Posts Tagged ‘REDCAT’

Late July and we’re knee-deep in festival season. You’ve likely hit a few events from the Slamdance, the LA Film Fest, the Fringe Fest, Outfest, Comic-Con, the Middle Eastern Comedy Fest, Lilith Fair…the list goes on and on. The urge to see it all keeps us coming back, but I know, festival fatigue is strong. Hang in there, though—we’re at the home stretch. The REDCAT’s NOW Festival, which kicked off this weekend, should bring festival season to a spectacular end.

The New Original Works Festival features new dance, theater, music, and multimedia performance works by artists who are known for their often radical and unconventional approaches. While Week One (with work from Maureen Huskey and Killsonic) may have past us by, there’s still time to catch Weeks Two and Three, beginning this Thursday, July 29th.

Three artists make up Week Two of NOW: Christine Marie & Ensemble, in the expressionist theater piece “Ground to Cloud,” uses projections, electric light and shadowplay to unfold a multidimensional mythology of nature and human intervention. Systems of Us, from choreographer Rae Shao-Lan Blum & composer Tashi Wada, explores the disruption and transformation of relationships in a dance collaboration that may call to mind those early experiments of Cage and Cunningham. Finally, master of Breaking and hip-hop dance innovater Raphael Xavier’s “Black Canvas” explores the body of the Breaker in relation to the stage and life.

Week Three, beginning August 5th, features theater, dance, and animation. Alexandro Segade’s “Replicant vs. Separatist” depicts Segade himself calling the shots on a live sci-fi film shoot in which two male couples navigate the murky waters of state-mandated marriage. Hana van der Kolk’s “Once More, Again, One (Solo)” uses familiar pop music as the background for her solo dance adaptation of a work originally conceived for four dancers. To close, animator Miwa Matreyek (of Cloud Eye Control) uses animation with live projection to explore fantastical worlds in “Myth and Infrastructure.”

- By Helen Kearns

Each “week” of NOW is really only a Thurs/Fri/Sat, so budget your time accordingly. If you only attend one more festival this summer, consider the power of NOW. For more information, please visit www.redcat.org, or call 213-237-2800.

When I heard about choreographer Lionel Popkin’s There’s an Elephant in This Dance happening at the REDCAT this past weekend, complete with interpretive dance and elephant costumes, my imagination went wild. Dancing elephants! Sign me up! Being the enthusiastic fan of the extravagantly bizarre that I am, I was of course expecting something outrageous—chorus lines of elephants adorned in gold and green, roller-skating through arbitrarily-floating sheer fabrics of rose and yellow, a bazaar-like carnival of gleaming lights and clamorous music and pinwheels and ice sculptures and bubbles, lots of bubbles!—but of course, as I should’ve learned by now, anything that I attend at the REDCAT is nothing like what I expect. Usually, it’s better.

The dance opened with a woman, Peggy Piacenza, on a dark, empty stage, matter-of-factly putting on the pieces of a chintzy, worn-out elephant suit. She jiggled the headpiece into place, and bing! Elephant! The now-elephant contemplated her newfound existence for a moment before beginning a series of delightful, childlike dances, at moments hesitant and at others exuberant, until collapsing exhausted on the floor.

I was quickly learning that the elephants in my own mind rest in a much different place than the ones in Popkin’s. Popkin, raised in a split Hindu/Jewish home, grew up surrounded by images of Ganesh, the Hindu deity esteemed as the Remover of Obstacles and Lord of Beginnings. Popkin used his own connection to the iconography of Ganesh to explore the themes of cultural identity and self-actualization in There’s an Elephant.

Following the opening, the dance centered on the character played by Lionel Popkin himself. The wistful, plucky music of composer Robert Een’s live score accompanied by a black-and-white video of the furry dancing elephant by Cari Ann Shim Sham and Kyle Ruddick served as a backdrop for Popkin’s more serious self-exploration. Hands in pockets, Popkin planted himself center-stage and looked around inquisitively. Slowly, he began to sway, his spine swiveling at his hips just like the trunk of a curious pachyderm, whipping and contorting with increasing ferocity. Popkin was soon joined by the dance’s other players, including long-time collaborator Carolyn Hall and modern dance veteran Ishmael Houston-Jones.

