VIRTUAL EVENT

Nine New Contemporary Performance Projects Given Residency Support to Premiere at the 17th Annual New Original Works Festival

REDCAT's Annual New Original Works Festival transforms REDCAT into a 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: October 8-10

Davia Spain: This is for Davia

Musician and performance artist Davia Spain takes a deep dive into a journey of self-actualization. She asserts that there is a connection between self-love and ecological justice. Is it ever a good time to say ‘enough is enough’? As the Earth begins its process of breaking up with humans, are we too being forced to look at the cycles we need to break? Will returning to our bodies, our memory, our true power heal our festering wounds; ergo, easing life in 2020? Will the destruction of “life as we know it” lead to a better existence for us all? Spain hopes that by harnessing creative energy she can transmute chaotic energy and find peace in this storm. 

Simone Moore: The Divorce Comedy: A spiritual study

Actress and writer Simone Moore's The Divorce Comedy is an exploration into the absurdity, isolation, and loss of identity of an Afro-Jamaican immigrant woman’s experience in marriage and divorce. With an original short by cinematographer Arthur Jafa, this excerpt of her one-woman show incorporates video, photography by Barron Claiborne, Afro-Caribbean dance, singing, reggae DJ-ing, and text that conjures the Dance-Hall Queen vs. Proper Church Lady archetypes present in Jamaican culture, indicts colorism within the Caribbean community, rings the alarm bell on our current mental state, and doles out her grandmother’s method for healing the Diasporic soul.

Alex Alpharaoh: O-Dogg: An Angeleno Take on Othello

Performance artist Alex Alpharaoh’s bold reimagining of Shakespeare’s Othello is set in Los Angeles’ Koreatown during the 92’ Uprising. O-Dogg, the Afro-Latino leader of LOKs Crew is preparing to leave the street life behind with his new bride, Desireé Park. When the riots begin, his Father-In-Law’s liquor store becomes threatened. Jay, the owner of Jay’s Liquor refuses to spray "Black Owned" on his boarded windows in spite of O-Dogg pleading. When Eye-G discovers that O-Dogg is handing LOK to Cash-O, Eye-G sets a deadly plan into motion.

Week Two: November 5-7

Primera Generación: Nepantla

Through a series of movement-based explorations and rasquache play, Primera Generación Dance Collective’s (PGDC) — Alfonso Cervera, Irvin Gonzalez, Patricia “Patty” Huerta, and Rosa Rodriguez-Frazier— new multimedia work, Nepantla, re-imagines the desmadre (messiness) that reflects, generates, and questions the flux of their Mexican American identities. PGDC strategically navigates culturally-iconic images, stereotypes, and rituals to visibilize the harsh realities and imaginative potentials of Mexicanidades in the U.S. 

Xiaoyue Zhang: Little Red Book, or Plural Body

Little Red Book, or Plural Body is an experiment of bodies in performative spaces to look carefully at the interactions in which individual bodies, collective identity, and ideology are connected within the cultural space of China and beyond. Focusing on the practices and disciplines that Chinese bodies assimilate in the process of socialization, modernization and globalization, Xiaoyue Zhang and her onstage collaborators explore the political and cultural pressures and conflicts within their bodies, and how they, as artists and movers, take them in, rebel against them, and move forward with them.

randy reyes + Bapari: Real Talk # 1 (Pt. 2) | Vectors of Adverse Desires con un poco de tu disco stick 

Part grief party, part protest, part prayer, part f*** you, leave me alone, I need to take a nap now, Real Talk # 1 (Pt. 2) | Vectors of Adverse Desires con un poco de tu disco stick is a solo performance framed as an “excavation site” where randy will dive into their personal beliefs on ritual, intimacy, pleasure, and the erotic. randy will activate principles of contemporary dance, Qi energetics, endurance art, and structured improvisation, against the pulsating music composed by Bapari in service of constructing and deconstructing physical and sonic terrains through the use of objects (i.e. toyz) whose traces will be left behind as slippery sculptures only to be shifted again through their sweaty body and persistent repetitive subtle gestures.

Week Three: December 10-12

DaEun Jung: Byoul Part 1: 246 at 40 

What would happen if the conventional flow of Korean dance is disrupted? Prompted by this question, dancer-choreographer DaEun Jung has built a compositional system inspired by Merce Cunningham’s “chance operation” and the Korean alphabet, Hangul. Assigning the segmented moves of classical Korean dance to each morpho-syllabic block of the alphabet, Byoul Part 1: 246 at 40—consisting of 246 syllables, moves, and beats at 40 bpm—finds Jung, pansori singer Melody Shim, and sound composer Daniel Corral exploring concurrences of rigor upon arbitrary, spontaneity upon rules, flow upon interruption, dependency upon idiosyncrasy, and the conditional upon the absolute.

Maria Garcia and Samantha Mohr: Laocoӧn with Cabiria at 9

Maria Garcia’s Laocoön with Cabiria at 9 is a one-woman show led by Vatican Museums tour guide Cabiria, who in a nightmare, is confronted with a Trojan Soldier sharing her reflection. Brought to life by choreographer and performer Samantha Mohr, Cabiria’s obsession with the story of the Trojan Horse and the priest Laocoön sends her on a liminal journey of humiliation, pain, banishment, death, and love. Stuck between history and myth, Cabiria’s investigation of the Trojan war explores the designation of “foreign” bodies as dangerous, devious, and in need of discipline.

Genna Moroni: More

Employing unapologetically “ugly,” yet beautiful and raw physicality, dancer-choreographer Genna Moroni’s More invites viewers into the vacuum of female relationships. Slipping between different worlds, stories and perspectives with no clear end in sight, More creates a labyrinth. The audience will have the opportunity to both witness and sense the effort, disappointments and complexities expressed in movement. Layered with music by Adam Starkopf, Moroni and her team of dancers explore the ever-evolving and shifting nature of relationships, inspiring us to find ourselves and leaving a lasting sense that there is still “more.”