REDCAT’s NOW Festival Runs July 25-Aug. 10

CalArtians are featured in the lineup of nine new contemporary works at the 16th annual New Original Works (NOW) Festival, running from July 25-Aug. 10 at REDCAT in Downtown Los Angeles. 

Each summer, NOW Festival transmogrifies REDCAT into a cornucopia of dance, music, theater and multimedia performances. During the course of three weeks, the 2019 festival offers a stage to both emerging and established artists pushing the boundaries of their artistic disciplines.

• Actor Sola Bamis (Theater MFA 11) kicks off the festival in The Tutorial Part II: The White Tears Tea Steam, a “continuation of her revolutionary skincare routine and digital litany for Womanist survival” as presented by her digital alter ego @racheldolezall. Bamis’ piece critiques colorism in Hollywood while offering a four-week regimen of self-love and preservation for strong Black women.
• Samantha Shay (Theater BFA 12, MFA 16) directs Source Material’s music-theatre work A Thousand Tongues, a performance that interweaves a medley of sounds into a “tapestry of traditional music from all over the world.” Performer and vocalist Nini Julia Bang brings to life a story of isolation, vulnerability and the liminality between this world and the next.
• Artist Jesse Bonnell (Theater BFA 07) revives avant-garde playwright Richard Foreman’s texts in Paradise Island. The play explores that which exists between mundanity in a Parisian cafe setting and “the euphoric nature of the sublime hidden rhythms of the unknown.”

REDCAT Associate Director Edgar Miramontes characterizes the festival as a “vital initiative for experimentation and development that nurtures the creation of new interdisciplinary performances where artists share their unique perspectives, giving us an opportunity to view a changing world in different and imaginative ways …. The Festival creates opportunities for the artists that are all too rare. There is a great need for infrastructure to develop new performances, so NOW tries to address that need each summer.”

See the full event lineup here.