REDCAT Presents 17th Annual New Original Works Festival Over Three Weekends This Fall

For the first time ever, Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, CalArts' center for contemporary arts in downtown Los Angeles, will present its annual -- and now virtual -- New Original Works (NOW) Festival over three weekends this fall: Oct. 8-10, Nov. 5-7, Dec. 10-12, 2020.

The 17th edition of the esteemed event, a three-week celebration of Los Angeles' vibrant community of artists creating new contemporary performance work, will stream direct from REDCAT to viewers around the world.

Each year, NOW Festival transforms REDCAT into a laboratory for premiering new contemporary dance, theater, music, and multimedia performances. This year's festival launches nine new works by Los Angeles emerging and mid-career artists who are re-defining the boundaries of contemporary performance to invent hybrid artistic disciplines, re-imagine traditions and confront urgent issues. All artistic teams receive free rehearsal space, technical support, and artist fees.

"The NOW Festival creates opportunities for artists that are all too rare. This year, the Festival takes on greater opportunity and urgency: supporting and keeping artists working safely in these uncertain times," said Edgar Miramontes, REDCAT's Deputy Executive Director & Curator, who oversees the festival. "It is especially important to have artists lead us and move us forward using this vital initiative of experimentation and development where artists share their unique perspectives, giving us an opportunity to view this changing world in real time and in different and imaginative ways."

NOW Festival 2020 was organized by Miramontes with artists in the community, including Carole Kim, Jasmine Orpilla, and taisha paggett. In the spirit of CalArts, REDCAT's parent institution, the NOW Festival serves as a catalyst for creativity and new ideas. Over its 17-year history, the program has launched over 130 works by an impressive list of artists who continue to be seen on stages throughout the U.S. and abroad.

Each of the three weekends features a triple bill of three premieres in a shared evening, premiered on Thursday evening and repeated Friday and Saturday evenings at 8:30 pm. Week Two, held Nov. 5-7, 2020, kicks off with a program of works by artists Primera Generación, Xiaoyue Zhang, and Randy Reyes + Bapari. Details:

Primera Generación Dance Collective
Nepantla
Through a series of movement-based explorations and rasquache-play, Primera Generación Dance Collective's (PGDC) -- Alfonso Cervera, Irvin Gonzalez, Patricia "Patty" Huerta, and Rosa Rodriguez-Frasier -- new multimedia work, Nepantla, reimagines the desmadre (messiness) that reflects, generates, and questions the flux of their Mexican American identities. PGDC strategically navigates culturally-iconic images, stereotypes, and rituals to visibilize the harsh realities and imaginative potentials of Mexicanidades in the U.S.

Xiaoyue Zhang
Little Red Book, or Plural Body
Little Red Book, or Plural Body is an experiment of bodies in performative spaces to look carefully at the interactions in which individual bodies, collective identity, and ideology are connected within the cultural space of China and beyond. Focusing on the practices and disciplines that Chinese bodies assimilate in the process of socialization, modernization, and globalization, Xiaoyue Zhang and her onstage collaborators explore the political and cultural pressures and conflicts within their bodies, and how they, as artists and movers, take them in, rebel against them, and move forward with them.

Randy Reyes + Bapari
Real Talk # 1 (Pt. 2) | Vectors of Adverse Desires con un poco de tu disco stick
Part grief party, part protest, part prayer, part f*** you, leave me alone, I need to take a nap now, Real Talk # 1 (Pt. 2) is a solo performance framed as an "excavation site" where randy will dive into their personal beliefs on ritual, intimacy, pleasure, and the erotic. randy will activate principles of contemporary dance, Qi energetics, endurance art, and structures improvisation against the pulsating music composed by Bapari in service of constructing and deconstructing physical and sonic terrains through the use of objects (i.e. toyz) whose traces will be left behind as slippery sculptures only to be shifted again through their sweaty body and persistent repetitive subtle gestures.

REDCAT'S NEW ORIGINAL WORKS (NOW) FESTIVAL 2020

TICKETS & INFORMATION

Week One: Oct. 8-10, 2020
Program 1 featured:
Davia Spain, This is for Davia
Simone Moore, The Divorce Comedy: A spiritual study
Alex Alpharaoh, O-Dogg: An Angeleno Take on Othello

Week Two: Nov. 5-7, 2020
Program 2:
Primera Generación, Nepantla
Xiaoyue Zhang, Little Red Book, or Plural Body
Randy Reyes + Bapari, Real Talk # 1 (Pt. 2) | Vectors of Adverse Desires con un poco de tu disco stick

Thursday, Nov. 5 at 8:30 p.m.
Friday, Nov. 6 at 8:30 p.m.
Saturday, Nov. 7 at 8:30 p.m.

Week Three: Dec. 10-12, 2020
Program 3:
DaEun Jung - Byoul Part 1: 246 in 40
Maria Garcia and Samantha Mohr - Laocoӧn with Cabiria at 9
Genna Moroni - More

Thursday, Dec. 10 at 8:30 p.m.
Friday, Dec. 11 at 8:30 p.m.
Saturday, Dec. 12 at 8:30 p.m.

All events are virtual, streamed from the REDCAT website. Tickets can be purchased at redcat.org/festival/now2020.

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