REDCAT’s season of performances, screenings, and exhibitions features
Genre-defying music from Dorian Wood, Joy Guidry, inti figgis-vizueta;
The Wooster Group with a new production of Bertolt Brecht;
New work from artists Lemi Ponifasio, Okwui Okpokwasili, and Monty Cole;
An exhibition by visual artist and performer Lisa Alvarado;
New York Times-bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones;
The last film of Jean-Luc Godard;
And much more…
MEMBERS OF THE PRESS ARE INVITED TO ATTEND
FOR REVIEW AND CONSIDERATION
REDCAT Announces Its
Winter/Spring 2023 SeasonOkwui Okpokwasili. Photo by Oresti Tsonopoulos.REDCAT’s season of performances, screenings, and exhibitions featuresGenre-defying music from Dorian Wood, Joy Guidry, inti figgis-vizueta;The Wooster Group with a new production of Bertolt Brecht;New work from artists Lemi Ponifasio, Okwui Okpokwasili, and Monty Cole;An exhibition by visual artist and performer Lisa Alvarado;New York Times-bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones;The last film of Jean-Luc Godard;And much more…LOS ANGELES – Looking ahead to an exciting, new year, Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater (REDCAT), CalArts’ downtown center for contemporary arts, is proud to announce its Winter/Spring 2023 season of performances, screenings, and exhibitions, presented in-person and online January through June 2023.
“REDCAT’s new season continues to engage the urgency and creativity of our present moment, guided by our commitment to equitably distributing experimentation, supporting artists, and sharing their transformative work with Los Angeles,” said João Ribas, Steven D. Lavine Executive Director and Vice President for Cultural Partnerships; Edgar Miramontes, Deputy Executive Director & Curator; and Daniela Lieja Quintanar, Chief Curator and Deputy Director, Programs.
The new season features a slate of musical artists defying both genre and convention: On Feb. 3, multidisciplinary artist Dorian Wood‘s Canto de Todes (Song of Everyone) – a 12-hour composition and installation – makes its worldwide debut. On Mar. 24, REDCAT presents Radical Self-Love, an evening-length work written and designed by bassoonist Joy Guidry. On Jun. 3, composer inti figgis-vizueta shares new work and arrangements in Music for Transitions. And on Jun. 16 and 17, the Grammy-winning PARTCH Ensemble performs Harry Partch’s complete masterwork, The Wayward.
Continuing a tradition of innovative theater at REDCAT, The Wooster Group returns with a new production of Bertolt Brecht’s 1932 play, The Mother, Feb. 8 to 12. FAC XTRA RETREAT (FXR), a studio art pedagogy-themed performance by seven Asian American artist-educators based in L.A. (Ei Arakawa, Patty Chang, Pearl C Hsiung, Amanda Ross-Ho, Anna Sew Hoy, Shirley Tse, and Amy Yao), debuts at REDCAT on Feb. 17 and 18. From Feb. 23 to 25, next-generation director Monty Cole stages a world premiere production of Adrienne Kennedy’s Etta and Ella on the Upper West Side. And Brooklyn-based, Nigerian American performer, choreographer, and writer Okwui Okpokwasili presents her newest work from May 25 to 27.
Amor a la muerte (Love to Death), a traditional yet radical dance work conceived and directed by internationally renowned Samoan artist Lemi Ponifasio, takes the stage April 7 to 9.
Winter/Spring 2023 also sees REDCAT taking part in collaborations with its neighbors along Grand Avenue. On Jan. 28, as part of LA Phil’s Humanities programming, documentarian Jon Else and renowned composer John Adams present Land of Gold, Else’s film about the making of Adams’ opera, Girls of the Golden West. And from Apr. 27 through 30, LA Opera comes to REDCAT with a powerful double bill by Irish composer Emma O’Halloran.
