Jinku Kim’s untitled work at NOW Festival this week. Photo: Jinku Kim
The New Original Works (NOW) Festival continues this week with three new works for the stage. The week two program includes experimental choreographers Nick+James, sound/video artist and CalArts alumnus Jinku Kim (Music MFA 12) and Cambodian multimedia artist, Prumsodun Ok.
Nick+James: Lake
Nick+James presents ‘Lake’ | Photo: Nick Duran and Jmy James Kidd
Experimental choreographers Nick Duran and Jmy James Kidd create an ongoing investigative dance project that “repurpose(s) movement stored in their bodies from throughout their careers.” Between the two collaborators, they have danced for luciana achugar (Dance BFA 95), Seán Curran, Neil Greenberg, Victoria Marks, Mark Morris, Sarah Michelson, among many others. More about their new work, Lake, from REDCAT:
[Duran and Kidd] create an uncanny duet that reveals lineages of movement. In a sense stolen, yet transformed, transposed and renewed, the dance is performed in strict unison to a live score by multi-instrumentalist Tara Jane ONeil, highlighting subtle expressions of individual desire within the confines of choreographic legacies that stem back decades.
Jinku Kim
Sound and video artist Jinku Kim composes “hypnotic, data-driven synchronizations of electronic music and abstract projected imagery that respond to architecture both as a medium and a source of inspiration.” Kim, who recently created site-specific works on the walls of the Roy O. Disney Concert Hall and the Wild Beast at CalArts, brings his newest work to the REDCAT stage:
For his latest sense-saturating work, he fills the theater with looming surfaces developed in collaboration with scenic artist Drew Foster that serve as a luminous skin, immersing the audience in gravity-subverting configurations of pulsing color and light that amplify his time-altering spatialized sound.
Below is video Kim’s recent work, Piece for Mondrian:
Prumsodun Ok: Of Land and Sky
Prumsodun Ok brings ‘Of Land and Sky’ to REDCAT’s stage. Photo: Prumsodun Ok
Prumsodun “Prum” Ok’s multimedia performance draws on Cambodian pop music and traditional dance to retell and recast a classical drama. More from REDCAT:
Following the narrative of a mythological Buddhist tale in which an earth-bound deity falls in love with a mortal, Of Land and Sky re-imagines the central lovers as two gay men and surrounds them with a chorus of intergenerational women to explore notions of femininity, beauty and transgressive love. A classically trained artist who refuses to dismantle his tradition even as he challenges its constraints, Ok invokes contemporary political inquiry while retaining the elegant gestural language of Khmer dance.
The performance features music by alumni composers Archie Carey (Music MFA 11) and Odeya Nini (Music MFA 11), in addition to percussionist Ariel Campos.
“We basically created a score that is highly improvised in relation to Prum’s direction,” says Carey. To create the music, the musicians responded to poetic images that Ok provided. “Prum would tell us to play as if we are in a river from another world, or to make sounds as if that river is being sucked into a black hole.”
All three works are presented at this weekend’s performances.
New Original Works Festival: Week 2
REDCAT
631 West 2nd St., Los Angeles
July 27-28 at 8:30 pm
Tickets: $18, $14 students and $10 CalArts community