material and collaborations. Informed by grief, healing, and spirituality, Anna Luisa bends the past's visualization of the future into an ancient-feeling present moment. Expect interstellar synths, hymnal vocals, and tropical beats, woven together with vibrant chromatic visions.

February 22, 2022

Kahlil Joseph
Another BLKNWS
2021 recipient of The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts in Film/Video, Kahlil Joseph's multi-faceted practice embraces cinema, visual art, sound, and media. His films and video installations are deployed in both mainstream environments and the art world, from the Venice Biennale to a Black-owned barbershop in Washington, D.C. Joseph currently serves as the artistic director of the Underground Museum, a pioneering independent art museum, exhibition space, and community hub in Los Angeles. Premiered at Sundance 2020, Joseph's ongoing conceptual news program, BLKNWS, is a multi-site video installation. The constantly-changing two-channel project, with its uninterrupted flow of found footage, originally-produced segments, and current and historical news clips expanding on the current power of broadcast journalism, ultimately does away with hierarchy of information. REDCAT presents it as a one-hour broadcast.

February 25, 2022

Hilton Als
CalArts' 2022 Katie Jacobson Writer-in-Residence
Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and author of two acclaimed collections of essays, Hilton Als' writing are provocative contributions to the discourse on the arts, race, class, sexuality, and identity in America. His conversations with and about visual artists, his work as a playwright, and cultural critic invigorate our understanding of desire, vulnerability and artistic practice by insisting that we, in Roxane Gay's words, "question almost everything." With his incisive, lyrical perspectives in his weekly theater reviews for The New Yorker, and in White Girls, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2014 and winner of the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Non-fiction, Als simultaneously shows us how to place director, author and performers in the ongoing continuum of dramatic art, and how to critically view the individual in the ongoing dramatic continuum of life. As the CalArts MFA in Creative Writing Program's 2022 Katie Jacobson Writer in Residence, he will read from a curated set of new and previous works, infused with the arresting insights and rigorous style he is known for.

February 26, 2022

2022 Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation
The Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation returns to REDCAT for a day of screenings. Eyeworks, started in 2010 by Alexander Stewart and Lilli Carré, is a curatorial project that is dedicated to exhibiting distinctive, personal, visionary experimental films that are animated. The 2022 Eyeworks Festival features two programs of animated works and a retrospective screening of films from Canadian artist Barry Doupé. The two curated lineups of short films include classic and contemporary pieces that represent innovative work in a range of animation techniques: hand-drawn, CG, stop-motion, and digital methods.

Over the past 15 years, Doupé has used computer animation to explore poetic, brutal, and absurdist spectacles, in a patient and uncompromising style that is immediately recognizable. Working with images and language derived from the subconscious, Doupé's work is simultaneously unsettling and moving. His 2019 film Distracted Blueberry is a major work in the field of experimental animation; 4.5 hour film about an avant-garde performance art band. Doupé's work has been celebrated by major institutions around the world, including the Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou, Whitechapel Gallery, Anthology Film Archives, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

March 3-5, 2022

Elevator Repair Service
Baldwin & Buckley at Cambridge
In 1965, James Baldwin and William F. Buckley, Jr. were invited to The Cambridge University Union to debate the resolution "The American Dream is at the Expense of The American Negro." The result was a provocative and profoundly insightful confrontation between Baldwin, one of the most powerful figures of the civil rights movement, and Buckley, often considered the father of 20th Century patrician conservatism. New York-based performance ensemble Elevator Repair Service, a company with a rich history of adapting unconventional texts, stages the debate verbatim. In an intimate and dramatic counterpoint, the final scene of the performance features a brief, imagined exchange between Baldwin and his close friend and confidante Lorraine Hansberry, who died only weeks before the debate. Baldwin and Hansberry are portrayed by veteran ERS actors Greig Sargeant and April Matthis, who-speaking both as their characters and themselves-contemplate what it means to be a Black artist working within and confronting historically white frameworks. With both 1965 and 2021 in mind, Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge-through a starkly simple design and an acting style that favors intimacy over impersonation-presents the debate as real, immediate, and of this moment.

March 12, 2022

Florian Hecker
Extending earlier projects that staged the impressionistic or even hallucinatory relationship between sonic objects, the auditory encounter, and our self-perception within space, Resynthesizers advances a more recent line of inquiry engaged with bleeding-edge approaches to computational auditory analysis and the synthesis of sensory materials. Hecker's performance dramatizes sonic material produced using a novel algorithm for texture synthesis, developed by Axel Roebel and members of the Analysis/Synthesis team at IRCAM, Paris. The scientific analysis of sound and the quantification of auditory sensation dates back to the beginnings of psychophysics in the late nineteenth century and has developed continually ever since. Hecker's recent works respond to this history while addressing questions concerning machine listening, the semantic reconstruction of perceptual objects, and the unrepresentable. Florian Hecker's performance will feature thematic aspects of Resynthesizers, his current exhibition presented by Equitable Vitrines at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture's Fitzpatrick-Leland House.