CalArts comes downtown for another spectacular series of events starting on Jan. 20, as the CalArts MFA Program in Creative Writing presents an evening with bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones, 2023’s Katie Jacobson Writer in Residence. On Jan. 21, the CalArts MA in Aesthetics and Politics program and School of Critical Studies presents “Staying on the Grid: Platforms, Psyches, and Paths,” a day-long conference to discuss the future of the digital. That evening, renowned media theorist, internet critic, and author Geert Lovink takes the REDCAT stage for a lecture about the dark side of the net. And on Apr. 14, CalArts faculty members Sharon Lockhart and Ariel Osterweis present “Talent Show,” emerging from their course of the same name and featuring CalArts graduates, undergraduates, alumni, and professional guest artists coming together to put on a bonafide talent show. The season also sees the return of the always exciting annual CalArts Film/Video Showcase (May 2, 4-6), CalArts Writers Showcase (May 7), and CalArts Spring Dance Concert (May 10-11).
The season’s film/video screenings feature a wide-ranging line-up, including Le Livre d’image, the last film completed by Jean-Luc Godard (Jan. 30); experimental work from Iranian-born Bani Khoshnoudi (Feb. 13); “Cassandra with a flood in her mouth: A chorus, a riot, a cult, a swarm,” featuring multiple works (Feb. 27); Central Asian filmmaker Saodat Ismailova (Mar. 6); After Sherman, a new film from Jon-Sesrie Goff (Mar. 13); Queer Motions, a series of queer shorts (Mar. 20); Herb Alpert Award recipient Terence Nance (Apr. 10); and an evening of films by trans directors Angelo Madsen Minax and Nyala Moon (May 15).
In the Gallery, REDCAT presents visual artist and musical performer Lisa Alvarado with her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, opening Apr. 1. Alvarado is best known for her free-hanging abstract paintings, which operate as stage sets and artworks simultaneously, and engage with abstraction beyond the parameters of Western art history.
And that’s just the beginning for this extraordinary season at REDCAT. For dates, details, or ticketing information, see below or visit redcat.org.
REDCAT WINTER/SPRING 2023 EVENT LISTINGS:
Jan. 20
Stephen Graham Jones
CalArts’ 2022 Katie Jacobson Writer-in-Residence
REDCAT and the CalArts MFA program in Creative Writing present an evening with Stephen Graham Jones, 2023’s Katie Jacobson Writer in Residence. Jones is The New York Times bestselling author of My Heart is a Chainsaw, The Only Good Indians, and 30 other books. An important figure in contemporary Native American literature (Jones is Blackfeet), he is widely known for an innovative approach to genre, particularly horror. In his fiction, Jones adroitly remixes the conventions of literary horror fiction to construct disturbing, funny, and deeply moving depictions of contemporary American life, especially as it is lived at the rural margins of the American West. In Jones’ work, the past is always alive and lurking somewhere in the dark just beyond the beams of our headlights. He is the Ivena Baldwin Professor of English and a Professor of Distinction at the University of Colorado Boulder, as well as the recipient of many literary awards, including the Ray Bradbury Award from the Los Angeles Times, the Bram Stoker Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award.
Jan. 21
Staying on the Grid: Platforms, Psyches, and Paths
If Twitter is the canary in the coal mine, then the era of social media may soon be over. Or is it? This daylong conference organized by the CalArts MA in Aesthetics and Politics program and the School of Critical Studies brings together community groups, artists, and researchers to discuss the future of the digital. Thinking about what it means to “stay on the grid,” participants will discuss the current state of internet platforms, the mental states that come from being on the web, and creative alternatives for envisioning alternatives.
Jan. 21
Geert Lovink
We Are Not Sick
Geert Lovink discusses the dark side of the net. The mental state of internet users is tragic. Instead of empowerment and self-organization, what we mostly see around the internet is anger and despair. How did we end up like this? This lecture by the renowned media theorist, internet critic, and author will zoom in on the widespread techno-sadness that is produced by dominant social media platforms through “behavioral modification” (also known as “nudging”) with the aim to keep users coming back to the app, exposing them to even more personalized ads. Instead of empowerment and diversity, we witness a “chilling effect” of hyper-conformism, resulting in anger, sadness, depression, and loneliness. This is the social today. Presented as part of “Staying on the Grid: Platforms, Psyches, and Paths”–a series of panels offering a glimpse into a new digital future worth inhabiting.
