Pull up a cushion, have a cookie, get comfortable. Speak if you like, or just listen: This Emancipation Thing is an invitation to connect, to resurrect the second-wave feminist consciousness-raising circle in a new theatre event led by an interracial, gender-expansive ensemble. How do our relationships, our desires, our relationships with our bodies vibrate between 1968 and 2023, across generations? Whether for an hour or for six, settle into a womb of listening and care as contemporary LA-based feminists of all ages and genders intervene in the past, collapsing time in a new kind of theater experience from director Sara Lyons. With reproductive rights slipping through our fingers, what wisdom must we awaken from the activists who ushered in Roe v. Wade (1973)? What of that past must we crumble — and how will we emerge from the rubble?

EPSG:4326

Sara Lyons: This Emancipation Thing

Walt Disney Concert Hall

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 plays African thumb piano and the gottan, a string instrument from Kagoshima region. Cuatro Minimal is recognized as a highly innovative project, a kaleidoscope of musical possibilities built by cables and effects, an irresistible and deeply expressive landscape of sounds where the roots appear free and wide, intimately, and universally human.

Cuatro Minimal: Kumiroda - everything is dream

Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance at CalArts presents an eclectic mix of new dance projects created by Los Angeles-based artists Tuixén Benet, Gheremi Clay, Oren ‘Flea Rock’ Michaeli, Sara Silkin, and Mike Tyus & Luca Renzi, performed by CalArts Dance’s excellent students.

CalArts Winter Dance: Closer

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, share it. In these emergences, in this collective isolation, telepathy and intuition maintain communication. Between the lines, under your skin, the driving force of the future and of the living continues to circulate and resist.

Takemehome

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.

The Wayward

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.”

Music for Transitions

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.

Okwui Okpokwasili

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.

CalArts Spring Dance Concert

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!

Talent Show

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.

Amor a la muerte (Love to Death)

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.

Radical Self-Love

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.

Etta and Ella on the Upper West Side

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.

FAC XTRA RETREAT (FXR)

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.

The Mother

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.

Canto de Todes

KLII exorcises the ghost of Belgium’s King Leopold II through a mytho-biographical performance by theater-maker Kaneza Schaal. Designed and codirected by Christopher Myers, KLII draws on Mark Twain’s King Leopold’s Soliloquy (1905), a fictional monologue written after Twain’s visit to the Congo Free State, and Patrice Lumumba’s 1960 independence speech in the Congo. Increasingly our demons are invisible—long-hidden racism and misogyny, misinformation, even the virus. How do we handle these threats, which are as central to our everyday life as they are hidden? Schaal and Myers propose an exorcism in theater, starring one of the villains of the 19th century whose actions resonate through the present day.

Kaneza Schaal: KLII

The Grammy Award winning PARTCH Ensemble returns to REDCAT with two world premieres. Having given the virtual premiere choreography of Harry Partch’s “Castor & Pollux” at REDCAT in June 2021, the “wonderful rollicking” (New York Times) Sarah Swenson Dance returns for a live performance of the entire triptych of Plectra & Percussion Dances, the composer’s 45-minute “Evening of Dance Theatre” that has never been choreographed in its entirety since being written 70 years ago. Then the ensemble partners with the “luminous yet corporeal” (Los Angeles Times) Del Sol Quartetin Taylor Brook’s One Footed for string quartet and Partch instruments, paying homage to Harry Partch’s “One-Footed Bride” chart that explores the expressive qualities of “emotion,” “power,” and “suspense” inherent in his exquisitely tuned musical universe.

PARTCH Ensemble

Written and performed by Alpert Award-winning poet and artist Carl Hancock Rux, The Baptism is a three-part poem and tribute to the legacies of civil rights leaders John Lewis and C.T. Vivian. This live event will also include two iterations of a short film — The Baptism and The Baptism (rhetoric) — directed by seminal artist Carrie Mae Weems, with the latter featuring an original score by Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Meshell Ndegeocello.

Carl Hancock Rux and Carrie Mae Weems: The Baptism

Celebrating 60 years of revolutionary music, REDCAT is pleased to present a performance by the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra playing new and memorable tunes. The Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra is a Black music ensemble from Los Angeles founded in 1961 by Horace Tapscott. The Arkestra started as a collective of jazz musicians as a response to the racial inequality in the U.S. Artists subjected to prejudice who saw opportunities denied to them found an outlet to express themselves via the Ark. The Ark is currently mixed with veteran members as well as young musicians, all led by Mekala Session with the help of Jamael Dean and veteran members.

Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra

There is a mounting need for solutions to our national housing crises. Can art help us meet these challenges? The Most Beautiful Home… Maybe offers a nerdy and raucous vision for guaranteed housing. Hosted by chanteuse Zébra (a zebra), this multimedia, immersive performance juxtaposes housing data, Lyndon B. Johnson, and torch songs while time traveling through stories of Americans facing home insecurity, past and present. This interactive experience takes audiences on a fantastic sensurround journey to envision a future where everyone has a home. Created by Mark-n-Sparks (ashley sparks and Mark Valdez) and produced by the Mixed Blood Theatre of Minneapolis, The Most Beautiful Home...Maybe grew from conversations with housing advocates, activists, developers, government workers, renters, and people facing home insecurity. This performance is part of a multi-year, multi-platform experiment by Mark-n-Sparks to influence housing policy through art and dialogue.

Mark-n-Sparks: The Most Beautiful Home...Maybe

CalArts Dance presents adventurous repertory celebrating the new season and the return to in-person performing. Featuring works by Trisha Brown, Donald Byrd, Kyle Abraham, and Sidra Bell performed by CalArts Dance’s spectacular students.