March 24-26, 2022

Dahlak Brathwaite
Try/Step/Trip
Try/Step/Trip is a spoken word, multi-character musical performed in the body through the language of step dance. The story follows the journey of an anonymous narrator as he re-imagines his experience in a court-ordered drug rehabilitation program. Inspired by Brathwaite's own history, Try/Step/Trip layers characters, poetic verse, and dialogue over music to create a theatrical piece that blurs the lines between hip-hop and dramatic performance. Try/Step/Trip emerges from the belief that the subjugation of Black people is an American ritual; that the criminal justice system now functions as a normalized rite of passage for too many young Black males. With Writer/Composer Dahlak Brathwaite and Director Roberta Uno, Choreography by Toran X. Moore and Orchestration and Additional Composition by Teak Underdue.

March 27-May 14, 2022

Studio 2022
REDCAT's Studio series is an annual program supporting multidisciplinary work-in-progress. Responsive to changing needs and concerns, Studio adopts various formats and locations, from performances and workshops, the series supports the development of new work and novel reflection from within the communities of LA-based artists. Studio 2022 occupies the gallery at REDCAT as an informal forum for performance, gathering, storytelling, through a series of exploratory works across various disciplines and media.

March 28, 2022

Andrés Di Tella
Ficción Privada
REDCAT proudly presents the Los Angeles premiere of Ficción Privada, the latest work of Andrés Di Tella, one of the most prominent documentary filmmakers from Latin America. Over several days and nights, a young actor and a young actress read through the love letters of the filmmaker's parents-Torcuato, from Argentina, and Kamala born in India. The letters, written over decades, between the 50s and the 70s, record their travels and speak of love and idealism, but also pain and broken dreams. Di Tella's family affair weaves together one of his most intimate and personal stories, on the one hand an exploration of his parents' epistolary relationship, while simultaneously excavating his own role as a film director.

March 31, 2022

Christine Sun Kim
Presented with the LA Phil
California-born, Berlin-based artist Christine Sun Kim explores concepts of sound, its visual representations, and how it is valued by society, from her perspective as part of the Deaf community. She uses performance, video, drawing, writing, and sound installation to uncover the depth and complexity of communication, including the politics of voice, listening, and language. Musical notation, written language, American Sign Language (ASL), and the use of the body are all recurring elements in her work. In this multimedia artist talk, Kim shares the thinking behind her practice and invites the audience to consider the concept of sound as it is felt, seen, and experienced.

April 2, 2022

Derrick Skye
Where can we go, from here?
Derrick Skye is a composer and musician based in the Los Angeles area who often integrates music practices from different cultural traditions around the world into his work with classical music communities. The Los Angeles Times has described his music as "something to savor" and "enormous fun to listen to." During his studies at the University of California, Los Angeles and the California Institute of the Arts, music across many cultures became an integral part of his musical vocabulary. Skye passionately believes in music as a doorway into understanding other cultures and different ways of living. Through learning the music of other cultures, the opportunity for dialogue rather than conflict between strangers is opened, and our society can become one with less conflict due to cultural misunderstanding. He is deeply invested in fostering creative and effective collaboration between artists of different disciplines and traditions.

April 4, 2022

Desire as Resistance
Films by Priya Sen, Sarah Naqvi, and Suneil Sanzgiri
At a time when love is frequently summoned to the courtroom in India, the films in this program present unsanctioned desires as a form of active resistance. By reclaiming control over the narrative of their own lives, the different subjects onscreen express their refusal to accept the illusion of a singular identity, be that national, religious or personal.

Priya Sen's Yeh Freedom Life (2019) pictures an intimate portrait of love and struggle as queer couples navigate their vulnerability and precariousness of love outside of societal constraints. Sarah Naqvi's How Does One Say Queen in Islam (2020) invokes ghosts of heroic women from traditional storytelling to conjure a new and personalised version of Islamic history. In Letter from Your Far-Off Country (2020) Suneil Sanzgiri follows the entangled traces of self and community in the history of a distant homeland.

April 13-14 and April 16-17, 2022

Du Yun
In Our Daughter's Eyes
Presented with LA Opera
LA Opera Off Grand presents a new one-man opera by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Du Yun, presented in collaboration with Beth Morrison Projects. Told through the perspective of a new father (baritone Nathan Gunn), In Our Daughter's Eyes shows the journey of the protagonist as he wrestles with truly becoming a man that his daughter would be proud of. He imparts passages from the journal he keeps-a gift for his unborn daughter- as the moments of this journey unfold before him. The story traces his wife's joyful and fraught pregnancy, the legacy of the family's past and the personal demons that he vows to vanquish before assuming the role of a father. Along the way, mounting complications take the story through unexpected and sobering turns that test our flawed hero as he discovers a strength of self and purpose that he never imagined possible.

