New Original Works Festival

The Roy and Edna Disney CalARTS Theater (REDCAT) presents the 21st annual New Original Works (NOW) Festival, a celebration of new and innovative dance, theater, music, and performance by Los Angeles artists presented over three weekends this fall.

Committed to an investigation of history and contemporary norms, these nine works use humor, improvisation, and multidisciplinary collaboration to disrupt power dynamics, craft collective rituals of care, and build new modes of community abundance.

Each of the three festival weekends features a triple bill of performances in a shared evening. Each program will premiere on Thursday and repeat Friday and Saturday at 8:30 PM. Performances will also be livestreamed each Saturday during the festival's run.

In the spirit of the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), REDCAT's parent institution, the NOW Festival has served as a catalyst for creativity and new ideas for more than two decades.

Each year, NOW Festival premieres new and innovative work in contemporary dance, theater, music, and multimedia performance by Los Angeles-based artists. All artistic teams receive rehearsal space, production and technical support, artist fees, and participate in development workshops. Since the first edition in 2004, NOW Festival has presented the work of over 200 artists who continue to be seen on stages throughout the U.S. and abroad.

Schedule of Events

Eliza Bagg, Rohan Chander, George R. Miller, Bernard Brown, Meena Murugesan

The 21st Annual New Original Works kicks off with a program of works by Eliza Bagg, Rohan Chander, George R. Miller, Bernard Brown, and Meena Murugesan. Committed to an investigation of history and contemporary norms, these works use humor, improvisation, and multidisciplinary collaboration to disrupt power dynamics, craft collective rituals of care, and build new modes of community abundance.

Eliza Bagg, Rohan Chander, George R. Miller
7 Early Songs

7 Early Songs is an opera song cycle created by composer-performers Eliza Bagg and Rohan Chander in collaboration with director George R. Miller. Framed by celebrated composer Alban Berg's rarely-staged song cycle of the same name, Sieben frühe lieder (1905-1908), this new work interweaves Berg's music with new arrangements of the existing material for voice, electronics, and synthesizers, along with entirely new compositions by Bagg and Chander. Miller stages the work as a series of poetic tableaux, tracing the lonely narrator's shadowy visions—the sound of a sweet voice, a surveilling gaze, a day of white chrysanthemums, or the sun's heat—as they process the banality of daily life and the urgency of the threats around them.

Bernard Brown
Sissies: Something Perfect Between Ourselves

Choreographer Bernard Brown spotlights a community of seven Black and Brown men, accompanied by a live DJ, Defacto X, in an uplifting dance performance that celebrates the Black Gay bar as a Queer haven. Taking its title–Sissies: Something Perfect Between Ourselves–from the disco-era ballad by Black Queer music icon Sylvester and Marlon B. Ross's text Sissy Insurgencies: A Racial Anatomy of Unfit Manliness, this work conjures a future where Queer Men of Color craft their own narratives as central to society. While they swirl, swish and kiki through disco and R&B songs highlighting the lost generation of Queer icons who changed the world, Brown prompts a reconsideration of understandings of masculinity, sexuality, and connection through embodied discourse, text, and sonic power.

Meena Murugesan
Dravidian Futurities: Chapter II

Dravidian Futurities: Chapter II dives into the deep indigo waters where the Bay of Bengal, Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea meet. Meena Murugesan investigates the space where a sunken landmass once connected South India and Sri Lanka to Africa to consider the connections across dark melanin, caste abolition, syncretic spiritual systems, and earth-reverent rituals. Together with an ensemble of diasporic artists based in Los Angeles, they craft a surreal visual art, movement, and music ritual to re-earth ethical possibilities of being together.

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