SCREAM, the Southern California Resource for Electro-Acoustic Music, returns to REDCAT for its annual SCREAM Festival, a series of yearly programs curated by Barry Schrader. This year’s event features NoiseFold, a live cinema, installation and electronic music performance group founded by artists David Stout and Cory Metcalf. SCREAM Festival: NoiseFold will be held at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater on Friday, November 5, 2010 at 8:30 pm.

Originally from New Mexico, NoiseFold melds real-time animation and generative electronic sound within the legacy of cybernetics. Using sensor-activated computer systems and complex audiovisual feedback models, Metcalf and Stout synthesize a mesmerizing array of bio-mimetic visual forms that generate sound, celebrating the evolution of visual music as a form of instrumental play with semiautonomous systems. From subtle lifelike emanations to roiling upheavals of sound and light, their audiovisual events are at once familiar, mysterious, and strange. The result is a powerful synaesthetic experience where noise, music and image interact on a symphonic scale.

On November 5, NoiseFold unleashes a suite of selected movements in its live cinema works nFold 1.0, ALCHIMIA, and Neu_Blooms. Presenting their work on varied multi-screen configurations that provide opportunities for the pair to join in duets, perform solos or share data between a number of screens at once, the performers re-imagine a painterly abstraction to suggest elemental narratives that evoke highly charged emotional states in an effort to reinvent the laptop performance as an embodied dramatic form.

SCREAM Festival: NoiseFold will take place at REDCAT on Friday, November 5, 2010. Curtain for performance is 8:30 pm. Tickets are $20 ($16 for students with current I.D.) and are available at www.redcat.org or by calling 213 237-2800. REDCAT is located at the corner of W. 2nd and Hope Streets, inside the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex (631 West 2nd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012).

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This September, Poland’s Stefan Zeromski Theatre unleashes on Los Angeles In the Solitude of Cotton Fields, a theatrical tour de force described by Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza as “A combination of a concert, disco, poetic slam, and club event.” Co-presented with The Polish Cultural Institute in New York, performances will be held at REDCAT on Thursday, September 23, 2010 and runs through Saturday, September 25, 2010 at 8:30 pm with an additional matinee on Sunday, September 26, 2010 at 7:00 pm.

Fueled by the live music of Poland’s cult rock band Natural Born Chillers, the searing text by late French writer Bernard-Marie Koltès takes on a visceral urgency when two seductive frontmen for an edgy art-rock band have more than singing on their minds. Under the direction of Radosław Rychcik , the enigmatic young men engage in an intense dance of negotiation.

They are dealer and client, but are clearly trading something deeper and more mysterious than ordinary goods and services. The high-stakes game is played out amid a powerful barrage of video and lighting effects, enhancing Rychcik’s masterful manipulation of raw power and emotional fragility–demonstrating why the young Polish director is gaining global attention.

Radoslaw Rychcik lives and works in Poland. He began his career as an assistant to renowned director Krystian Lupa on Factory 2 and later worked on Stanislaw Wyspianski’s drama Protesilas and Laodamia. In 2008, Rychcik directed Dictator, a performance based on Charlie Chaplin’s film, for the Wybrzeze Sztuki Festival in Gdansk. Most recently, Rychcik has presented A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes at the Drama Theatre in Warsaw and an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Versus: In the Jungle of Cities at the New Theatre in Krakow and the Under the Radar Festival in New York.

In the Solitude of Cotton Fields makes its Los Angeles premiere at REDCAT on Thursday, September 23, 2010 and runs through Sunday, September 26, 2010. Curtain for performances on Thursday-Saturday is 8:30 pm with a Sunday performance at 7:00 pm. Tickets are $20-25 ($16-20 for students with current I.D.) and are available at redcat.org or by calling 213 237-2800. REDCAT is located at the corner of W. 2nd and Hope Streets, inside the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex (631 West 2nd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012).

