See it NOW @ REDCAT. |
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StubDog.com :: Event Information And Articles :: See it NOW @ REDCAT.
REDCAT’s sixth annual NOW Festival launches eight new works by Los Angeles dance, theater music and multimedia artists who are bending traditions and investigating new visions of work for the stage. “REDCAT’s New Original Works (NOW) series has become one of the city’s more eclectic and vital performance festivals. Although the “program one” is already over, you still could make it to REDCAT to view the rest of what LA’s performing artists have to offer this season in the New Original Works Festival. NOW/ Fest 09 offerings are built of Los Angeles based author’s stage works (some of them “in progress”) and come from the public call for submissions.
Well, you’ve already missed Early Morning Opera: Abacus, and solo works of Sheetal Gandhi and Ayana Hampton, but there’s still a lot to see:
Jennifer The Leopard will present a program Leop Year (No Jamming), opening “program two” of the New Original Works Festival at REDCAT. Jennifer the Leopard —a.k.a J-Lep—is not a band, though they are not not a band either. J-Lep is a collective composed of Lauren Fisher, Stephanie Hutin, Lana Kim and Marissa Mayer—four women who combine sound-making with visual practice and performance with participation. J-Lep performs a band in order to create what they’ve always wanted to see: a process that involves as many props as instruments and as many hours of girl talk as rehearsal. This weekend, Jennifer the Leopard will realize a concept they crafted specifically for NOW Fest, supported by the funding and assistance provided by REDCAT as well as the dedication of collaborators who’ll be tapping and screaming and dancing and maybe even storming out.
Carole Kim w/ Oguri, Alex Cline and Dan Clucas will show N1, hallucinatory mix of live-feed video and layered projections. An immersive installation refracts the live performances of celebrated dancer-choreographer Oguri, percussionist-composer Alex Cline and multi-instumentalist Dan Clucas. Kim (interdisciplinary artist with a focus on live video performance and performance-based video installation) and her collaborators use time and technology to twist the myth of Narcissus, with a visual vocabulary that evokes a dreamlike state in which past and future mysteriously entwine.
Both performances run July 30 through August 1. (oh, it ends tomorrow!)
Meg Wolfe, choreographer & performer, organizer & instigator of Show Box projects
including the Anatomy Riot performance series; the tri-annual dance journal “itch” and DANCEbank classes presents her newest work : watch her (not know it now).
Sharp, precise and wholly original, choreographer Meg Wolfe is known for dances that are restlessly inquisitive and edged with dark humor crafted from fractured neo-noir storytelling, avian video imagery and showgirl camp. Now she strips the stage bare for a new solo accompanied only by Aaron Drake's original score, placing at the center of the work her signature dancing in which gesture is tied to action, muscles are strong-willed and abstraction rubs against articulation.
Provocative multimedia colloborators Zackary Drucker, Mariana Marroquin and Wu Ingrid Tsang stage a meeting of Politically Involved Girls in their compelling and wryly funny PIG. With an irreverent nod to Warhol's cult film Women In Revolt, the unpredictable trio mixes biting humor with socio-political themes ranging from contemporary transgender politics, sexual identity, civil rights, and the evolving language of trans societal constructs.
Lauren Weedman’s OFF tells about how being an expectant mother affects her view of life, whether she is working in a hospice or visiting the tattoo parlor.
In her unflinchingly funny theater works, Lauren Weedman's incisive observations and painfully dead-on characterizations are woven into laugh-out-loud stories that boomerang back to nail the teller of the tale. Her latest solo performance traces her attempts to "trust herself" even as she struggles with things beyond her control. On the brink of motherhood, Weedman seeks comfort in hospice work, hangs out with a pair of harassed lesbian moms, and puts her faith in not one but two untalented tattoo artists. Her inner voice may not yet be audible, but her outer voice is certain to spill its guts.
All three of the performances will be running August 6 through 8.
As we could read in LA Times about a week ago:
Women created or perform in seven of the event’s eight pieces, exploring topics such as sexual politics, self-identity and the vagaries of life and love. The strong female presence is a result of natural selection, says Mark Murphy, REDCAT’s executive director. These days, experimental material is often dance-based, he explains, “and a lot of the most interesting choreographers in L.A. happen to be women.” He adds that women also are producing “some of the really interesting interdisciplinary proposals.”
Check it out for yourself.
