January 2017
Eko Nugroho and Wayang Bocor: God Bliss (In the Name of Semelah)
With a whirlwind of shadows, humor and iconic visual images from street art, popular culture and traditional Javanese forms, provocative artist Eko Nugroho riffs on the story of how Islam first came to Java in the 15th century, eventually resulting in Indonesia becoming the world’s largest Muslim-majority country. After gaining notice with his controversial ‘zine Daging Tumbuh (Rotting Flesh) in the moments after the end of president Suharto’s reign, Nugroho has gained international fame for work that uses found materials, graffiti techniques…
Find out more »REDCAT: Meg Stuart: Hunter
Staged within an exquisite installation created with video, scenography and light, choreographer Meg Stuart’s acclaimed solo Hunter explores her own body as an archive populated with personal and cultural memories, ancestors and artistic heroes, fantasies and invisible forces.
Find out more »Screening: “The Murder of Fred Hampton: The Struggle Continues”, followed by Panel discussion
“Hampton struggled against the same problems black America faces today, and lost his life for it. His life mattered.” – David A. Love, The Grio The landmark documentary The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971, 88 min.), by Howard Alk and Michael Gray, is a testament to black activism and a chilling record of covert police and FBI actions. Begun in 1969 to portray the activities of the Chicago branch of the Black Panther…
Find out more »March 2017
Teatro El Público: Antigonón, un contingente épico
"A kaleidoscope of Cuban society...just when the country is turning everything upside down." - European Cultural News “Simply spectacular…The magic touch of one of our best directors today gives body and new resonance to Antigone" - Cuba Si Havana’s leading provocateur in the underground counterculture of fashion, spectacle, cabaret, theater and drag confronts the tyrannical themes of Antigone with sharp humor and shocking currency in this internationally acclaimed production direct from Cuba. Two myths collide in one epic explosion of…
Find out more »The Wooster Group: The Town Hall Affair
“Peering through The Wooster Group’s technological menagerie, we can see the battle of the sexes more clearly.” — Hyperallergic "Is there nothing The Wooster Group cannot imagine-or reimagine?" — The New Yorker The Wooster Group’s newest work THE TOWN HALL AFFAIR delves into the revolutionary fervor of feminist thinking and art “happenings” of 1970s New York. The piece is based on the Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker film Town Bloody Hall, a documentary of a 1971 panel that featured feminist…
Find out more »April 2017
International Children’s Film Fest
Presented in partnership with Northwest Film Forum Two action-packed weekends of short films highlighting the most innovative and magical animation techniques, as well as mesmerizing live-action films from around the world. Audiences of all ages will be inspired by these exhilarating works from more than two dozen countries — including Mexico, Brazil, Sweden, Russia, Taiwan, Belarus, Korea, The Netherlands, The Ukraine, and more! Curated by Elizabeth Shepherd “For cultural immersion they’ll confuse for fun, take the kids to REDCAT’s International…
Find out more »September 2017
REDCAT: Faustin Linyekula/Studios Kabako: Sur les traces de Dinozord
"Quite possibly the most important artist working on the African continent today." — Frieze Magazine “There’s no walking away from Mr. Linyekula...painful, brutal, live-wire intensity.” —The New York Times “An ethereal figure with a spirit of steel... the Congolese choreographer is an intellectual and practical force to be reckoned with.” —The Star (South Africa) The riveting and elegant work of Congolese choreographer and writer Faustin Linyekula nurtures hope in the face of the ongoing legacy of war and ruin in…
Find out more »October 2017
Karen Finley: The Expanded Unicorn Gratitude Mystery
Wickedly funny… Ms. Finley knows anger; she also knows entertainment.” —The New York Times “ provocations resonate with surprising power.” —New York Theater “Unicorn is a rare beast indeed, a new way to consider the BDSM paradigm of the American body politic.” —Time Out New York Widely hailed as the high priestess of performance art, Karen Finley confronts the absurdity of contemporary politics and society in an incisive, hilarious and bedazzling new work she describes as “a psycho-sexual portrayal of…
Find out more »Guillermo Calderón: Mateluna
“He lets it rip and shows us his mettle. As a writer, Calderón is as interested in power as fact and illusion as the legendary Jean Genet and María Irene Fornés.” —Hilton Als, The New Yorker "Reminds us just how powerful a work of art can be.” —Magazine Artez “Starkly elegant … Calderón’s drama is Chekhovian in the best sense.”—Village Voice U.S. Premiere Mercurial Chilean playwright and director Guillermo Calderón, who is described as “an authentic genius of the theater”…
Find out more »November 2017
Charles Atlas, Rashaun Mitchell, Silas Riener: Tesseract