The performances at REDCAT are co-presented with The Polish Cultural Institute in New York. Generous support for In the Solitude of Cotton Fields was granted by the Trust for Mutual Understanding. Additional support comes from The Marshall of the Swietokrzyskie Voivodeship.

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Name: George Lugg
Title: Associate Director, REDCAT
URL: www.redcat.org

1. Where did you grow up and how did you end up where you are now?

The first half of my childhood was spent on Long Island, in a housing development where the streets were named after American-made cars. I lived on DeVille Drive. My family then moved to Madison, Indiana, a small town on the Ohio River and settled into a house on Main Street. Really. And after the initial shock, I became actually quite happy, and my father, rather unexpectedly, started acting in Louisville, Kentucky, where a former NYC firefighter who spoke like a guy from the Bronx met the demand for tough guys and cops and smarmy businessmen in a town where everyone had a drawl. That began my association with theaters, and is probably why I have almost no interest in traditional theater. I dreamed of being a French teacher. Which lead me to Paris for a bit, where I met an interesting band of Seattlites, followed them back to Seattle, and wound my way to On the Boards in 1989, where I saw so much work that excited and interested me that I’ve pretty much been working in the field ever since.

2. Which performance, song, play, movie, painting or other work of art had the biggest influence on you and why?

It would have to be Jay Anson’s horror novel 666, his follow-up to Amityville Horror. It was the first time I really remember thinking “this is crap.” I can’t think of a more defining moment. I was in the 6th grade and living on Long Island and I had thought Amityville Horror was the coolest book ever. So I grabbed this fat, paperback edition off a rack at the library and didn’t even make it through the first chapter. It broke my trust. Evil voices were rendered in ALL CAPS! It was forced and unbelievable and cheap. Something started to take shape in my consciousness: that I was on my own. That the library was probably filled with useless things, and that I couldn’t be passive and had to hunt for things of value. It was the beginning of an independent opinion, and perhaps a quest.

3. What skill, talent or attribute do you most wish you had and why?

I would like to know exactly how to let go. It’s this thing that I understand intellectually: That is the past, it is no longer relevant… But, really, do we have conscious control of such things? If so, I would like some instruction. Grief, longing, love, a humiliating moment—–what the hell are they anchored to? I can play shrink with myself and say “Obviously, you don’t really want to let go of these things.” But I am pretty sure I do, I just don’t seem to get the mechanics. So I wait. And you’d be surprised how long it can take to forget.

4. What do you do to make a living? Describe a normal day.

I work for REDCAT in Los Angeles. My title is Associate Director. Maybe it’s like bowling. I take hundreds of little details and roll them into a ball. Then I stand and look head-on at a line-up of pins, take aim, and try to knock down as many as I can. I think that’s right. Only at the end of the day, whether I’ve knocked them all down or missed entirely, there’s a show.

5. Have you ever had to make a choice between work and art? What did you choose, why, and what was the outcome?

Yeah, sure. I chose my job. Because it was the right thing to do, for me. Now I have a job.

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This sounds like a pretty interesting show.

This September, REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) transforms its flexible performance space into an immersive visual and sonic environment for the world premiere of AH!, a co-production of The Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts and the CalArts Center for New Performance. AH! opens Wednesday, September 16, 2009 at REDCAT and runs for a limited engagement through Friday, September 18, 2009.

Standard theatrical seating is absent as audience members are invited into an intimate arena of sound, experiencing what the creators describe as an “opera no-opera.” Composed and performed live by creators from across the Americas, Europe and East Asia, this pioneering collaboration emerged from A Counterpoint of Tolerance, a special project of the Transatlantic Arts Consortium (TAC) led by composer-performer David Rosenboom and award-winning poet Martine Bellen.