Jan. 28
Jon Else and John Adams
Land of Gold
Presented as part of the LA Phil’s Humanities programming, Land of Gold, a documentary film by Jon Else about the making of John Adams’ opera, Girls of the Golden West, takes audiences into the rehearsal rooms and behind the scenes of the opera’s premiere production in San Francisco in 2017. With direction and a libretto by Peter Sellars, Girls of the Golden West brings true stories of the California Gold Rush to life by rejecting the whitewashed romantic view of California in the early days of the Gold Rush and highlights the heroism, passion, racial conflicts, love, cruelty, and truth during one of the most significant events in American history. Land of Gold captures the process of bringing this revisionist and corrective take on American history to life with insights from Adams and Sellars as well as first cast members Julia Bullock, Paul Appleby, and J’Nai Bridges.
Jan. 30
Jean-Luc Godard
Le Livre d’image (The Image Book)
Le Livre d’image (The Image Book) is the last film Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022) completed in 2018 before his passing last September. Arguably the most influential filmmaker of the last six decades, Godard was both the conscience and the revolution of cinema, borrowing from film and art history to invent new forms of cinematic expression. A final essay film, The Image Book, is a montage of film excerpts, archives, television reportage, and fragments of text and music, whose beauty consists in the way he transfigures the original material.
Feb. 3
Dorian Wood
Canto de Todes
Dorian Wood’s Canto de Todes (Song of Everyone) is a 12-hour composition and installation, making its worldwide debut at REDCAT. Inspired by a lyric of the late Chilean singer and songwriter Violeta Parra, the Creative Capital-awarded project emphasizes the urgency of folk music as a vessel for social change. A genre-defying canon of songs arriving as a long-durational spatial experience, the work is divided into three movements. The first and third movements are hourlong chamber pieces influenced by folk, popular, and experimental music. The second movement is a 10-hour prerecorded piece unfolding throughout multiple spaces within REDCAT. Canto de Todes upends the expectation of the rigidness often associated with witnessing chamber music performances by offering a welcoming space that allows for individuals to project their personal, communal joys, and traumas. It is a collaborative work with local artists who have historically been marginalized due to their nationality, race, or othered identity.
Feb. 8-12
The Wooster Group / Bertolt Brecht
The Mother
The Wooster Group returns to REDCAT with a new production of Bertolt Brecht’s 1932 play, The Mother. This play was written by Brecht in the style of a “learning play,” intended both to entertain and to incite social change. He used plain language and songs to tell the story of an illiterate Russian woman’s journey to revolutionary action. The Wooster Group’s American translation of The Mother uses the vernacular of early Hollywood gangster movies (one of Brecht’s favorite genres). The production features new music by composer Amir ElSaffar, who works across classical, jazz, and Arabic musical forms. The Mother is The Wooster Group’s first staging of Brecht, and the result is a dialogue between two influential experimental theater methodologies.
Feb. 13
Bani Khoshnoudi
Traces, imprints, and vital gestures: three experimental films
Iranian-born Bani Khoshnoudi presents a program of recent experimental films: Sap (2022), Transit(s): Our Traces, Our Ruins (2016), and a surprise film from 2022. Immigrating to the U.S. during the 1979 revolution, Khoshnoudi now splits her life between Mexico City and Paris. Her films, inhabited by displacement and uprooting, explore themes of exile, modernity, memory, and the invisible. The films dig into the layers, stories, and experiences related to global migrations, nomadism, and historical struggles for freedom. Her work has been shown at the Centre Pompidou and Fondation Cartier (Paris), Serralves Foundation (Porto, Portugal), Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC, Mexico City), and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Zagreb, Croatia), among others.
