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Nine New Contemporary Performance Projects Given Residency Support to Premiere at the 15th New Original Works Festival (NOW 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 - July 19-21, July 26-28, and August 2-4 - 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.

Artists and collaborators participating in the unique program for the creation of adventurous new performances include:

Week One: July 19-21

Live music is featured in each of the new projects premiering in the first week of the New Original Works Festival. The NOW Festival kicks off with a program of works by Jasmine Orpilla with Peter Deguzman, Miwa Matreyek with Morgan Sorne, Jmy James Kidd and Tara Jane O’Neil. 

Jasmine Orpilla with Peter Deguzman: How Many Years Did We Fight the Beast Together

A unique soprano arrangement with kulintang gongs merges with Pangalay dancers in shadow, as composer/singer Jasmine Orpilla revisits timeless Filipino traditions in collaboration with Peter Deguzman, artistic director of Malaya Filipino-American Dance Arts. Activist poet Carlos Bulosan inspires the ritualized operatic performance deconstructing the Filipino body via food, indigenous dance and languages, and ancient, cyclical music.

Miwa Matreyek with Morgan Sorne: Eat Your Young

Blending fantastical animation with live shadow play, ingenious animator/performer Miwa Matreyek pushes the boundaries of realism in this collaboration with sound artist Morgan Sorne and his otherworldly five-octave vocal range. In the visual kaleidoscope of complex shape-shifting imagery of the anthropocene, Matreyek’s cinematic work Eat Your Young is accompanied live by Sorne’s song of the same name. 

Jmy James Kidd and Tara Jane O’Neil: solid, like a rock 

22 Sunland dancers give ecstatic life to a bold and fleshy choreographic event created by Jmy James Kidd with composer and instrumentalist Tara Jane O’Neil. To a compelling score for effect-manipulated solo bass, the performers wildly bound through the air or slither on the ground, relishing a connection to nature and spirit through an unguarded, purely female expressive vocabulary with an allied group of humans. 

Week Two: July 26–28

New Original Works Festival continues with works by KyungHwa Lee, Sebastian Hernandez and Milka Djordjevich.

KyungHwa Lee: Malleable Bodies: Flusser, Plasticity, and the Corset

Inventive media and performance artist KyungHwa Lee explores contemporary themes of embodiment, displacement, and the “ideal body” in an installation created with new technologies including 3-D printing and virtual reality. The performance contemplates the body as architectural and malleable as six performers actualize this ideal, while projections capture historical progressions of representation. 

Sebastian Hernandez: Hypanthium 

Named for the part of a rose that holds nectar, Hypanthium is an experimental collage of actions and movements grappling with notions of sisterhood, space, power and survival amidst memories of ancestral trauma. With sensuality, fierceness and hints of wry humor, three performers synthesize a pseudo kinship of queer femme moving bodies in Los Angeles, while recognizing the intensity of a hegemonic project that tries to assimilate them. 

Milka Djordjevich: CORPS

Commanding and irresistible percussive marching music in the spirit of a drum corps surrounds an ensemble of women in choreographer Milka Djordjevich’s new collaboration with composer Chris Peck. The contrapuntal beats infuse vivid movement that is at times militaristic, ritualistic, or athletic, as performers engage in repeated compulsory actions that evolve into a beautifully woven movement score of methodical formations that become a feminine procession of collective power.

Week Three: August 2–4 

The 15th Annual New Original Works Festival closes with works by Rachel Mason and Oguri, CARLON and Christine Marie.

Rachel Mason and Oguri: Singularity Song

With a large scale video environment, Rachel Mason creates a virtual black hole, where her song cycle becomes a score for gravitational waves, and renowned dancer and choreographer Oguri inhabits a dimension beyond earth. Mason was inspired by her interviews with some of the most provocative thinkers about the physics of black holes and the poetics of visualizing such immense phenomena. 

CARLON: fold, unfold, refold 

In a dramatic visual landscape dominated by oversized sheets of cardboard, Jay Carlon and his athletic dancers may seem protected by the soft material, but their impact on the surface is powerfully amplified by composer Alex Wand, who manipulates and weaves the intensified sounds into an aural soundscape. Combined with high-velocity movement, it compellingly confronts the overwhelming impact of disturbing and fractured memories. 

Christine Marie: Shadow in Stereo: Antiquated A.R.

Light artist Christine Marie draws the audience into an immersive world dominated by 30- foot tall figures that come to vivid 3-D life in choreography viewed through your fashionable 3-D glasses. The exquisite ensemble of performers seems to do the impossible—reach out live—yet Marie uses a non-digital stereo imaging technique she reinvented by drawing on ancient and spellbinding effects, each beautifully revealed.