Drawing inspiration from the classic Buddhist text, the Diamond Sutra, AH! is a celebratory passage across musical cultures and times: a polyglot clarion call for understanding and unity in today’s globalized, increasingly interconnected world. Rosenboom and Bellen describe AH! as “Interwebbing variations, narrative actions, story woven into story form, one song, one story, one song-story story-song, one opera no-opera. Is it Electronic? Static Buzz? Rock? Jazz? Eastern? Western? Northern? Southern? Post-Modern? Pre-Modern? Experimental Funk? Zen Hip Hop? Genre-blind? Yes! Yes! Yes!”

Performing in more than 13 different languages and on a variety of Latin American, East Asian and Western instruments, including an eleven piece lap-top orchestra, the collaborating composer-performers who comprise A Counterpoint of Tolerance are Iván Caramés Bohigas (Spain), Michael Foumai (US-Hawaii), Alex Kotch (US-North Carolina), Claudio Maldonado (Argentina-Patagonia), Vedran Mehinovic (Bosnia), Natalie Oram (UK), Doo Jin Park (Korea), Jerónimo Rachenberg (Mexico), Diana Syrse Valdés Rosado (Mexico), and Xiaolang Zhou (China). Joining them at REDCAT, along with David Rosenboom and Martine Bellen, is an exceptional cast of musicians, theatermakers and interactive artists under the direction of Travis Preston, who stages this exceptional music event with production designer Christopher Barreca, choreographer Mira Kingsley, lighting designer Laura Mrczkowski, and video designer Jeremiah Thies.

Spinning off a mandala of 13 extraordinary and ordinary modern-life stories, this spellbinding opera brings together ingenious stagecraft, flights of phenomenal musicianship, and an array of robotic and interactive musical technologies, Musical robots, 3-D sound-speaker pods, a piano outfitted with Multi-Laser Gestural Controllers, and a Laser Tetrahedron Music Controller suspended in the theater have been imagined, developed, and utilized for this immersive visual and aural experience. More information about these technologies is described at www.ah-opera.org, where the audience is invited to engage with and contribute to AH! before, during and after the performances at REDCAT. Via the website, mobile media, and an interactive, multi-touch BriK table in REDCAT’s lobby, the audience can take part in the creation of this interactive opera no-opera, contributing sounds and words which are being collected with the intention of making them visible and audible during the performances.

A Counterpoint of Tolerance is a project commissioned by the Transatlantic Arts Consortium (TAC). This production of AH! is made possible with generous support from TAC, The Evelyn Sharp Foundation, Judith O. and Robert E. Rubin, and Abby Sher.

AH! runs September 16-18, 2009 at REDCAT.  Performances take place Wednesday-Friday at 8:30 p.m. Tickets are $25, with student discounts available. Seating is general admission. Tickets and information at the REDCAT box office, 213-237-2800 or www.redcat.org.

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read the write-up on culturemonster and check out the complete listing after the jump…

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First you might wanna check out REDCAT’s NEW ORIGINAL WORKS FESTIVAL 2009

REDCAT’s sixth annual NOW Festival launches eight new works by Los Angeles dance, theater, music and multimedia artists who are bending traditions and investigating new visions of work for the stage.

“REDCAT’s New Original Works (NOW) series has become one of the city’s more eclectic and vital performance festivals.”
—LA Weekly

July 23–August 8, 2009
Thur–Sat | 8:30 PM

Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater
631 W 2nd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012

See all three programs for only $36!
213-237-2800 orwww.redcat.org

+ + +

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EARLY MORNING OPERA: ABACUS
Staged under the direction of Lars Jan, Early Morning Opera’s large-scale multimedia workAbacus, is a persuasive performance-cum-PowerPoint presentation that catapults data into metaphysical territory, where vision and fanaticism are equal parts in an equation of prophecy.

SHEETAL GANDHI: BAHU-BETI-BIWI
With powerful dance, stirring vocalization and percussive text, Sheetal Gandhi’s magnetically rhythmicBahu-Beti-Biwi (Daughter-in-Law, Daughter, Wife)wraps North Indian music traditions and family characters into a contemporary tour de force.

