REDCAT Closes Out the 19th Annual NOW Festival This Week with Sarahjeen François, Sarah Lyons, and More

Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT), CalArts' downtown center for contemporary arts, closes out the 19th annual New Original Works (NOW) Festival, a celebration of Los Angeles' vibrant community of artists creating new performance work, over three weekends this summer. The final week of performances takes place from September 1-3.

This year's festival showcases nine new works by Los Angeles artists who are redefining the boundaries of contemporary performance, inventing hybrid artistic disciplines, reimagining traditions, and confronting urgent issues - all of which can be enjoyed either in-person or online through REDCAT's website.

NOW Festival 2022 was organized by Edgar Miramontes, REDCAT's Deputy Executive Director & Curator, with artists Meena Murugesan, jumatatu m. poe, and Kendra Ware.

"REDCAT has worked to prioritize diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion in its program offerings, staff, and artists. This year's NOW Festival continues this practice by presenting a diverse range of artists, specifically focusing on BIPOC and queer artists," said Miramontes "NOW 2022 aims to highlight issues of identity and intersectionality, which supports REDCAT's mission to push the evolution of contemporary art and culture, develop new ideas, and create vital dialogue in our complex and changing world."

In the spirit of the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), REDCAT's parent institution, the NOW Festival serves as a catalyst for creativity and new ideas. Each year, NOW transforms REDCAT into a laboratory for premiering new contemporary dance, theater, music, and multimedia performances. All artistic teams are provided rehearsal space, technical support, and artist fees. Since the first edition in 2004, NOW Festival has presented the work of over 200 L.A.-based 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.

Week Three, held Sept. 1-3, 2022, comprises a program of works by artists Sarahjeen François, Sara Lyons, and The Rock Collection. Details:

Sarahjeen François: Sister, Braid My Hair

Accompanied by the bass, tone, and slap of the Djembe, Sarahjeen Francois' new theater work, Sister, Braid My Hair, pays homage to the rich cultural practices of African hair braiding through rhythmic poetry and flow. When the ancestors of today's Diaspora were kidnapped and sold into slavery, they did what they could to hold on to whatever generational traditions, information, lessons, and skills they could- among those traditions was hair braiding preserving the bond it creates. Sister, Braid My Hair participates in the tradition of this passing of knowledge by exploring just how cyclical time can be, examining the effects of the over-policing of Black and Brown spaces, and asking: What happens when unsuspecting Black lives are interrupted by systemic oppression?

Sara Lyons: This Emancipation Thing

Sara Lyons' This Emancipation Thing is a new interdisciplinary performance that embraces second wave feminist histories as embodied and non-linear. The theater becomes a multimedia consciousness-raising session as archival texts from 1968 and interview transcripts with L.A.-based feminists of all ages and genders create a textual landscape and collaborative installation that collapses time. What resonances and glitches emerge between 1968 and 2022, across generations? With reproductive rights slipping through our fingers, what wisdom must we learn from the activists who ushered in Roe v. Wade (1973)?

The Rock Collection: Fault | Lines

Combining dance, spoken word, sound, and light, Fault | Lines creates a landscape both obscured and defined by darkness. Throughout the new work, the members of The Rock Collection (Erik Speth, Sarri Sanchez, Arletta Anderson, Finn Murphy, Jamar Morris, and Nguyễn Nguyên) oscillate between manipulating warm halogen and cold LED work lights to constantly recontextualize their bodies and the space. Illuminations and shadows become extensions of individuals with their surroundings, their link to one another, as well as the deepest parts of themselves shielded from the appraisal of an outside world. Fault | Lines contemplates the mechanics of memory, origins, beginnings, and human connection-physical and otherwise.

Tickets can be purchased at: https://www.redcat.org/event/now-2022-week-three

REDCAT | The Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater

REDCAT, CalArts' downtown center for contemporary arts, is a multidisciplinary center for innovative visual, performing and media arts founded by CalArts in the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex in downtown Los Angeles. 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.

California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) has set the pace for educating professional artists since 1970. Offering rigorous undergraduate and graduate degree programs through six schools-art, critical studies, dance, film/video, music, and theater-CalArts has championed creative excellence, critical reflection, and the development of new forms and expressions. As successive generations of faculty and alumni have helped shape the landscape of contemporary arts, the institute first envisioned by Walt Disney encompasses a vibrant, eclectic community with global reach, inviting experimentation, independent inquiry, and active collaboration and exchange among artists, artistic disciplines and cultural traditions.

For current program and exhibition information, visit redcat.org.

Photo Credit: Amber Leacock