Feb. 17-18
Ei Arakawa, Patty Chang, Pearl C Hsiung, Anna Sew Hoy, Amanda Ross-Ho, Shirley Tse, and Amy Yao
FAC XTRA RETREAT (FXR)
FAC XTRA RETREAT (FXR) is a studio art pedagogy-themed performance by a temporal grouping of seven Asian American artist-educators based in L.A.: Ei Arakawa, Patty Chang, Pearl C Hsiung, Amanda Ross-Ho, Anna Sew Hoy, Shirley Tse, and Amy Yao. Academia uses acronyms more than Gen Zers! Inspired by the many mandatory online training modules and follow-up quizzes required of instructors by their teaching institutions, FAC XTRA RETREAT (FXR) promises “learning outcomes” with a series of weird, hard, soft, informative, and sometimes physically challenging multiple-choice problems with answers deeply associated with each artist’s teaching philosophy. With the help of suspicious polling devices, costumed performers and all members of the public take on-stage votes. The results of the polls will be acted out, branched out, and change the destination of the performance. Participants will be awarded an FXR certificate of completion at the end.
Feb. 23-25
Adrienne Kennedy and Monty Cole
Etta and Ella on the Upper West Side
One of the American theater’s seminal writers, Adrienne Kennedy captures the Black experience in America in the 20th century with a trademark embrace of symbolism, lyricism, and mythic figures. In this world premiere production, Etta and Ella Harrison are talented academics on the Upper West Side—as well as sisters and rivals. After a lifetime of competition, they are on the verge of destroying each other. Next-generation director Monty Cole employs a cinematic approach to this intricate blend of monologue, dialogue, voiceover, and prose in a work that is part experimental play, part narrative thriller.
Feb. 27
Cassandra with a flood in her mouth: A chorus, a riot, a cult, a swarm
How do we relate to land, place, and ecologies under conditions of destabilization and contamination? Insurgent worlding practices and queerspaces at the edges of imagination are given form in this selection of works by Sofía Córdova, Rana & Sara Hamadeh, Erin Johnson, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, and Bassem Saad. Mixing fabulation with fact, the films are rehearsals toward collective social formations that undo harmful distinctions between humans and other beings. This program presents work that reimagines relationships to the earthly and the elemental while emphasizing that we are inseparable from the material ecologies of place.
Mar. 6
Saodat Ismailova
I Do Not Take My Name for Granted
Who accounts for the whispers forgotten in the oral tradition? Who accompanies the ghosts that haunt the visual tradition? Saodat Ismailova’s film pierces the forgotten and the silenced. Engaging the spiritual and representational in equal measure, the film is forceful but nuanced, intimate but communal, historical and imagined. Ismailova’s work is situated in the context of Central Asian cinematic history, collective memory, and women’s inner spaces. Within this context, Ismailova’s work indexes, recontextualizes, and bears witness. This program presents four of Ismailova’s short films from different stages in her career, marking the first time her films have screened theatrically in Los Angeles.
Mar. 13
Jon-Sesrie Goff
After Sherman
Beautifully layered, After Sherman is a story about inheritance and the tension that defines our collective American history, especially Black history. The filmmaker follows his father, a minister, in the aftermath of a mass shooting at his church in Charleston, South Carolina, to understand how communities of descendants of enslaved Africans use their unique faith as a form of survival as they continue to fight for America to live up to its many unfulfilled promises to Black Americans.
Mar. 20
Queer Motions
Queer Motions brings together six queer shorts characterized by movement and a spirit of anarchy in a unique combination of pulsating, contagious energy and leisurely drag. Mobile protagonists transported by feet, cars, motorbikes, roller skates, or trains navigate a range of mostly urban terrains in Bissau, New York, East Jerusalem, Nairobi, and other places, tracing pathways of freedom within occupied territories. Verging in tone from lightness to spirited irreverence, these shorts by Dawn Suggs, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Amirah Tajdin, Eduardo Williams, Jumana Manna, and Lionel Soukaz exemplify resolutely queer, experimental approaches to form, especially volatile, frenzied, kinetic camerawork and verbal excess via polyphony, overlapping, discordant running commentaries, and poetic discourse.