Hall and Popkin took the lead in a terrific duet, wherein Hall commanded Popkin about the stage with her index finger, leading him by the mouth like a mule to a carrot. The innocent buoyancy of the dance dissolved quickly as the power struggle between the two dancers grew. Caught between resistance and longing, both dancers struggled to assert their individuality while simultaneously remaining clearly co-dependent. A beautiful play of domination, desire, and will emerged as Popkin’s character scuffled with the ever-more-clingy Hall. Finally, in a brilliant reversal of roles, it was no longer Hall’s character who led Popkin’s on her finger, but he who carried her, limp with exhaustion, into darkness.

What was so great about this dance was its capacity to mimic human capriciousness—at one moment somber and pensive, the dancers entwined in this petulant power-struggle, and at another playful and blithe. Being prone to emotional volatility myself (only sometimes, y’all) I found myself laughing out loud and then immediately sinking back with the dancers into their pining.

In the concluding act, Popkin’s character reached the final stage in his quest for self-actualization. Alone again, he encountered the elephant suit, which had maintained an eerie side-stage presence for much of the dance (aside from a charming interlude in which Piacenza romped excitedly around stage while attempting to put the thing on). Watching Popkin explore the dimensions of the suit, dressing and disrobing, at times rolling on the floor trailing the head by its trunk, gave strange feelings of awe and unease. With the last moments of the dance Popkin seemed to find peace, but only after many fits full of grace and existential yearning (I said it! Existential yearning!).

I was left not only wanting to sign up for an agro-yoga class, but feeling almost like I’d already taken one myself. That feeling you get after a not-to-strenuous bike ride on a sunny day. So what if I saw “dance” and “elephant” and I didn’t read any further—I’m glad I didn’t. There’s an Elephant in This Dance was the most pleasant surprise a trunk-lovin’ girl could’ve asked for.

For more information on REDCAT and their upcoming events, please call 213-237-2800, or visit www.redcat.org.

I took a walk during my lunch break today and thirty minutes down the road was straight-up sweating. I got back to the office with that oh so pungent little-boy-that’s-been-in-the-sun-all-day smell that I remember clinging to my little brother when we were kids.  Now I know we’re in LA, and season-change is practically non-existent, but I’ll happily take that salty odor that kept me from standing fewer than five feet from anyone for the rest of the day as a sure sign that yes, spring is upon us! Late sunsets! Heat! Insects! Prom! A great swell of life that will balloon under the fury of the rising sun and send us all spinning into summer.

The REDCAT’s CEAIT Festival could not have come at a better moment. The CalArts Center for Experiments in Art, Information and Technology Festival—a two-day-long, musical celebration of all things noisy and experimental—will open its doors this weekend with a parade of musicians who share in the spirit of the spring’s joyous cacophony. On Thursday night, John Wiese, of recent SunO))) doom metal fame and founder of grindcore outfit Sissy Spacek, will open the festival with his patented punch-in-the-ear soundscaping (and I mean that in a good way, I promise). Following Wiese is Maria Chavez, a Peruvian-born turntablist who experiments with “pencils of sound,” aka broken record needles, to compose crackling layers of dissonance.  Marcus Schmickler, based in Cologne and member of the electroacoustic free improv group M.I.M.E.O., will conclude the night with his laptop-led examination of astrophysical data.

Friday night is just as exciting. Casey Anderson, Scott Cazan, and Elisabeth McMullin of Better Than Future open with an ensemble of laptop warblings, followed by a set from Steve Roden. Roden is a mixed media artist whose set will combine field recordings, live improv, graphic notation, acoustic objects, electronics, and video as a meditation on desert lanscapes. Finally, Carla Bozulich (aka Bloody Claws), who’s very name has become synonymous with entropy—in both her solo work, as well as her frequent collaborations in bands like Evangelista and The Geraldine Fibbers—will conclude the fest. (And note to any Gerladine Fibbers reunion hopefuls out there: Bozulich does promise a special, secret guest).

Be warned: this is definitely not spring as Mendelssohn imagined it. It may not be for those who are weak-at-heart. Certainly not for those who are weak-at-spirit. But, if the spring has touched you as it certainly has touched me—or, if you’re just sick of yet another night of lounge-jazz at the Roosevelt—the REDCAT this weekend promises spring—in all it’s dirty, loud, tuneless glory.

by Helen Kearns

The festival takes place this Thursday and Friday, March 16^th and 17^th at the REDCAT. General admission is $20. Students $16. CalArts Students, Faculty, and Staff $10.