April 21-23, 2022

Sola Bamis
The Tutorial
Part social media livestream event, film/video installation, solo performance, and theatre piece, The Tutorial is an irreverent and heartfelt original work that deconstructs and reimagines Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye. The work explores the idea of the self and the other while providing a digital litany for Black women's survival in the face of Neoliberalism, Big Tech, Hollywood colorism, xenophobia, and cultural genocide. Sola's multi-step skincare tutorial serves as an allegory to the processes of dehumanization that Black and Third World Women have faced, with the third and fourth steps exploring the effects of Jim Crow on our psyche and the implications of forced sterilization on our sexuality. Sola Bamis is a Los Angeles based actress in television, film, and theater, as well as a voiceover artist.

April 25, 2022

Adam Khalil
With a prankster's side-eye and biting critique, 2021 recipient of The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts in Film/Video Adam Khalil's work breaks and bends linear time, weaves narrative, documentary, and experimental forms together with humor and unapologetic political inquiry to address the ongoing trauma of colonization. His practice involves multiple collaborations. A member of the Ojibway Tribe, he is a core contributor to New Red Order, an interdisciplinary "public secret society" that co-produces video, performance, and installation works confronting obstacles to Indigenous growth. He is a co-founder of COUSIN, an Indigenous-led non-profit collective created to provide support for Indigenous artists who expand the moving image through experimentation. Khalil presents a personally curated collection of recent collaborative shorts made with Bayley Sweitzer, Oba, Zack Khalil, Kite, Maria Meinild, Jackson Polys, and more.

April 27-30, 2022

CalArts Film/Video Showcase
CalArts School of Film/Video presents a juried selection of special screenings that feature new films by students in its four programs-a culmination of hard work and dedication throughout the year.

May 1, 2022

Waiting to X-hale Podcast
Karen Tongson and Wynter Mitchell
Presented with the LA Phil
Waiting to X-hale is a queer / woman-of-color-driven podcast exploring the pop culture and transformative social issues that defined Generation X. Hosted by Karen Tongson and Wynter Mitchell-Rohrbaugh, experts in the fields of pop culture and digital media, Waiting to X-hale's discussions, debates, and instructive interludes reflect on Gen X culture and its enduring afterlives in ways that shed new light on both then and now. Presented in conjunction with the LA Phil's Gen X festival curated by Tongson and Mitchell, the podcast taping will bring a distinctly L.A. lens to the subject, amplifying the Gen X artists, creators, and communities whose points of view have been traditionally pushed to the peripheries in the story of Los Angeles.

May 6-7, 2022

CalArts Spring Dance
Repertory Returns! CalArts Dance presents adventurous repertory celebrating the new season and the return to in-person performing. Featuring work by Trisha Brown, Donald Byrd, Kyle Abraham, and Sidra Bell performed by CalArts Dance's spectacular students.

May 9, 2022

Mara Fortes
Inner Space: miniature epics
Featuring an array of techniques, from collage, animation, time-lapse, and meticulous sound design, attuned to the rustle of motile life forms, this selection of short works navigates the vast expanse of inner worlds untethered from a human scale. Embedded in each thrilling endoscopic exploration, lies the artists' distinct awareness of how scientific conventions, myth, film and genre mediate our "natural" habitats. From sentient architectures of mineral and plant forms, operatic dramas of bodily processes, and remote murmurs of interstellar traffic, to mental emanations that bloom into surreal creations. Transmuted by sensibilities ranging from the gothic to the comedic, this program will evoke fables of ecological distress, extra-terrestrial intelligence and parasitic attachment: this is sci-fi beyond the reach of the eye.

May 19-21, 2022

Mark-n-Sparks
The Most Beautiful Home...Maybe
There is a mounting need for solutions to our national housing crises. Can art help us meet these challenges? The Most Beautiful Home... Maybe offers a nerdy and raucous vision for guaranteed housing. Hosted by chanteuse Zébra (a zebra), this multimedia, immersive performance juxtaposes housing data, Lyndon B. Johnson, and torch songs while time traveling through stories of Americans facing home insecurity, past and present. This interactive experience takes audiences on a fantastic sensurround journey to envision a future where everyone has a home. Created by Mark-n-Sparks (ashley sparks and Mark Valdez) and produced by the Mixed Blood Theatre of Minneapolis, The Most Beautiful Home...Maybe grew from conversations with housing advocates, activists, developers, government workers, renters, and people facing home insecurity. This performance is part of a multi-year, multi-platform experiment by Mark-n-Sparks to influence housing policy through art and dialogue.