“ don’t just break the rules. They break them in a new way each time.” –Dance Magazine “One of the most technically ambitious dance recordings ever made…” —The Art Newspaper “The multidisciplinary Tesseract explores queer identity through the lens of science fiction.” —Chicago Reader The Sharon Disney Lund Dance Series Virtuosic movement is experienced through heightened new dimensions in this daring collaboration between two former Merce Cunningham dancers and an iconic filmmaker expanding the corporeal and digital realms. The thrilling…
Find out more »March 2022
Elevator Repair Service: Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge
From March 3-5, 2022, Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT), CalArts’ center for contemporary arts in downtown Los Angeles, proudly presents New York-based performance ensemble Elevator Repair Service with their powerful new adaptation, Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge. In 1965, James Baldwin and William F. Buckley, Jr. were invited to The Cambridge University Union to debate the resolution “The American Dream is at the Expense of The American Negro.” The result was a provocative and profoundly insightful confrontation between Baldwin, one of the most powerful…
Find out more »September 2022
Faye Driscoll: Thank You For Coming: Space
Choreographer Faye Driscoll is a Doris Duke Award-winning performance maker who has been hailed as a "startlingly original talent" by The New York Times. Her most recent work, Thank You For Coming: Space, is a shared rite of passage—a conjuring of the transformative powers of presence and absence. The dance work unfolds within an intimate installation—wired for sound and upheld by pulleys, ropes, and the weight of others—where Driscoll appears alone with the audience. Through an alchemy of body, object, voice,…
Find out more »November 2022
Christiane Jatahy: Depois do Silêncio (After the Silence)
In the new and final part of her trilogy on colonial violence, acclaimed Brazilian theater maker Christiane Jatahy looks at how racism and capitalism are interwoven. From the slave trade to the contemporary politics of the likes of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, little has changed. There are those who possess land, freedom, and their own identity, and those whose existence is of no value. In the award-winning novel Torto Arado by Itamar Vieira Júnior, the source material for the play,…
Find out more »Christina Catherine Martinez: Aesthetical Relations
Aesthetical Relations is a live comedy talk show experience by writer, actor, art critic, and comedian Christina Catherine Martinez, bringing together comedians, artists, video screenings, a rotating house band, and other multimedia delights. Loosely modeled on the late-night talk show format, guests perform unclassifiable feats of entertainment, followed by a brief heart-to-heart with the magnanimous host, Ms. Martinez. Bits and interruptions are sprinkled throughout, and the fourth wall is broken, reassembled, and mixed into a smoothie for your pleasure.
Find out more »William Kentridge: Houseboy by Ferdinand OYONO
Based on the 1956 novel Une Vie de Boy by Cameroonian diplomat Ferdinand Oyono, the 120-minute-long performance is directed by Kentridge and explores themes of historical participation, archival memory, and post-colonial identity. Upending accounts of colonial history told by colonizers, Houseboy looks at the same period through the vantage-point of the colonized, specifically through the eyes of Toundi Ondoua who is forced to serve a colonial household. Oyono’s novel is told through Toundi’s diary and is unflinching in its account of an era full…
Find out more »December 2022
My Barbarian: Double Future
REDCAT and Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles present Double Future, a double-bill performance by My Barbarian (Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon, and Alexandro Segade). Recently performed as the final act of their survey exhibition at the Whitney, You Were Born Poor and Poor You Will Die (Performa 05 at Participant Inc., 2005) combines ancient Greek theater, mystery plays, and rock opera to tell the story of a religious cult engaging in human sacrifice to maintain the economic status quo. Silver Minds (Aspen Art Museum, 2005)…
Find out more »February 2023
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.…
Find out more »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…
Find out more »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…
Find out more »March 2023
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…
Find out more »April 2023
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…
Find out more »May 2023
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…
Find out more »Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born: adaku, part 1: the road opens
In this chapter of a larger speculative mythology, a precolonial African village is at the cusp of a major upheaval. The community is entangled in an argument that could shape the future of all of their lives. This collective reckoning explores the fraught relationship between ancestors, future generations, and the role of ritual. A sonic and visual landscape of reflective textures, contouring shadows, and thrumming facilitates an intimate exchange between performers and the audience.
