Now in its sixth year, the New Original Works (NOW) Festival opens tonight at REDCAT in L.A.’s Walt Disney Concert Hall. For the next three weeks, eight different Los Angeles-based dance, theater, music and multimedia artists will showcase their innovative works. On the program this week:
Early Morning Opera’s Abacus: Under the direction of Lars Jan, Early Morning Opera’s large-scale multimedia work Abacus features a solo performer interacting with projected video and a chorus of choreographed Steadicams to explore R. Buckminster Fuller’s vision of a Geoscope–a data visualization device that could almost perfectly model the future.
Sheetal Gandhi’s Bahu-Beti-Biwi (Daughter-in-Law, Daughter, Wife)
Sheetal Gandhi’s magnetically rhythmic Bahu-Beti-Biwi wraps North Indian music traditions and family characters into a contemporary tour de force that glides between humorous portraiture and active resistance.
Ayana Hampton’s The Ayana Hampton Show (video above)
Ayana Hampton headlines her own wildly sexy and overtly subversive music-theater cabaret. Her song stylings range from raunchy to reverent as she testifies to the obsessions that fuel her iconic ambition–from prolific fornication to roiling heartbreak, from Michelle Obama’s coiffure to Hampton’s own celebrity social cause: Acute Diana Ross Disorder.
Program 1
New Original Works Festival
REDCAT
631 W. 2nd St., Los Angeles
Thurs.-Sat. at 8:30 pm
Tickets are $14-$18 (CalArts $10)