Mar. 24
Joy Guidry
Radical Self-Love
Radical Self-Love is an evening-length work written and designed by Joy Guidry, drawing inspiration from the work of Sonya Renee Taylor, who has defined radical self-love as “its own entity, a lush and verdant island offering safe harbor for self-esteem and self-confidence.” As Guidry states, “much of my music-making right now is keenly focused on a radical reimagining of spaces, sonic, and communal. At the center of imagination is radical self-care: creating a world for yourself that allows the expansion of other worlds.” While these music offerings represent a range of musical idioms and methodologies–from improvisation and graphic scores to multimedia and gospel–the uniting principle for Guidry is a focus on the importance of affirmation, validation, and self-care. Radical Self-Love at REDCAT will feature an opening performance of new works by Yatta Zoker (YATTA), an artist, musician, performer, and educator who has shared the stage with musicians such as Cardi B and The Sun Ra Arkestra.
Apr. 1 – Jul. 30
Lisa Alvarado
Lisa Alvarado is a visual artist and performer best known for her free-hanging abstract paintings. Her works operate as stage sets and artworks simultaneously and engage with abstraction beyond the parameters of Western art history. Alvarado’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles continues her exploration of abstract visual language and its relationship with sound, rhythm, and vibrations. Her artistic practice takes inspiration from her sound performances, textiles traditions from the Americas, and her family experience as Mexican American in the Texas border region.
Apr. 7-9
Lemi Ponifasio
Amor a la muerte (Love to Death)
Amor a la muerte (Love to Death) is a traditional yet radical work conceived and directed by internationally renowned Samoan artist Lemi Ponifasio, a champion of both the avant-garde and Indigenous people. This new work brings together Mapuche artist, singer, and composer Elisa Avendaño Curaqueo and Chilean contemporary flamenco dancer Natalia Garcia-Huidobro. The work was sparked by events detonated after the Chilean police murdered Camilo Catrillanca, a Mapuche former student, activist, and farmer. Catrillanca worked on the movement of reclamation of Mapuche lands. Voices and bodies weave together in a ceremony revealing their own stories: two lives that reflect both Chile’s history and the search for its future. Touching on questions of identity, destiny, and nature, the work transcends conventional ideas of theater, dance, and activism.
Apr. 10
Terence Nance
Multitudes, or Surreal Notions in Service of Us
Herb Alpert Award-winning artist, filmmaker, and musician Terence Nance’s creative worlds are expansive, boundless, and liberating. This evening of short films weaves visions unhindered by the structures of categorization, form, and precedent. Nance doesn’t resist the narrative form. Instead, he subverts, troubles, interrupts, and expands it in search of the sublime. Nance’s work makes sense of our contemporary moment, moving alongside and in conversation with a saturated and taxing cultural and media landscape. In his hands, Black subjectivity abounds and is both vernacular and grounded as well as surrealistic and fantastical. Embracing a multimodal cinematic language, Nance employs animation, archival imagery, performance- and music-oriented filmmaking, and buoyant soundscapes to examine love, spirituality, healing, and interdimensionality.
Apr. 14
Sharon Lockhart and Ariel Osterweis
Talent Show
If you can’t find talent at CalArts, you can’t find it anywhere! Talent Show emerges from faculty members Sharon Lockhart and Ariel Osterweis’ CalArts course of the same name. Graduates, undergraduates, alumni, and professional guest artists come together to put on a talent show, featuring acts that may lie outside their formal training. Yes to amateurism! Yes to virtuosity! Yes to awkwardness and adolescence, aspiration, and ambition! From concert performance to clunky experimentalism, Talent Show unites high and low. When is a talent show a freak show, a magic show, a circus, a pageant, a musical, or a TV competition? We’ve held auditions, we’ve made cuts; now it’s your turn to decide who’s got talent!
