Nine New Contemporary Performance Projects Given Residency Support to Premiere at the 16th Annual New Original Works Festival

REDCAT's Annual New Original Works Festival transforms REDCAT into a summer laboratory 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.

Each of the three weekends features a triple bill of three premieres in a shared evening. Each program is premiered on Thursday evening and repeated Friday and Saturday evenings at 8:30 pm.

Week One: July 25-27

The 16th Annual New Original Works Festival kicks off with a program of works by Sola Bamis; zach dorn and Danielle Dahl; Katherine Helen Fisher and Andrew Ondrejcak. 

Sola Bamis: The Tutorial Part II: The White Tears Tea Steam

Performance artist Sola Bamis presents The Tutorial Part II: The White Tears Tea Steam, a continuation of her revolutionary skincare routine and digital litany for Womanist survival. Mixing infamous tweets, personal videos, and original text, Bamis introduces her new digital alter ego @racheldolezall, who provides insight to the makings of a Strong Black Woman—delivering a 28-day regimen for improved complexion, an explosive critique of Hollywood colorism, and a vital prescription for blk women’s self-love and expression.

zach dorn and Danielle Dahl: Sponge Hollow

Visual and performing artist zach dorn artfully manipulates a table-top platform filled with elaborate cardboard dioramas and a Lionel train set in Sponge Hollow, a multimedia live-action graphic novel. Accompanied by composer Danielle Dahl, live projected video seamlessly invites audiences to venture into a Florida swamp and witness the destruction of a tourist-ridden town from the window of the moving O-scale train. Along the way, we encounter the world’s largest sponge and a man obsessed with the television drama Gilmore Girls.

Katherine Helen Fisher and Andrew Ondrejcak: The Muses

Pulsating to the imagistic nature of Helado Negro’s cosmic synth-folk sounds, choreographer Katherine Helen Fisher’s new work The Muses renders a suite of lush and riotous dances that conjures a communal space in celebration of the divine feminine. The Muses combines visuals by inventive artist Andrew Ondrejcak, whose works link historical art objects with contemporary iconography, often with a queer perspective on classical forms.

Week Two: August 1–3

The New Original Works Festival continues with works by Paul Outlaw; Kate Watson-Wallace, Hprizm and Verónica Casado Hernández; Alexandro Segade and Amy Ruhl.

Paul Outlaw: BBC (Big Black Cockroach)

Inspired by Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis: a white, cis, heterosexual, Tr*mp-supporting American woman awakens to find herself transformed into what she considers a monstrous vermin—an African-American man. Directed by Sara Lyons, Paul Outlaw’s solo performance BBC (Big Black Cockroach) is an evocative, farcical horror show about black virility, white fragility, gender confusion, internalized homophobia and misogyny.

Kate Watson-Wallace, Hprizm and Verónica Casado Hernández: kim.

Kate Watson-Wallace’s new performance work functions as a live collage for an ensemble of female/femme performers—an investigation of notions and experiences of desire, contagion, failure, ritual, pleasure and the ecstatic. In collaboration with composer Hprizm and visual artist/dramaturge Verónica Casado Hernández, kim. is a conversation with the body in movement as it channels the act of dressing and undressing as pleasure, confrontation, joy and disruption.

Alexandro Segade and Amy Ruhl: Popular Revolt

Are we willing to put in the work? In Popular Revolt, interdisciplinary artists Alexandro Segade and Amy Ruhl use office technologies to perform a brainstorming session where participants develop a “socialism app.” Using sensitivity training modules as narrative structures, Popular Revolt makes Marxist theater via motivational speeches and motion graphics, attempting to muster revolutionary fervor in the suffocating embrace of Neoliberalism.

Week Three: August 8–10

The New Original Works Festival closes with works by Source Material, Austyn Rich and Jesse Bonnell.

Source Material: A Thousand Tongues

Source Material’s new music-theater work A Thousand Tongues, performed by Nini Julia Bang and directed by Samantha Shay, is an eruption of visuals born from the sounds of a tapestry of traditional music from all over the world. With a pristine, sparse, and yet oceanic symbolic visual landscape, A Thousand Tongues explores isolation, the unknown, vulnerability and the veil between this world and the other.

Austyn Rich: BL**DY SPAGHETTI

Sensing an end is near, two sailors in a highly-charged room refuse to communicate with each other in this fervent and virtuosic new performance work by Austyn Rich. Remembering and honoring black and brown troops who were front-lined, BL**DY SPAGHETTI celebrates companionship, self-worth, death and unspoken love to be something worth feasting over.

Jesse Bonnell: Paradise Island

Part retrospective and part future-bending reinvention, Jesse Bonnell’s Paradise Island brings new life to texts written by Richard Foreman, one of America's most influential experimental artists. Paradise Island explores, through a contemporary lens, notions of paradise, shifting between the everyday events of a cafe in Paris and the euphoric nature of the sublime hidden rhythms of the unknown. The work marks a departure for theater artist Bonnell, who is a co-founder of the daring performance ensemble Poor Dog Group.