I may be living in the “age of technology” here in 2010, with the smart phones and the talking GPS devices and the iTunes auto-DJ always at my disposal.  We’ve all become pretty accustomed to—and spoiled by—this kind of “smart” technology that’s taking over at such a rapid rate. But, to this day, when I hear “robot technology” or “artificial intelligence,” I still think of Rosie—the sweet, lovable, wheel-legged house-bot from The Jetsons. And that’s just what I was expecting when I attended the SCREAM Festival at the REDCAT this Wednesday night, where the KarmetiK Machine Orchestra performed a unique symposium of electronic North Indian music.

The Karmetik Music Orchestra is the creation of music director Ajay Kapur, production director Michael Darling, and a whole team of musicians and designers both within and without the CalArts sphere. Ajay Kapur is the Director of Music Technology at CalArts and the creator of KarmetiK, a body of artists and engineers working to redraw the line between music and technology. KarmetiK uses artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction technologies to create new digital works of art. This is more than just reinventing the sitar, though. This is a whole new man behind the sitar. I’m talking about robots, here. The researchers and engineers at KarmetiK have pushed the technological barrier so far as to create custom-built robotic instruments that can improvise with a human musician, fusing musical tradition and modern engineering.

Neat! But are these robot-musicians self-aware? Maybe not, but this was nothing like what I expected. At Wednesday night’s performance, five robots shared the stage with a dozen or so musicians. Two strange looking drum sets hovered on each side of the stage, roughly seven feet from the ground, with drums, bells, cymbals, gongs, strings, and shakers splaying from the center. A rain stick spun slowly on an automated pinwheel at stage left. There was a gamelan-bot, like the Reyong used in the Balinese tradition, with upside-down metal pots suspended on a wooden frame. Tammy, a master-bot of sorts, stood high in the center. Tammy was designed by the well-known instrument sculptor Trimpin, Michael Darling, and Ajay Kapur, and built by students in the Robotic Design class at CalArts. Made up of a marimba, a self-plucking drone device, and five bells—all recycled objects found in the electronics junkyard—Tammy stands 14 feet tall and is certainly nothing like my dearly-beloved Rosie.

The program consisted of music in the North Indian style, beginning with a sparse call-and-response piece, Digital Sankirna, demonstrating the performer-robot interaction, in which the robots seemed to learn and play more as the piece progressed. Amazing was the robot’s sense of restraint—it seemed to intuitively know just when to release. Accompanied by Ajay Kapur’s ESitar and Curtis Bahn’s most beautiful EDilruba, it made for an arrestingly haunting opening. A second highlight was the appearance of the Ustad Aashish Kahn, considered one of the greatest living sarodists in the world, for a performance of the an Indian raga Shivranjani. Finally, the dance of the dalem, in the Balinese masked-dance tradition, concluded the program, complete with five gamelan players, the Reyong Bot, and the dancing white-masked king.

So maybe we haven’t yet advanced artificial intelligence to the point where robots are self-actualizing, but after watching KarmetiK, I feel that we are frighteningly close. This is more than a simple case of deus ex machina. Music is one of mankind’s most primitive forms of communication, fastening us together on the most gut level. The technology powerful enough to create a robot that can tap into the human psyche on that basic plane may be the great equalizer between man and machine, and that is a loaded possibility. Rosie is with us, certainly more than we might have known.

- By Helen Kearns

To see the full calendar of upcoming shows at REDCAT, please click here.

The job of a film archivist is a relatively new one.  It sounds silly.  (If my friend Pete has a massive DVD collection, is he suddenly considered an archivist?)  But what a lot of people don’t know is that film is a kind of living organism.  It decays quite rapidly over time.  And as depicted so graphically in the latest Tarantino venture, Inglorious Basterds, most of the movies made in the silent-era were shot on an ultra-flammable cellulose nitrate film base.  Due to this highly unstable stock, as well as the recklessness of early studio storage, a great many of the films made in America before 1920 are either lost, or have turned to dust.  In fact, no type of truly durable film base was even introduced into the movie-making landscape until the early 1990’s with the popularization of polyester.