May 23, 2022

Los Otros
The Kalampag Tracking Agency
Overcoming institutional and personal lapses to give attention to little-seen works-some more recent, some surviving loss and decomposition-this program collects loose parts in motion, a series of bangs, or kalampag in Tagalog, assembled by individual strengths and how they might resonate off each other and a contemporary audience. Featuring some of the most striking films and videos from the Philippines and its diaspora, this is an initiative that continues to navigate the uncharted topographies of Filipino alternative and experimental moving image practice. Coming for the first time to the city of Los Angeles, The Kalampag Tracking Agency will feature works by Raya Martin, Roxlee, Miko Revereza, John Torres, Tito & Tita, and more.

May 28-August 20, 2022

American Artist
Shaper of God
In the religious text Earthseed, written by the protagonist of Octavia E. Butler's 1993 novel Parable of the Sower, there is a repeated epitaph that instructs readers to "Shape God." Lauren Oya Olamina, a young Black woman, the religion's creator, tells us that "God can't be resisted or stopped, but can be shaped and focused." American Artist: Shaper of God, an exhibition consisting of a new video and sculpture conceived for REDCAT, takes inspiration not only from Octavia E. Butler's novels, but from her own life. As a descendant of African-Americans that migrated to the enclave of Pasadena, and growing up in the 1950s, when Pasadena's own rocket science legacy was beginning, along with Los Angeles becoming the capital of science-fiction, Butler's legacy is one of unacknowledged overlaps and connections. This exhibition has been developed in conversation with classmates and scholars of Octavia E. Butler and Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in an attempt to give breadth to Butler's legacy. Shaper of God observes how Butler's writing tapped into the vital heartbeat of American history.

June 4, 2022

Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra
Celebrating 60 years of revolutionary music, REDCAT is pleased to present a performance by the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra playing new and memorable tunes. The Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra is a Black music ensemble from Los Angeles founded in 1961 by Horace Tapscott. The Arkestra started as a collective of jazz musicians as a response to the racial inequality in the U.S. Artists subjected to prejudice who saw opportunities denied to them found an outlet to express themselves via the Ark. The Ark is currently mixed with veteran members as well as young musicians, all led by Mekala Session with the help of Jamael Dean and veteran members.

June 6, 2022

Dana Berman Duff: Short Films
Dana Berman Duff has long been a vital force in Los Angeles' media arts. Astonishing in her versatility, Duff moves fluidly between Super-8mm and 16mm film, video, multi-channel installation, photography, drawing, and sculpture. Regardless of the medium, Duff's work is infused with her subtle wit, tactile delight, and deeply reflective conceptual structure. This program includes selections from the Catalogue Series, in which fantasy tableaux and objects from the pages of a designer furniture knock-off catalogue are reworked into contemplations on the control and selling of desire. Duff's art is in collections of The Museum of Modern Art and New Museum of Contemporary Art, and her films have shown in the Toronto, Rotterdam, Edinburgh, and other international film festivals.

June 9, 2022

Carl Hancock Rux and Carrie Mae Weems
The Baptism
Written and performed by Alpert Award-winning poet and artist Carl Hancock Rux, The Baptism is a three-part poem and tribute to the legacies of civil rights leaders John Lewis and C.T. Vivian. This live event will also include two iterations of a short film - The Baptism and The Baptism (rhetoric) - directed by seminal artist Carrie Mae Weems, with the latter featuring an original score by GRAMMY-nominated singer-songwriter Meshell Ndegeocello.

June 17-18, 2022

PARTCH Ensemble
The GRAMMY Award-winning PARTCH Ensemble returns to REDCAT with two world premieres. Having given the virtual premiere choreography of Harry Partch's "Castor & Pollux" at REDCAT in June 2021, the "wonderful rollicking" (New York Times) Sarah Swenson Dance returns for a live performance of the entire triptych of Plectra & Percussion Dances, the composer's 45-minute "Evening of Dance Theatre" that has never been choreographed in its entirety since being written 70 years ago. Then the ensemble partners with the "luminous yet corporeal" (Los Angeles Times) Del Sol Quartet in Taylor Brook's One Footed for string quartet & Partch instruments, paying homage to Harry Partch's "One-Footed Bride" chart that explores the expressive qualities of "emotion," "power," and "suspense" inherent in his exquisitely tuned musical universe.

In keeping with current Los Angeles County public health requirements and Music Center policy, and for the safety and comfort of our community, all patrons and guests must provide proof of full vaccination. All patrons and guests must also wear a mask while at REDCAT except when eating or drinking.

In-person events are subject to change as COVID-19 protocols evolve.