New Original Works Festival Begins at REDCAT

Cloud Eye Control, courtesy of CalArts Photography

Since its opening five years ago, REDCAT programming has maintained a space for local artists to show their work at the state of the art theater below Disney Hall. The NOW Festival is the highlight of this community-aware programming. This first week of the three week series includes interdisciplinary projects that bend traditions and investigate new visions of work for the stage. The artists in this first program are: Baker & Tarpaga Dance Project, Cloud Eye Control and Theatre Movement Bazaar.

Merging West African and Western dance with live percussion and vocals, the Baker & Tarpaga Dance Project will present Sira Kan / On the Road, a work for three male dancer-musicians. Directed by Olivier Tarpaga, Wilfried Souly and Esther Baker-Tarpaga, On the Road layers movement, music and oral histories as it journeys through the physical dangers and political realities of West African men seeking new opportunities across borders.

The creative team of Miwa Matreyek, Anna Oxygen and Chi-wang Yang combine interactive media with live performance in Cloud Eye Control's Final Space and Subterranean Heart. Blending projected animation, live theater and upbeat music, these new works probe outer space for a new habitat and mine the earth for embedded gems to reveal a multidimensional, seductively cinematic experience.

In Model Behavior, Theatre Movement Bazaar shreds the story of Jekyll and Hyde into a collage of movement, theater and song that careens through cultural obsessions with mesmerism, CSI, the modeling industry, and more. Co-directors Tina Kronis and Richard Alger draw on varied source materials that morph from theatrical expression into dance athleticism in order to tell the tale of a group of men who encounter a brutal murder—and their own dual nature.

What a wild opening program! I'm always surprised by what surfaces at the NOW Festival: that these artists are based here in LA, yet hidden by the freeways and beaches and making work that mainstream producers have yet to discover. The successive programs are equally compelling, so beat the heat and head into the theater!!

Check out these youtube moments:

Baker & Tarpaga Dance Project