NOW Festival continues with two new works that employ technology, media and unique stagecraft: Heidi Duckler, "the queen of L.A. site-specific dance-performance" (Los Angeles Times), responds to REDCAT's performance space. The collaborative team of Lars Jan, Jane Pickett and Bureau V generate layers, both literal and psychological, in a work of operatic complexity, but without the singing.

Early Morning Opera: Autopilot

Lars Jan layers innovative staging, collage-like projections and powerful performances to illuminate Jane Pickett's original text in which a downed American fighter pilot confronts the isolation of the desert. Psychologically probing and politically relevant, Autopilot draws on the stories of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Icarus and first-hand interviews with active and retired U.S. military pilots to investigate the remove of the cockpit and its parallels to America's position in foreign affairs.

"Mind-bendingly creative...boundless work that signals Jan as a rising talent." Philadelphia Weekly

Collage Dance Theatre: My Beowulf

Known throughout Los Angeles for her exquisitely realized site-specific dances, Heidi Duckler takes on REDCAT's performance space to construct the latest installment in Collage Dance Theatre's Beowulf series. Using Seamus Heaney's modern translation of the classic text, Duckler and her dancers team with writer Merridawn Duckler and designer Chris Kuhl to address loyalty, kinship, aggression and community.

Heidi Duckler, the reigning queen of L.A. site-specific dance-performance, is one choreographer that really cooks." Los Angeles Times

Complete 2007 NOW Festival Schedule