Apr. 27-30
Emma O’Halloran
Mary Motorhead / TRADE
A powerful double bill by Irish composer Emma O’Halloran. In the compelling monodrama Mary Motorhead, a convicted murderer invites us to hear her secret history—the disappointments and betrayals that shaped her life—in the hope that it may shine some light upon the darkness of her actions. Mezzo-soprano Naomi Louisa O’Connell stars as the woman pushed to the edge by circumstance, now finding the road back to herself. TRADE is the story of a rent boy and his closeted client in working-class Dublin, both trapped within their own lives. Meeting secretly in a cheap hotel, they wrestle with their own inner demons and their need for each other. Three-time Tony nominee Marc Kudisch (star of LA Opera’s Wonderful Town and anatomy theater) portrays a family man whose world is crumbling apart, with international recording artist Kyle Bielfield as a young hustler determined to take charge of his future.
May 2, 4-6
CalArts Film/Video Showcase
The CalArts School of Film/Video presents four nights of special screenings featuring new films by BFA and MFA students in its programs—a diverse collection of bold, innovative cinematic works.
May 7
CalArts Writers Showcase
The CalArts MFA Creative Writing class of 2023 will present exciting glimpses into their wild and varied work. Audience members will get a feel for the incredible range of experimentation that characterizes the literary endeavors of students in the Creative Writing program.
May 10-11
CalArts Spring Dance Concert
CalArts Dance presents repertory from guest artists, including internationally acclaimed choreographers and emerging local artists with close affiliations to the Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance at CalArts.
May 15
Angelo Madsen Minax, Nyala Moon, and Zackary Drucker
Films
Artist and filmmaker Zackary Drucker curates an evening of films by trans directors Angelo Madsen Minax and Nyala Moon. In North By Current, filmmaker Angelo Madsen Minax returns to his rural Michigan hometown after the death of his young niece. Through confusion and grief, he begins to unfurl the depths of generational addiction and Christian fervor in his family to dive head first into the pain of growth and the power of kinship. Poised to incite more internal searching than provide clear statements or easy answers, North By Current is a visual rumination on the understated relationships between mothers and children, truths and myths, losses and gains. North By Current is preceded by Nyala Moon’s short film How Not to Date While Trans, a break-the-fourth-wall, dark comedy that follows the dating life of a Black trans woman and the problematic men she meets along the way. Andie searches for romance and self-love but finds heartbreak.
May 25-27
Okwui Okpokwasili
Okwui Okpokwasili’s new theater piece centers around a young African American girl who loses all of her hair after using a chemical straightener, only to have it restored by the power of a mysterious, unhoused woman. The young girl’s hair comes back with properties that restore genetic and cultural memory and allow her to discover her family’s precolonial past. A work that centers around the complexity of repair, physical and psychic, that will require traveling to the past and into the future.
Jun. 3
inti figgis-vizueta
Music For Transitions
inti figgis-vizueta writes magically real music through the lens of personal identities, braiding a childhood of overlapping immigrant communities and Black-founded Freedom schools—in Chocolate City (DC)—with direct Andean and Irish heritage and a deep connection to the land. In Music for Transitions, she is joined by collaborators to present new arrangements of previously remote works and a new co-composed piece for mixed ensemble. Her music has been described as “the sounds of nature with what I imagined as the soundtrack of a dream.” (Blogcritics Magazine)
Jun. 16-17
PARTCH Ensemble
The Wayward
Grammy Award-winning PARTCH Ensemble presents Harry Partch’s complete masterwork The Wayward, [Barstow, San Francisco, The Letter, U.S. Highball, Ulysses]: “A collection of musical compositions based on the spoken and written words of hobos and other characters—the result of my wanderings in the Western part of the United States from 1935 to 1941.” Opening with the rousing Cloud Chamber Music, the program also includes the premiere of a new work by microtonal maven Kyle Gann.
