THE FORD/HILL PROJECT to Lead REDCAT's Fall 2026 Season
Dimitri Chamblas and Mindy Seu headline a lineup spanning theater, dance, music, and contemporary art.
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REDCAT, The Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater, has announced its 2026 fall season, running September 12, 2026 through December 13, 2026. This coming season presents bold new offerings of theater, performance, dance, music, film, and contemporary art. Throughout the season, artists contend with contemporary, urgent thematics including politics, technology, and sexuality through presentations ranging from a landmark exhibition to US premieres and the annual New Original Works festival celebrating the diversity and expertise of local artists.
The new season of performances includes The Ford/Hill Project, September 17–19, a play that transforms the Senate testimony of Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford into a gripping evening of theater. Thirty years apart, Hill and Ford shared private and painful experiences on a national stage during Supreme Court nomination hearings. Created by Lee Sunday Evans, Elizabeth Marvel, and Waterwell, and with an ensemble of luminary LA actors speaking from the verbatim transcripts of the hearings, the play connects these two stories as they resonate across decades, illuminating the emotional weight and historical significance of these pivotal hearings.
A series of performances by Mindy Seu, from December 11–12, consider how technologies have shaped and been shaped by sexuality. A Recital of Citations presents an augmented reality reading of her book, CYBERFEMINISM INDEX, on online activism and net art as radical technological environments; and the participatory lecture performance, A SEXUAL HISTORY OF THE INTERNET, in which histories and citations on the pervasive and perverted origins of our digital tools are read aloud by the audience, through a shared script on their mobile devices.
Renowned choreographer and dancer Dimitri Chamblas returns to REDCAT with a new work, Ulysse Marion, from October 20–21. Chamblas delves into the life stories of two remarkable dancers, Marion Barbeau and Ulysse Zangs. In this intimate piece, Chamblas uses choreography to rediscover buried memories, transforming REDCAT into a vast, empty space to present a portrait of artists laid bare.
Developed by Wild Up in partnership with MOCA and CalArts, Democracy Sessions returns in October 2026 for an expanded festival of music and performance taking place across Los Angeles. Over two days at REDCAT, catch the world premiere of a newly commissioned work by Shelley Washington as part of The Room Begins to Rise and works by Sofia Gubaidulina, Gabriella Smith, Luigi Nono, and Louis Andriessen as part of Order and Its Others. This new iteration of Democracy Sessions asks how art can function as a way of gathering, listening, speaking, and acting together.
The 23rd annual New Original Works (NOW) Festival, a celebration of innovative new work by Los Angeles artists, features nine new works in dance, theater, music, and performance from November 5–21. This edition features new works from Alfonso Abraham Cervera and Irvin Manuel Gonzalez, Chica Barbosa, Brenda Barrios, Friidom, Scottie Harvey, Tarren Johnson, Jeonghyeon Joo, Cody Perkins/Algorythm.Code, and SUUVI, selected through an open call for applications. Each of the three weeks of NOW features three artists in a shared evening on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 8 pm, with livestreamed performances on Saturdays. From looking at the ethos of street dance to revisiting the myth of Marilyn Monroe, this year's REDCAT NOW festival continues to serve as a catalyst for vibrant and urgent experimentation in Los Angeles.
A landmark contemporary art exhibition, Flesh Witness, examines global histories and ongoing conditions of militarism across Asia and the Pacific. Conceived by Amy Kahng and GYOPO, Flesh Witness includes artworks spanning from the 1970s to newly created work focusing on the Korean Peninsula, Okinawa, the Philippines, Hawai'i, and Samoa by artists Bernice Akamine, Lani Asunción, Pelanakeke Brown, Crystal Z Campbell, Jisoo Chung, Sean Connelly, Kyuri Jeon, Jane Jin Kaisen, Mao Ishikawa, Slow Futures Laboratory, and Stephanie Syjuco. An accompanying two-day gathering, As Ocean People: Symposium, Screenings, and Performance, brings together artists and scholars of diasporic Asian Pacific Islander identities for panel discussions, screenings, and performances, including Crystal Z Campbell, Tony Cho, Sean Connelly, Micki Davis, Alfred Peredo Flores, Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, Madeleine Han, hearthealer, Jane Jin Kaisen, Leora Kava, Sung Hwan Kim, Sohl Lee, jas lin, and Tuan Andrew Nguyen.
This season's film programming kicks off with Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens' Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency on September 26, a documentary that imagines the Earth as a lover. Born from the ashes of California's devastating wildfires, the film is a creative and urgent call to action that illustrates how climate catastrophe intersects with social justice. Sharon Lockhart's new film WINDWARD, September 30, brings to life Fogo Island's striking geological formations, unique climate, and austere beauty. Filmed on the windswept northern face of the remote island, the film is organized by an unseen, persistent force—the breezes that descend uninterrupted from the Arctic. The debut feature film by Leonardo Pirondi (CalArts BFA 22 + MFA 24 in Film and Video) Fractais Tropicais (Tropical Fractals), October 14, shot on 16mm, depicts environmental collapse and a vision of the post-apocalyptic world.
The fall 2026 season continues REDCAT's collaboration with Angel City Arts for its annual Jazz Refractions Festival, with two dynamic double bills featuring Fred Frith's Fremakajo and DoYeon Kim's Quartet on October 17, and two outstanding artists from Los Angeles, Mekala Session and Qur'an Shaheed, in dialogue with the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra on October 18.
In November, The Chapter House, The Broad, and REDCAT co-present Sage-Based Drag Night, an interactive, queen-centric comedy and drag show hosted by Indigenous comedians and queens Jana Schmieding (Lakota), Brian Bahe (Diné/Hopi/Tohono O'odham), Landa Lakes (Chickasaw), Lady Shug (Navajo), Big Mama Tama (Hawaiian/Tahitian/Filipino/Chinese), Bohenne Arreaux (Jena Choctaw), and special guests on November 8. The night will feature a combination of standup comedy and drag performances, and culminate in a live recording of the Sage-Based Wisdom podcast.
Reflecting the creativity of the CalArts community, the CalArts Winter Dance Festival features commissioned works from choreographers Brigette Dunn-Korpela (Choreography MFA 14), Crystal Jackson-Singletary, Rosanna Tavarez, and Odessa Uno (Dance BFA 19) performed by the students of The Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance. As distinct voices in contemporary dance, these choreographers consider how the next generation of diasporas dance, highlighting the talents of CalArts Dance undergraduate and graduate students in diverse and celebratory evenings December 4–5.
Photo Credit: Paul McMillan.*
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Much Ado About Nothing McCadden Place Theatre (8/07-8/16) |
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6 Out of 10 Theatre 68 (8/20-8/20) |
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After the Blast The Broadwater Second Stage (8/05-8/13) |
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Catch Me If You Can Colony Theatre (9/17-10/18) |
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Emily Skinner: In Concert Feinstein's at the Nikko (8/14-8/15) |
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Gershwin and the Golden Age Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for the Performing Arts (The Soraya) (10/11-10/11) |
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John Lloyd Young Feinstein's at the Nikko (8/21-8/22) |
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Love, Loss and What I Wore Sawyer's Playhouse (8/08-8/30) |
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Matt & Ben Sherry Theatre (7/31-9/05) |
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The Turning Mark Taper Forum (9/02-10/11) |