AYANA HAMPTON: THE AYANA HAMPTON SHOW
Vibrant performer Ayana Hampton’s song stylings range from raunchy to reverent as she rocks a portrayal of stardom headlining her own wildly sexy and overtly subversive music-theater cabaret, backed by live music and The Lustrous Black Up Dancers.

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CAROLE KIM w/ OGURI, ALEX CLINE & DAN CLUCAS: N1
Carole Kim’s hallucinatory mix of live-feed video and layered projections form an immersive installation that refracts the live performances of celebrated dancer-choreographer Oguri, percussionist-composer Alex Cline and multi-instumentalist Dan Clucas.

JENNIFER THE LEOPARD: LEOP YEAR (NO JAMMING)
The “all girl band” also known as J-Lep, stages a multimedia event featuring songs about celebrity sightings and knife fights while pitting an on-stage “audience” against the real one in a show that is part bitchin’ rock concert and part post-studio pep rally.

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ZACKARY DRUCKER / MARIANA MARROQUIN / WU INGRID TSANG: PIG
With an irreverent nod to Warhol’s cult filmWomen In Revolt, the unpredictable trio mixes biting humor with socio-political themes ranging from contemporary transgender politics, sexual identity, civil rights, and the evolving language of trans societal constructs.

MEG WOLFE: WATCH HER (NOT KNOW IT NOW)
Sharp, precise and wholly original, choreographer Meg Wolfe strips the stage bare for a new solo accompanied only by Aaron Drake’s original score, placing at the center of the work her signature dancing.

LAUREN WEEDMAN: OFF
In her latest solo performance Lauren Weedman traces her attempts to “trust herself,” even as she struggles with things beyond her control—seeking comfort in hospice work, hanging out with a pair of harassed lesbian moms, and putting her faith in not one but two untalented tattoo artists.

—AND THEN AT THE HAMMER:

Second Nature: The Valentine-Adelson Collection at the Hammer

Through October 4, 2009

Since the mid-1990s, sculpture has developed as a particularly vital and inventive area of artistic practice in Los Angeles. This will be the first public presentation of a selection from the extraordinary gift by Dean Valentine and Amy Adelson to the Hammer. The Valentine-Adelson Collection comprises 50 sculptures by 29 Los Angeles artists, made from 1995 to the present. This collection includes many of the key works by this new generation of artists and captures a significant moment in L.A. art-making that stands out for the abundance of handmade sculpture and the return of the consideration of the tangible object. This exhibition is curated by Douglas Fogle, Chief Curator and Deputy Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs at the Hammer and Ali Subotnick, curator.

Artists included in the exhibition:

Edgar Arceneaux, Frank Benson, Jonathan Pylypchuk (aka Rudy Bust), Xavier Cha, Liz Craft, Sam Durant, Chris Finley, Hannah Greely, Katie Grinnan, Evan Holloway, Matt Johnson, Martin Kersels, Lisa Lapinski, Won Ju Lim, Nathan Mabry, Jason Meadows, Pentti Monkkonen, Ruby Neri, Ry Rocklen, Sterling Ruby, Paul Sietsema, and Eric Wesley.

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The following is a review of The Wooster Group’s La Didone at REDCAT by L.A.-based writer Matthew Lurie.

photo by Paula Court

First things first: Many potential attendees will justifiably wonder whether knowing La Didone or Planet of the Vampires, the two main texts on display here, should be a prerequisite to attending this performance. And my answer to you is this: It doesn’t matter. The Wooster Group’s inter-textual mind-melt so thoroughly reinvents each piece, knowing the originals might even be a hindrance.

On the tails of Star Trek‘s re-entrance into American pop culture, the Los Angeles premiere of La Didone weaves sci-fi into opera for some truly otherworldly results.

