NOW 2017 30 sec promo from REDCAT on Vimeo.

The annual NOW Festival transforms REDCAT into a vital laboratory for the creation of new contemporary performances. This year's festival launches nine new works by Los Angeles artists who invent hybrid artistic disciplines, re-imagine traditions and confront urgent issues. 

Week One: July 27–29

Jessica Emmanuel: Witnessing Her

Jessica Emmanuel’s commanding presence and starkly impassioned movements capture the essence of the vicarious trauma triggered by images, sounds, stories and details of senseless black deaths. A seemingly viral wave of violence belies the deeply personal impact of each confrontation, each bullet and each chalk outline.

Stacy Dawson Stearns: LOVE GASOLINE! 

Bessie Award-winner Stacy Dawson Stearns constructs a scintillating mix of video and highly visceral movement theater to probe the erotic machine of Marcel Duchamp's famously unfinished The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (or the Large Glass). LOVE GASOLINE!unveils the humorous complexity of desire using five eloquent performers, punctuated by bursts of original music, "readymade" sounds, and vivid film sequences. 

Nancy Keystone: Untitled Communion

Whiplashed by the accelerating waves of madness in a tumultuous political time, Nancy Keystone and her cross-disciplinary collective, Critical Mass Performance Group, take the audience on a whirlwind journey that careens between resistance, fun, panic, thrashing and persistence. Fueled by Jacob Richard's live music, it is a boisterous cri-de-coeur that also features “sparkles and communion.”

Week Two: August 3–5

Nickels Sunshine: Take Me With You

With smart, lush movement and a notably contemporary “corps de ballet,” Nickels Sunshine beautifully crafts a non gender conforming homage to the distinctive techniques and choreographic styles of such canonical dance pioneers as Vaslav Nijinsky and Martha Graham. Nickels rejoins with the fearless Jmy James Kidd – along with Barry Brannum, Alexx Shilling, Bernard Brown and Maya Gingery – to re-imagine the poetics of movement in shared spaces.

Megan Fowler-Hurst, Mackenzey Franklin and Sarri Sanchez (TBOL): A Dismal Glimpse at a Script We Create to Keep Us Moving Forward

Three adventurous collaborators blend capricious theatricality with nuanced choreographic non-sequiturs, working under the collective name Tales Between Our Legs (TBOL). Their satirical multimedia exploration draws from the vocabulary of dance theater, sitcoms and even post-performance discussions to cleverly exploit the contrast between what people say and what they really mean. 

Vivian Bang: Can You Hear Me / LA 92

Incisive writer/performer Vivian Bang, one of the original members of New York’s explosively antic Big Art Group, turns her focus to interrogating L.A., where she now has a thriving TV/film career. Bang poignantly re-visits a forgotten history of the 1992 L.A. riots, as recalled from the perspective of Korean-Americans she researched, to create this revealing live documentary that poetically captures a crucial historic moment.  

Week Three: August 10–12

Luis Lara Malvacías and Jeremy Nelson: C

In movement rich with playful rhythmic juxtapositions, Luis Lara Malvacías and Jeremy Nelson navigate a domestic environment, evoked by furniture and décor, in their collaboration C. Video imagery on multiple surfaces enhances this astute exploration of time—the latest in a series of highly structured improvisational duets they are creating—one for each letter of the alphabet: A to Z. 

Gina Young: BUTCH BALLET

BUTCH BALLET is writer and director Gina Young’s love letter to female masculinity. A series of private moments and pedestrian “dances” for a cast of butch, gender nonconforming and nonbinary performers (with no actual ballet involved!), BUTCH BALLET is a movement-theater piece of minimalist vignettes tackling softness and hardness, otherness and belonging, love and desire, butch iconography and of course... swimwear.  

Timur and The Dime Museum: Artaud in the Black Lodge

Artaud in the Black Lodge explores the imagined psychic connections between Antonin Artaud, William S. Burroughs and David Lynch. Drawing from the worlds of heavy metal and electronica, composer David T. Little collaborates with librettist/poet Anne Waldman, Isaura String Quartet, director Lydia Steier and operatic rock band Timur and The Dime Museum. Produced by Beth Morrison Projects.