This week, REDCAT announced its upcoming Winter/Spring 2024 season, showcasing a dynamic lineup of multidisciplinary artists who are pushing the boundaries across various media.
REDCAT’s new season of performances, screenings, and artist talks features a number of CalArts alums and faculty. The season kicks off on Jan. 17 with the CalArts Music Showcase, a concert that includes collaborative work by graduate students from programs in Composition and Experimental Sound Practices, Jazz, Performer-Composer, VoiceArts, InstrumentalArts, World Music Performance, and Music Technology.
On Jan. 19, Don Mee Choi (Art BFA 84, MFA 86), an award-winning poet and 2024 Katie Jacobson Writer in Residence, will present a reading and artist talk on her highly acclaimed Kor-Us Trilogy (Hardly War, DMZ Colony, and the forthcoming Mirror Nation). Choi is a recipient of some of literature’s highest accolades, including the National Book Award for 2020’s DMZ Colony and a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, acknowledging her contributions to both poetry and translation. [Read her Pool Magazine profile.]
The following evening (Jan. 20), REDCAT screens Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum, a film by Arjuna Neuman (Film/Video MFA 11) and Denise Ferreira da Silva, writer and 2024 CalArts MA Aesthetics and Politics Theorist in Residence. The film, which marks Neuman and da Silva’s third collaboration, is dedicated to tenderness, and asks the question, “Can tenderness dissolve total violence?”
Music resumes on Feb. 17 with the premiere of Bandung by Sans Soleil, a multigenre jazz duo by Chris Williams (Music MFA 18) and Patrick Shiroishi. The evening-length composition weaves together field recordings, pan-Indigenous instrumentation, and free jazz expression, also featuring collaborators William Parker and Lesley Mok.
From the world of dance, REDCAT is presenting the Los Angeles premiere of Jérôme Bel’s Jérôme Bel, a survey of the renowned French artist’s self-titled “auto-bio-choreo-graphy.” The concert takes place on April 4 and 6, and is led by Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance faculty Ariel Osterweis.
On April 8, Christopher Harris, 2023 recipient of The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts in Film/Video, presents a screening of his experimental film Black Ecstatic Cinema. The program includes a post-screening talk with the artist, moderated by CalArts School of Film/Video faculty Jheanelle Brown.
One of the last events of the season is Magdalene, a chamber opera in 13 movements scored by 14 women composers, including CalArts alums Danielle Birrittella (Music-Theater 09), Zoe Aja Moore (Theater MFA 11), Sheena Wenger Birrittella (Music BFA 11), and Pulitzer-Prize winning composer Ellen Reid (Music MFA 11). The West Coast premiere of Magdalene takes place from June 4-5 and 7-8. The opera is set to Marie Howe’s Magdalene poems and brings audiences into the interior world of the biblical figure Mary Magdalene.
The Winter/Spring 2024 season will continue to honor the achievements of CalArts students with the CalArts Film/Video Showcase on April 30 and May 2-4; the CalArts Spring Dance program on May 7-8; and the CalArts Writers Showcase on May 9.
For more details, tickets, and the entire 2024 season lineup, check out REDCAT’s full event calendar.
