Winter/Spring 2021

With new commissions, performances, screenings, conversations, and exhibitions, the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) continues a program of reimagining performance and multidisciplinary practice. The REDCAT Winter/Spring season, from January through June 2021, reflects how the work of artists, and ways of acting, caring, and making together, take on an even greater urgency in the current moment. The season also offers an opportunity to support artists from all over the globe by showcasing their work virtually, amplifying their experiences from Los Angeles and beyond.

REDCAT’s new season includes three international productions: Chilean actor Francisco Reyes with his critically-acclaimed Yorick, La Historia de Hamlet, February 12-14; Indonesian choreographer and dancer Rianto exploring history, culture, and gender through dance, workshops, and film with Hijrah, February 18-20; and April 10-11, internationally renowned Chilean playwright and director Guillermo Calderón with The Second Life of Dragón, a version of his newest work for our current circumstances of confinement. Internationally acclaimed theater company Elevator Repair Service recreates a profoundly relevant 1965 confrontation, in a work-in-progress showing of Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge on April 23-25.

REDCAT musical performances this season include torchbearers of Chicago’s innovative jazz scene Artifacts Trio (February 27); Global Studios and Audiotopias, a project exploring virtual hybridity and musical collaboration with artists from around the world (March 13); stuttering, Afro-Caribbean composer, performer, and writer JJJJJerome Ellis with a newly commissioned work (April 3); soprano and sound artist Micaela Tobin with an immersive, experimental opera (May 1); and GRAMMY Award-winning PARTCH Ensemble with seven new works (June 4-5).

Mixing ritualistic and visceral movement, sound, video, and text, Jessica Emmanuel’s new solo dance work,ˈkwirē/, considers a dystopian world live from the REDCAT stage March 4-6. CalArts Dance returns April 29-30 with new work that once again expands the digital platform. 

The season also includes two works reimagined for a virtual stage: Dohee Lee’s ritual shamanic experience of music and dance, MU: 9 Goddesses, March 19-20, and Rosanna Gamson/World Wide’s dark dance/theater prequel to Hansel and Gretel, Prelude to Sugar Houses, June 10-12.

A living, moving score and endurance mediation on current times, taisha paggett presents com.pleats.we (housecoat) May 10-22, during which the dance artist and choreographer will live at REDCAT under the surveillance of a 24/7 livestream.

The season will also celebrate a newly commissioned work by prolific artist, writer, and curator Aria Dean. Co-commissioned by REDCAT and the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Aria Dean: Suite! is a film and installation that stars a chorus line of Kudzu plants occupying digitally rendered versions of Dean’s installation: a darkened chamber with a curved screen at one end, and a black and white checked floor that gives the optical illusion of a sunken hole. 

This season’s Film/Video programming comes from all corners of the cinematic and geographical world, from queer cinema to Indigenous culture, Latin American animation to female filmmakers from Post-Soviet Russia and feminist film collectives from South Korea, and so much more. Across ten screenings, the season features films by Aquelarre Gonzo Camarena, Hyun Jin Cho, COUSIN, Mariah Garnett, Sky Hopinka (2020 recipient of The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts in Film/Video), Fernanda Pessoa, Ekaterina Selenkina, Eduardo Williams, and others.

The season also features a series of REDCAT conversations: a continuation of “Black Motion Pictures,” a series of interviews with radical Black creatives about race, performance, and representation conducted and curated by artist Gabrielle Civil; CalArts MA Aesthetics and Politics Theorist in Residence McKenzie Wark on January 20; and CalArts 2021 Katie Jacobson Writer-in-Residence and current U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo on March 23.

For dates, details, or ticketing information, visit redcat.org.