Enter the heroic film archivist, whose job it is to preserve the ever-growing, ever-decaying amount of film stock from the grips of its natural demise.  Mark Toscano of the Academy Film Archive is one of these heroes, who most recently co-curated the REDCAT screening of Now You Can Do Anything: The Films of Chris Langdon.  This series of fourteen short, experimental films were all made within the period of two years, from 1973 to 1975, and would have easily been lost were it not for the efforts of people like Mark Toscano and fellow filmmaker/Angeleno, Thom Andersen.

Yet Langdon’s shorts, interestingly enough, seemed to work in spite of preservation.  The magic was in her apparent disregard for such preciousness.  Her film “Bondage Boy,” for instance, featured 16mm shots of a guy in a basement dressed in a woman’s slip and bound with ropes in various positions, all to the soundtrack of an uppity 1950’s swing tune.  “Picasso,” another one of Langdon’s works, was, in her words, “the first post-mortem documentary” of the famous painter, fully completed in four hours for a little under $5.

Langdon, who was present at the screening, addressed the audience afterwards.  And it was clear that her main motivation behind the 83 minutes of film we had all just sat through was simply to film something.  One piece was a joke, another was a bet, and one was just to get over the plain fear of wasting money through a camera.  In a sense, she was fueling the need for future experimental film archivists like Mark Toscano.  Because without artists with the courage to waste film, why would you need someone to preserve what’s special about it?

The Redcat is located Downtown at the Roy and Edna Disney/Calarts Theater in the Walt Disney Concert Hall.  For information about upcoming screenings and performances, please visit www.redcat.org, or call (213) 237-2800.

You’re met with fishnet stockings held up by a garter belt.  As your eyes pan upwards, you see a nude corset with black hooks and a jet-black wig.  As you take in the whole picture, you see a dancer/singer performing a rendition of Billie Holiday’s “You’ve Changed,” with swaying hips before an elaborate set.  Then you realize that this chanteuse is not like the others – not exactly that throaty singer you daydream about.  Potentially because… he’s a man…in drag.

His name is Joey Arias and he’s bringing his friend Basil Twist to REDCAT to perform their show Arias with a Twist.  From Wednesday, November 18 through December 13, you will be met with a feverish, fabulous theatrical extravaganza.  Arias will perform live a selection of songs from a host of different genres – from Billie Holiday to a Busby Berkeley-esque finale, you’ll be thoroughly entertained once you pick your jaw up from the floor.  We promise there will be costume changes and shocking showstoppers abound.  Telling you about them all would only ruin the effect.

Basil Twist, on the other hand, will be behind a team of puppeteers with vintage marionettes and “anatomically correct puppets.”  Known well for his underwater rendition of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, Twist has a wild imagination for creative, interactive set design and choreographed feats of puppeteering.  Originally hailing from New York’s downtown art scene, Arias and Twist have an underground street cred that’s making its way around the world and across the US – so far this year, they’ve toured through Paris, Brussels, Stockholm and now, Los Angeles.

What better way to kick off the holiday season than with a show that heightens your senses and shocks your sensibilities with familiar songs, wild costumes, spectacular set design, and good ol’ fashioned drag.  Just keep in mind that the more you drink, the better he starts to look.

Arias with a Twist will be on at REDCAT from November 18 through December 13.  For more information, please call or click here.

There are many directions you could take your Halloween experience this year. You could take the sweet ‘trick-or-treat amongst the children’ route, the ‘excuse to dress like a slut’ route, or the truly ghoulish, creepy, scary route.  If you are looking for any excuse to participate in the latter, REDCAT is the place to be on Friday, October 30 or Saturday, October 31.

It’s been proven time and again that it doesn’t take much to be thoroughly spooked.  In a great many very effective horror films, you may not even catch a glimpse of the monster until more than halfway through.  This weekend at REDCAT, prepare yourself for a truly original, horrifying experience: The Golem with live musical accompaniment under the direction of Brian LeBarton (otherwise known as Beck’s producer) for your pleasure.  Made in 1920 by Paul Wegener and shot by Karl Freund (of Metropolis fame), The Golem is the story of a statue brought to life by a Rabbi in 16th century Prague.  While the Rabbi’s intentions are noble, the experiment goes awry and the Golem ends up committing horrible crimes and kidnapping the Rabbi’s daughter.

We’d be ruining Halloween for everyone if we gave away the ending, but we do have something else to give away… tickets!  Fine Arts LA has got some tickets for both screenings of this spectacularly spooky piece of cinema and we’re just dying to give them away.

