Fall 2021 at REDCAT

Making its return to live performance and art, the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) announces its fall 2021 season. Through live and streaming performances, screenings, and exhibitions, REDCAT, CalArts’ Downtown Los Angeles center for contemporary arts, will once again welcome in-person audiences while also reaching online audiences around the world. 

The fall 2021 season at REDCAT includes What Remains, a collaboration between world-renowned poet and MacArthur Fellow Claudia Rankine and choreographer and Guggenheim Fellow Will Rawls. Inspired by Rankine’s texts on racial violence—Citizen (2014) and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004)—the result is a performance at the edge of dance and poetry that meets and challenges the erasure of Black citizens with its own immersive disturbances. 

Opening the season, performers and choreographers jumatatu poe and Jermone Donte Beacham will explore J-Sette, a performance style practiced widely among majorettes and drill teams at historically Black colleges and universities, presented as part of The Sharon Disney Lund Dance Series. 

The new season also features world premieres from three of L.A.’s most exciting artists: choreographer, performer, and educator Milka Djordjevich’s CORPS, exploring how labor and gender are addressed under the lens of regimented movement; extreme vocalist, improviser, and intermedia artist Carmina Escobar’s Bajo la Sombra del Sol / Under the Sun’s Shadow, a performative hypertextural scenic work staged at Mono Lake, California; and artist Nao Bustamante’s The Wooden People, which layers ancient myths on the familiar melodrama of the telenovela.

The 18th annual New Original Works (NOW) Festival—a celebration of Los Angeles’ vibrant community of artists—returns with nine new works by L.A.-based artists continuing to redefine the boundaries of contemporary performance. Back in person, NOW will unfold over three weekends, and feature a triple bill of performances each night on October 7–9, 14–16, and 21–23.

Philadelphia-based Moor Mother and collaborator Vitche-Boul Ra present recognition technology, a visceral blend of social issues, hardcore electronics, and intense poetry, while internationally renowned bass player Mark Dresser and Canadian jazz heavyweights the Jeremy Ledbetter Trio perform as part of the Angel City Jazz Festival. And CalArts Dance returns to REDCAT for its annual Winter Dance Concert December 3–4.

The fall season also includes presentations of new films by Lebanese artist Haig Aivazian, queer Afro-Puerto Rican artist Macha Colón, a sneak preview at the latest feature by acclaimed director Bill Morrison, groundbreaking women animation artists from Japan, a one-of-a-kind live Halloween and Día de los Muertos celebration from curator and historian Abraham Castillo Flores, and the return of the contemporary artists’ cinema series, Murs Murs.

Throughout the fall, REDCAT offers a comprehensive look at Karrabing Film Collective, an Indigenous media group based in Australia’s Northern Territories that uses the creation of film, and art installations, as a form of Indigenous grassroots resistance and self-organization.

And on November 6, REDCAT opens CPT Reversal, a new installation from Black Quantum Futurism, the interdisciplinary creative practice between artists Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips. CPT is commonly understood as the acronym for “Colored People’s Time,” oftentimes a negative stereotype, but also a cultural understanding that events and experiences do not adhere to strict schedules and linear time. In physics, the same acronym stands for “charge, parity, and time reversal,” a fundamental symmetry of laws that holds for all physical phenomena. Intrigued by this double meaning of CPT, Black Quantum Futurism seeks to examine time and temporality at various scales and dimensions—personal, interpersonal, communal, global, and cosmic time—and their connections and reverberations through new and rearranged videos, collages, maps, sounds, and other visual works.

As we begin to gather together again, the fall 2021 season is guided by the urgency of performance and experimentation in engaging the complexities of our shared moment. REDCAT remains resolute as ever in its commitment to artists, and to uplifting the voices and perspectives that continue to define the present.

For details or ticketing information, visit redcat.org.