Find out more »September 2023
Natural Information Society
Natural Information Society is led by the acclaimed composer and multi-instrumentalist Joshua Abrams, alongside artist Lisa Alvarado, who returns to REDCAT following her recent exhibition, Pulse Meridian Foliation. Since first developing the Natural Information Society in 2010, Abrams has been gradually expanding the group’s conceptual underpinnings, its musical references, and the sheer number of the group’s members. Their music is, in a sense, an expansive form of minimalism, based in repeated and overlaid rhythmic patterns, ostinatos, and modalities. Their most recent…
Find out more »7NMS | Marjani Forté-Saunders + Everett Saunders: Prophet: The Order of the Lyricist
A four-year archival, research, and multi-genre storytelling project on the life journey of a lyricist, Prophet: The Order of the Lyricist, illuminates the distinctive practices, systems, philosophies, and political ideologies that have shaped hip-hop’s emcee/lyricists. The Lyricist is an Order of craft, of prose, oration, and exposé. Through the coming-of-age story of Everett as “Mental,” the emcee, audiences are invited to enter a world of courage, self-determination, and devotion. Using text, sound, film, and performance, Prophet is a critical and embodied…
Find out more »Anna Luisa Petrisko: All Time Stop Now
Anna Luisa Petrisko’s experimental opera, All Time Stop Now, is a contemplation on listening, impermanence, and kinship. A chosen family invokes a spell to stop time. In this suspended reality, they grapple with their existence in a time-based world as they search for ways to rest, heal, and feel joy. The stage morphs into a “spacetime playground.” Hypersaturated video, projection mapping, sculpture, dance, and new original music from Petrisko’s latest release on Practical Records transform the senses. Her signature prism of…
Find out more »October 2023
Boney Manilli
Written and directed by interdisciplinary artist Edgar Arceneaux, Boney Manilli is a dark musical comedy in the shape of a pop music video, a puppet show, and a burial ceremony. Actor Alex Barlas plays “Edgar,” a visual artist overwhelmed by feelings of inadequacy, frustration, and self-loathing, who is unable to complete his play on the infamous pop music duo, Milli Vanilli. His freeloading brother, Bro Bro, decides to adapt Disney’s Song of the South into his own play about Black liberation, while their mother,…
Find out more »L’Onde: The Wave
Internationally revered for her powerfully abstract work, Nacera Belaza draws a path between shadow and light, seeking to glimpse the infinite. In L’Onde (The Wave), the French Algerian choreographer immerses herself in the spellbinding notions of Algerian ritualistic dances. With a hypnotic sound narrative and mesmerizing movement that blends tradition and modernity, the piece features four dancers who explore the body’s capacity for transformation through rigorous and elegantly minimalist choreography.
Find out more »November 2023
Dorothée Munyaneza: Mailles
Renowned choreographer, singer, and author Dorothée Munyaneza brings Mailles to REDCAT. In this symphony for six African and Afro-descendant female voices, Munyaneza seeks to weave the fabric of their stories in collaboration with the designer and visual artist Stéphanie Coudert. The costumes and the material itself become the through line for what happens onstage, raising questions about the feminine and bodily freedom. Mailles is a women’s show united onstage in order for their different paths to be heard, as well as the violence of their life stories and history…
Find out more »Dimitri Chamblas with Kim Gordon: takemehome
A work for nine dancers, five electric guitars, and five amplifiers, takemehome is the latest creation of Dimitri Chamblas and Kim Gordon that takes shape under a luminous zeppelin where silhouettes emerge and disappear. These shadows are the forgotten ones of the great metropolises: prisoners, elders, unproductive ghosts, the neglected, the indecisive. Rendered visible in this device, itself ready to disappear, and embodied by dancers with precise movements, they wander, hesitate, or suddenly assert a vital impulse, display an attempt, repeat it,…
Find out more »Artis in Times of Crises: The Role of Artists in Weakened Democracies
Artis in Times of Crises: The Role of Artists in Weakened Democracies Nov 18, 2023, 1 – 8 p.m., REDCAT Los Angeles An Event by the Thomas Mann House in collaboration with Zócalo Public Square & Los Angeles Review of Books A public program at REDCAT Los Angeles on November 18 with performances and panel discussion on the role of the arts in times of crises. On November 18, 2023, the Thomas Mann House Los Angeles will convene a day-long…
Find out more »December 2023
Cuatro Minimal: Kumiroda — everything is dream
Take a journey with Cuatro Minimal, an intrepid quartet that blends roots music and oral traditions from Mexico and Asia with contemporary music, free improvisation, and deep collaborative experimentation. Founded in 2011 in the rice fields of Nanto, Japan, Cuatro Minimal includes singer and composer Juan Pablo Villa and guitarist Fernando Vigueras, both hailing from the contemporary music scene of Mexico City; the traditional Korean percussion master Chang Jaehyo; and one of Japan’s most respected world musicians, Sakaki Mango, who…
Find out more »