As always, some Extra! Extra! details you’ll want to keep in mind: by entering into this raffle, you’re automatically entered to win the next three we’ve got going on.  All we need is your first name, last name, email address, and voila – you’ll be off to REDCAT this weekend.  Try not to scream too loud!

(Click here if you don’t want to risk it and would rather just buy your own tickets.)

Everyone answers the question the same way.  “So, what kind of music do you listen to?” A little bit of everything, except country… right? Well, whether or not you’re hiding Carrie Underwood on your iPod, have you ever mentioned your penchant for “eclectic post-jazz?”

John Hollenbeck and his Claudia Quintet are betting they’ll be able to change your tune.  The New York-based band experiments with what we’ve thus far known as jazz, but not in an extremely esoteric way – their rhythms and sounds are playful, complex, and really get you thinking.  Since hearing them will undoubtedly give you a whole new genre to brag about (“I mostly love traditional Ghanaian drumming”), we’ve got some tickets to give away! Performing at REDCAT on Wednesday, October 28 at 8:30pm, Claudia Quintet includes Hollenbeck himself, Drew Gress on double bass, Maat Moran on “vibes,” Ted Reichman on accordian, and on the clarinet and tenor sax, Chris Speed.  They’ll be joined by guest pianist Gary Versace as well as a couple of curious and lucky Fine Arts LA readers!

Here are some Extra! Extra! details you’ll want to remember: by entering into this raffle, you’ll automatically be entered into the next three raffles we’ve got hidden behind our backs.  All we need is your first name, last name, and email address and voila – your eclectic musical taste speaks volumes about your open-mindedness.

(Click here if you don’t want to risk it and would rather just buy your own tickets.)

Let’s make something clear.  We’re not being paid by REDCAT, we don’t work for them, and they’re definitely not offering us anything sinister.  It’s not our fault that their lineup this week (and for the next few) has been something close to irresistible.

Having gotten that out of the way, tonight is the final night that you can see Belarus Free Theatre’s Discover Love at the downtown performance spot.  The company, which is banned at home, created the dramatic performance based on the true story of Irina Krasovskaya and her husband Anatoly who went missing a decade ago.  In a place where only state run theatres are allowed to exist, Belarus Free Theatre and its political, violent Discover Love are silenced before they open their mouths.

Irina and Anatoly’s story is one that we see only in films, with Anatoly, a democratic-supporter, businessman, and associate of one of Belarus’ government’s political rivals, kidnapped and subsequently murdered. The story is tragic and especially moving considering how far Belarus Free Theatre’s message has reached.  Discover Love premiered in the Netherlands and has been performed in Washington, Italy, and is now coming to LA.  Okay, specifically to REDCAT, which is a place all its own.

Belarus Free Theatre’s Discover Love closes this evening at 8:30pm at REDCAT.  For more information, please call or click here.

In my personal experience, South Africans tend not to worry about political correctness.  One night in Cape Town, I was impressed by the drag show unfolding before me entitled “Bangbroek Mountain” – a musical version of Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, that, dare I say, quite improved upon the movie.  Here to seemingly perpetuate this truth is Pieter-Dirk Uys, a Cape Town based satirist, with his Elections and Erections. 

A one-man drag show that pretty much only covers the taboo topics of politics and sex, nobody in either industry is safe: we’ll hear all about the Obamas, the Clintons, apartheid supporters, Communists, Democrats, and even Mr. Mandela.  He’ll perform also as his famed alter ego Evita Bezuidenhout – the self-proclaimed “most famous white woman in Africa.”  The head of her own political party, Evita’s People’s Party, and the recipient of her own awards from women’s groups in South Africa, Bezuidenhout is the very picture of what we might call a “hot mess” – she’s got a penchant for large jewelry and bright pink dresses.  This outrageous show takes politics about ten steps farther than John Stewart and Stephan Colbert combined.  Make that twenty steps, since they don’t dress in drag. 

Pieter-Dirk Uys and Evita Bezuidenhout’s performance of Elections and Erections will be at UCLA’s Glorya Kaufman Hall on Saturday, October 3 and Sunday, October 4 at 7:00pm.  For more information, please call (310) 825-2101 or click here.   Then they’ll be at REDCAT on Friday, October 9 at 8:30pm.  For more information, please call (213) 237-2800 or click here.