This year's festival launches with a playful integration of silent film and live music from Marissa Chibas, a modern fable from puppeteer Cindy Derby, and a new multi-channel sound performance from composer Luke Fischbeck of Lucky Dragons.

Marissa Chibas: Clara’s Los Angeles

Marissa Chibas kicks up the dust on Los Angeles history as Clara, a disoriented flapper who awakes after a wild night at the Ambassador Hotel, in 1926, to find she has danced her way into a new century. Performing live and on film, Chibas playfully integrates silent cinema shot by John Hawk with live music inspired by the Roaring 20s composed by Nathan Phelps, as Clara attempts to find her way in the modern city. Wandering to her old haunts—Olvera Street, The Vista Theatre—Clara reveals the rich historic influences to be found in a city often blind to its own past.

"Chibas touches the human need to know who we are and where we come from." —Los Angeles Times

Cindy Derby: Edward’s House of String

A modern fable from puppeteer Cindy Derby’s Edward’s House of String is a moving and mysterious performance in which stop-motion animation, live puppetry and hand-crafted scenic elements create potent images that delve into realms of psychological loss. While unraveling threads and rustling trees, Derby manipulates the lonesome Edward and the world that surrounds him to illuminate the unseen forces that shape his existence. In doing so, she speaks to the power that even the dimmest memories have to influence and transform the psyche.

" ... skillful performance ... with real emotional content." —The Edinburgh Guide 

Lucky Dragons: Actual Reality

Inquiring into the complexities of digital mediation, composer Luke Fischbeck of Lucky Dragons gathered thousands of Google Alerts for the seemingly redundant phrase “actual reality” as the basis for his latest multichannel composition. The score features an ensemble of acoustic musicians with spatialized amplified sound as Fischbeck generates a matrix of software-driven cancellations and reinforcements to engage the audience in a participatory act of listening and orientation.

"Lucky Dragons have managed to create a completely new strand of West Coast American psychedelia." —Frieze