Fall 2020

REDCAT, CalArts’ center for contemporary arts in downtown Los Angeles, continues its multidisciplinary program of experimentation, discovery, and lively civic discourse online this fall. Through streaming performances, exhibitions, screenings, and more, REDCAT will reach audiences around the world with a program of cutting-edge visual, performing, and media arts. Fall 2020 programming includes:

Inside Out & Upside Down: Posters from CalArts 1970-2019
August 25-November 29, 2020

This comprehensive retrospective provides an in-depth look at an unseen history of CalArts and graphic design practice. Featuring the work of important figures in Southern California graphic design from the last half century, the exhibition reveals the role of the CalArts Poster Archive in the history of contemporary design. The exhibition, virtual walkthrough, streaming conversations, and online platform explore the archive’s relationship to contemporary art and design, while interventions and speculative designs by invited artists reflect on inclusion, equity, race and representation in design practice and education. 

New Original Works (NOW) Festival 
October 8-10, November 5-7, December 10-12, 2020

The 17th annual New Original Works (NOW) Festival, an annual program featuring Los Angeles’ vibrant community of artists creating new contemporary performance work, will take place virtually over three weekends this fall. This year’s festival premieres new contemporary dance, theater, music and multimedia performances by Davia Spain, Simone Moore, Alex Alpharaoh, Primera Generación, Xiaoyue Zhang, randy reyes + Bapari, DaEun Jung, Monica Garcia + Samantha Mohr, Genna Moroni.

Black Motion Pictures
September 18, 2020

Covering topics from Black punk music to heritage sites, re-enactments to queer ancestors, REDCAT presents interviews by artist and poet Gabrielle Civil with radical Black creatives about race, performance, and representation.

Patrisse Cullors
October 2-3, 2020

Artist, political strategist, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, and founder of Reform LA Jails Patrisse Cullors will premiere a newly commissioned video work, recorded exclusively for REDCAT, Malcolm X Revisited.

Paul Outlaw
BigBlackOctoberSurprise
October 22-24 and October 28-31, 2020

In the final week before The Most Important Election in Our History™, Paul Outlaw’s solo performance offers a meditation on isolation, imprisonment and imperiled Blackness in America—not only in this year of COVID and insurrection, but throughout the history that began in the holds of the slave ships.

Daniel Corral + Alexander Gedeon
Concerto for Having Fun with Elvis on Stage + Count In!
November 14, 2020

Concerto for Having Fun with Elvis on Stage reimagines the vilified recording as the libretto for a sort of “ghost opera”—creating a memetic hologram of the endless purgatory of celebrity afterlife. Daniel Corral’s video piece Count In!, combines the voice of Poly Styrene [of 1970’s punk band X-Ray Spex] with musical minimalism and hypnotic color.

Dahlak Brathwaite
Try/Step/Trip Conversation
November 20-21, 2020

Writer and composer Dahlak Brathwaite, director Roberta Uno, choreographers Toran X. Moore and Freddy Ramsey Jr., and artist/organizer Dr. Shamell Bell discuss art and activism as a vital component of Try/Step/Trip one night, before screening excerpts from both Try/Step/Trip and Brathwaite’s solo performance, Spiritrials, the next night. 

Miguel Gutierrez
SADONNA: The Brown Ambition Tour
December 18-19, 2020

In the form of a cabaret concert conceived as a poignant homage to the pop icon, Miguel Gutierrez reinterprets Madonna’s big successes in a melancholic way, accompanied by the Slutinos, the Sad Latino Boys Backup Singers.

Fall 2020 REDCAT Film/Video Program
From the evolution of queer media in China, to BIPOC filmmakers pushing cinema’s conceptual boundaries, the Fall 2020 Film/Video program reflects the complexity of today’s independent and radical film communities. The season’s ten screenings, curated by Bérénice Reynaud, include films by Kevin Jerome Everson, Ulrike Ottinger, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Christine Panushka, Nicolás Pereda, Popo Fan, Kahlil Joseph, and more.

Aria Dean
Suite!
January 16 - April 11, 2021

REDCAT will begin its 2021 season with a solo exhibition of new work by artist and writer Aria Dean. Suite! is an animated dance film and installation featuring a plant-based chorus line.

For more information or to stream these events, visit redcat.org.