CalArts Spring Dance

LA Opera Off Grand presents a new one-person opera by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Du Yun, presented in collaboration with Beth Morrison Projects. Told through the perspective of a new father (baritone Nathan Gunn), In Our Daughter’s Eyes shows the journey of the protagonist as he wrestles with truly becoming a man that his daughter would be proud of. He imparts passages from the journal he keeps—a gift for his unborn daughter—as the moments of this journey unfold before him. The story traces his wife's joyful and fraught pregnancy, the legacy of the family's past, and the personal demons that he vows to vanquish before assuming the role of a father. Along the way, mounting complications take the story through unexpected and sobering turns that test our flawed hero as he discovers a strength of self and purpose that he never imagined possible.

Du Yun: In Our Daughter’s Eyes

Derrick Skye is a composer and musician based in the Los Angeles area who often integrates music practices from different cultural traditions around the world into his work with classical music communities. The Los Angeles Times has described his music as “something to savor” and “enormous fun to listen to.” During his studies at the University of California, Los Angeles and the California Institute of the Arts, music across many cultures became an integral part of his musical vocabulary. Skye passionately believes in music as a doorway into understanding other cultures and different ways of living. Through learning the music of other cultures, the opportunity for dialogue rather than conflict between strangers is opened, and our society can become one with less conflict due to cultural misunderstanding. He is deeply invested in fostering creative and effective collaboration between artists of different disciplines and traditions.

Derrick Skye: Where can we go, from here?

California-born, Berlin-based artist Christine Sun Kim explores concepts of sound, its visual representations, and how it is valued by society, from her perspective as part of the Deaf community. She uses performance, video, drawing, writing, and sound installation to uncover the depth and complexity of communication, including the politics of voice, listening, and language. Musical notation, written language, American Sign Language, and the use of the body are all recurring elements in her work. In this multimedia artist talk, Kim shares the thinking behind her practice and invites the audience to consider the concept of sound as it is felt, seen, and experienced.

Christine Sun Kim

Try/Step/Trip is a spoken word, multi-character musical performed in the body through the language of step dance. The story follows the journey of an anonymous narrator as he re-imagines his experience in a court-ordered drug rehabilitation program. Inspired by Brathwaite’s own history, Try/Step/Trip layers characters, poetic verse, and dialogue over music to create a theatrical piece that blurs the lines between hip-hop and dramatic performance. Try/Step/Trip emerges from the belief that the subjugation of Black people is an American ritual; that the criminal justice system now functions as a normalized rite of passage for too many young Black males. Dahlak Brathwaite is the writer/composer, Roberta Uno is the director, choreography is by Toran X. Moore, with assistant choreography by FreddyRamsey, Jr., and orchestration and additional composition by Teak Underdue.

Dahlak Brathwaite: Try/Step/Trip

FAVN is an automated performance tracing the blurry boundaries between reality and imagination, sensory perception and hallucination. Evoking notions surrounding late-19th-century psychophysics and the quantification of the senses, in FAVN, we follow Debussy in sonically reincarnating the protagonist of Mallarmé’s 1876 poem “L’après-midi d’un faun.” FAVN uses the question ‘What did I hear?’ as a way to interrogate the constructive cognitive processes that intervene in apparently purely sensory, or indeed sensual, experiences. Using synthetic sound and a computer-generated voice, this work is presented for the first time in the United States on the occasion of the exhibition “Florian Hecker — Resynthesizers.”

Florian Hecker: FAVN

Elisa Harkins and Anna Luisa Petrisko share the REDCAT stage in this double-bill evening exploring future and ancient indigenous ideas. In Wampum / ᎠᏕᎳ ᏗᎦᎫᏗ, Elisa Harkins sings in a combination of Cherokee, English, and Muscogee (Creek) to electronic dance music, some of which is inspired by sheet music of Indigenous music notated by Daniel Chazanoff during the 20th century. As an act of Indigenous Futurism, it combines disco and Indigenous language in an effort to alter the fate of these endangered languages through active use. The intention of the Wampum / ᎠᏕᎳ ᏗᎦᎫᏗ performance is to create a metaphorical peacekeeping agreement that is between the people watching the piece, regardless of tribe or race.  Using vintage analog gear and video synthesis to create hypersaturated worlds, Anna Luisa Petrisko and special guests will transform the REDCAT stage into a sonic and visually immersive set, performing songs from her 2018 “tropical new age pop” album, Green, as well as new material and collaborations. Informed by grief, healing, and spirituality, Anna Luisa bends the past's visualization of the future into an ancient-feeling present moment. Expect interstellar synths, hymnal vocals, and tropical beats, woven together with vibrant chromatic visions.

Elisa Harkins: Wampum / ᎠᏕᎳ ᏗᎦᎫᏗ
Anna Luisa Petrisko: Green and all the Colors

Faye Driscoll’s Thank You For Coming: Space is a shared rite of passage—a conjuring of the transformative powers of presence, and of absence. Space 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, and live sound, she builds a moving requiem for the human body and conjures a world that is, like ourselves, alive and forever changeable. At the center of the work is the human body—built for action, self contained, and driven by its longing for the felt world. Space speaks in bewilderment. It conjures the inevitable forces of loss and grief and asks: How do I reproduce you, talk about you, now that you are gone?

REDCAT (Roy & Edna Disney /CalArts Theater)

Dec 9, 2023

Sara Lyons: This Emancipation Thing

Dec 3, 2023

Cuatro Minimal: Kumiroda - everything is dream

1 - 2 Dec, 2023

CalArts Winter Dance: Closer

8 - 9 Nov, 2023

Takemehome

16 - 17 Jun, 2023

The Wayward

REDCAT (Roy & Edna Disney /CalArts Theater)

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