REDCAT Continues The 19th Annual NOW Festival, August 25-27

Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT), CalArts' downtown center for contemporary arts, presents 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: Aug. 18-20, Aug. 25-27, and Sept. 1-3, 2022. (Watch a trailer here.)

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 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 Two, held Aug. 25-27, 2022, comprises a program of works by artists Jay Carlon with Micaela Tobin, Joe Diebes, and Stephanie Zaletel. Details:

Jay Carlon with Micaela Tobin: Novena
Derived from Bisaya ritwals for grieving and healing, Novena is a meditative performance that wrestles to confront and transmute suffering into vulnerability, joy, and acceptance. Choreographer/dancer Jay Carlon and composer/sound artist Micaela Tobin unearth and reimagine the Filipinx experience toward queer futurity and collaborate to strengthen, connect, and reinvoke the delicate and intimate web of Filipinx precolonial expressions.

Joe Diebes: ENG
Mixing sound, visual media, and voice in multifarious ways, ENG is an experimental opera structured around a newscast format. ENG confronts the American media's 'voice of authority' in relation to overseas cultures, particularly in the Middle East. The familiar rhythms and rhetoric of newscaster-speak will be musicalized and mangled, redirected and held accountable for the ideological veil it often is. Featuring performers Christina Campanella and John Rose, the sung-spoken words are accompanied by projections and a hypnotic electronic score composed by Joe Diebes.

Stephanie Zaletel | szalt: 5 basic movements (vagus excerpt)
Choreographer and dance artist Stephanie Zaletel's 5 basic movements (vagus excerpt) engages with the foundational sensorimotor actions - reach, grab, push, pull, yield - as the basis for performers to investigate intuitive choreography, body language, and the relational dynamics of our nervous systems. Set to lectures and interviews of Jungian Psychoanalyst and dream-tender Marion Woodman, as well as live singing, sounding, bells, and harp, 5 basic movements (vagus excerpt) is a dance forward, poetic, non-linear, and symbolic work imagining feminine consciousness and matriarchal logic as an option for how our bodies can move forward and through uncertainty.

REDCAT's 18th Annual New Original Works (NOW) Festival

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