While the New York-based Wooster Group has long combined together different texts for its productions—last year’s Hamlet saw a radically edited version of Gielgud’s film combined with a live drama of the Shakespeare itself—this production’s disparates are particularly unusual. On one side is Francesco Cavalli’s La Didone, a somewhat light Baroque opera from the 17th century, based on Virgil’s tragic story of Dido and Aeneas from The Iliad; on the other is Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires, a disturbing bit of proto-David Lynch Italian science fiction cinema from the 1960s. The breathtaking parallels and intersections The Wooster Group finds—augmented by four young, beautiful, phenomenally talented operatic vocalists—makes for an evening of camp, tragedy and unexpected revelation.

And really, nothing is sacred here: The opera of La Didone, for example, has been trimmed down to just its main arias, wiping out the endless repetition of said arias that tends to drag so much on modern audiences. And rather than using a baroque chamber ensemble for the music, the Wooster employs a “band” featuring baroque guitar, accordion, crazy sound effects and electric guitar. And Vampires gets chopped and screwed as well, with onstage televisions referencing both various scenes from the film as well as the action onstage. The group’s most anti-Hollywood gesture can be found right here: All six of the “post” (or pre?) production wizards do their work transparently, right next to the singers and actors onstage. Wooster almost dares the audience to imagine these computer-fiddling sound designers, for example, as part of the story itself.

But despite the production values, it’s the live performances which are most breathtaking. With the ensemble telling two stories simultaneously, each performer plays anywhere from two to five different characters and the contrast between these roles can be a joy to witness. Wooster’s Scott Shepherd plays not just Wess, the ubër-serious Spock of the spaceship team, but also a wild boar being hunted down for fun by Dido’s posse. And Ari Fliakos’s pitch-perfect Captain Mark, full of the Don Quixote-like self-assuredness of a William Shatner, also plays a devious Cupid that helps Dido fall for Aeneas.

Leads from both ensembles deserve special mention: Fliakos is comic genius; and Kate Valk’s Sanya draws out the irony of her female character’s submissive role. What’s more, Hai-Ting Chinn (Dido), whether half-naked or not, brings a crystalline beauty to every note she sings while Andrew Nolen (Jarbas) has a high falsetto that would make Antony (Hercules and Love Affairs) blush. Such high-level performances from the vocalists on an empty stage would be reason enough for applause, but seeing them do these arias while the Wooster Group nearly laughs in their faces will make you appreciate these ambitious singers threefold.

Quibbles are to be had: Occasionally the action longed for a bigger stage, where the spacing might feel clearer and less claustrophobic (Then again, maybe that’s the point). And I found myself squinting a bit at the font size of some of the super titles which you will inevitably forget to read at some points. (But as the Stuart Smalley in your head will point out: That’s ok.)

La Didone could have been a pedantic exercise on two pieces of art you really should know. But Wooster, all winks, nods, and teases, gives the audience a sense that to them, this is somewhere far, far away from the Ph.D. thesis from hell. In fact, it’s fun.

*****
A former staff music critic for Time Out Chicago, Matthew Lurie specializes in jazz, pop and the many places today they meet up. Past outlets include Modern Painters, Downbeat, and a spell as the Chicago correspondent for BBC’s “Jazz on 3.” Lurie currently resides in Los Angeles where his band, Matthew and the Mainstream, tries to write dumb pop music.

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and for all our west coast readers, may we suggest:

NEW ORIGINAL WORKS FESTIVAL 2008

The fifth annual NOW Festival features nine projects by artists working throughout the Los Angeles region in dance, theater, music and hybrid performance works. For three weeks beginning in July, these artists take the REDCAT stage to bend traditions, investigate new visions of work and celebrate risk and invention.

http://redcat.org/season/0708/dan/now.php

Program 1: July 17–19

Baker & Tarpaga Dance Project

Cloud Eye Control

Theatre Movement Bazaar

Program 2: July 24–26

Ledges and Bones Dance Project

Poor Dog Group

Lionel Popkin

Program 3: July 31–August 2

Rosanna Gamson / World Wide

Anne LeBaron/Douglas Kearney

Kristina Wong

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