Join REDCAT this fall for a powerful season of performance, theater, dance, music, art and film.

The Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater (REDCAT), CalArts’ downtown center for contemporary arts, announces its Fall 2024 season. From exploring the futures of AI as part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, to cutting-edge new work from Los Angeles’ vibrant community of artists, and powerful performances from The Wooster Group, Back to Back Theatre, and many more, the Fall 2024 season features innovative work and experimentation across all the arts. 

REDCAT + PST-ART: Art & Science Collide

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

September 12, 2024 to February 23, 2025

How can diverse conceptions of technology and intelligence reclaim AI’s potential? 

REDCAT’s All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace—presented as part of Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide—explores new models of or for AI proposed by artists. 

This exhibition and performance series addresses one of the most pressing issues of our time—the impact of artificial intelligence—by proposing alternative directions for its future. Delving into how technology alters the understanding of the human and nonhuman connection, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace engages new models of cognition and intelligence drawn from non-western, feminist, and non-binary systems of thought. On view from September 12 to February 23, this ambitious project of visual and performing arts features the work of Nora Al-Badri, Minne Atairu, Back to Back Theatre, Manthia Diawara, Stephanie Dinkins, Annie Dorsen, rafa esparza, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian with Dahlia Elsayed and Andrew Demirjian, Interspecifics, Kite, MUXX, Charmaine Poh, Sarah Rosalena, and Kira Xonorika.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is among more than 60 exhibitions and programs presented as part of PST ART. Returning in September 2024 with its latest edition, PST ART: Art & Science Collide, this landmark regional event explores the intersections of art and science, both past and present. PST ART is presented by Getty. For more information about PST ART: Art & Science Collide, please visit pst.art

Additional funding is provided in part by The Andy Warhol Foundation.

New Original Works (NOW) Festival

November 7 to November 23

Presented over three weekends from November 7 to November 23, the latest edition of the New Original Works Festival (NOW) continues REDCAT’s celebration of Los Angeles’ vibrant community of artists. In the spirit of the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), REDCAT’s parent institution, the NOW Festival has been a catalyst for creativity and new developments in dance, theater, music, and performance for more than two decades. The 21st edition of the NOW Festival features nine new and innovative works from artists Eliza Bagg, Rohan Chander, George R. Miller, Bernard Brown, Meena Murugesan, Ajani Brannum, Sophia Cleary, Tijuana Dance Company, Bret Easterling, Mallory Fabian, and Kensaku Shinohara.

Theater & Performance

REDCAT’s new season of theater features major national and international productions this fall. The Wooster Group returns to REDCAT with a surreal reimagining of Richard Foreman’s Symphony of Rats on October 18-23. A president of the United States is receiving messages by mysterious means, and he doesn’t know whether to trust them. In this new Wooster Group production, directed by Elizabeth LeCompte and Kate Valk, Foreman’s 1988 play is reimagined with a multilayered sound and video score that draws from wide-ranging literary and cinematic sources, including William Blake, D.H. Lawrence, and Charlie Chaplin. Set in a spaceship-museum gallery, this production follows the president as he plunges into a series of encounters with otherworldly beings, among them a giant rat with a special message. 

Australia-based Back to Back Theatre’s The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes, presented on September 26-28, is a bold theater work crafted and performed by an ensemble of neurodivergent actors. Set in a public meeting, the actors engage in political debate and community conversation, their narrative considering human rights, sexual politics, and relationships with technology. Inspired by mistakes, misreadings, and misunderstanding, this funny and poignant theatrical revelation asks how people come together to make decisions that are in the best interest of a civic society. LA-based interdisciplinary artist Sophia Cleary investigates the tension between script and improvisation in Read the Room, while Mallory Fabian studies the complexities of relationships between women in I Hate Women.

Dance

Bernard Brown opens another compelling season of dance with Sissies: Something Perfect Between Ourselves, which spotlights a community of seven Black and Brown men. With an ensemble of South Asian diasporic artists based in Los Angeles, Meena Murugesan crafts visual art, movement, and music with Dravidian Futurities: Chapter II. Ajani Brannum conjures and confront patriarchy’s ghosts in CONGRESS and Tijuana Dance Company’s Salón México reveals the stories that pulse through Tijuana’s nightlife. In On Second Thought, Bret Easterling refutes the logic of “first thought, best thought.” Kensaku Shinohara incorporates dance and music to explore his firsthand experience as a father, interdisciplinary artist, and immigrant in tired music concert.  CalArts Winter Dance presents new work by choreographers Kyreeana Breelin Alexander, Brigette Dunn-Korpela, Jobel Medina, and Chorong Yang. Bringing forward an eclectic array of visions, vernaculars, and kinetic identities, Winter Dance features dances by a cross section of Los Angeles-based CalArts Dance alumni choreographers, performed by the Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance’s students on December 5-6.

Music

A double bill by Oglala Lakȟóta artist Kite (Music, BFA ‘14) and the Mexico City-based collective Interspecifics brings together machine learning technologies, sound, the body, and Indigenous cosmologies on November 2. Composer-performers Eliza Bagg and Rohan Chander collaborate with director George R. Miller on the opera song cycle 7 Early Songs. Vocalist, clarinetist, and composer Holland Andrews comes to REDCAT in December with Where The Apple Fell, crafting a new sonic world in this solo performance. On December 7, REDCAT and CAP UCLA co-present Live Night: Cruising Bodies, Spirits and Machines, a celebratory evening at the 1920 iconic three-story and 1,600-seat United Theater on Broadway in Downtown LA. The evening will feature experimental performances by LA-based artist rafa esparza, Mexico City/Oaxaca-based collective MUXX, among other artists that engage with machines, AI, and avatars coded in trans-migrant and ancestral futures. Performances and DJ sets will take place throughout the theater, the three-story grand lobby, and stage. Angel City Jazz Festival returns to REDCAT with another lineup of some of the most innovative musicians working today, with Steve Lehman & Garden of Klōns and Kris Davis Trio performing the first week, followed by Wayne Horvitz: Zony Mash and Electric Circus later in October.  

Film 

A rich season of film begins with Manthia Diawara’s AI: African Intelligence, which considers the confluence of tradition and modernity among fishing villages in Senegal. Pablo Álvarez Mesa’s The Soldier’s Lagoon (La Laguna Del Soldado) retraces Simón Bolívar’s liberation campaign across Colombia 200 years later. Emerging filmmaker Justin Jinsoo Kim employs experimental animation to collide memories, mediums, and myths in Guidance by Dokkaebi Fire and Other Works. Experimental filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist Leah Solomon creates new sonic and visual landscapes in Jigna, with pianist, poet, and singer Qur’an Shaheed performing as part of an original collaboration between Shaheed and Solomon. Old Cartographies (Anew They Shall Be) presents four films that engage with maps, lands, borders, and the colonial histories behind them, from filmmakers Razan AlSalah, Udval Altangerel, Riar Rizaldi, Anoushka Mirchandani, Alisha Tejpal, and Mireya Martine. Closing out the film program is Eulogies for Eula, a program featuring a variety of work centered on Black grief, celebration, and memorializing in the context of death and transition, by multidisciplinary artists Lishan AZ, Tony Cokes, and Jacolby Satterwhite, along with filmmakers Miryam Charles and Keisha Rae Witherspoon.

Check out our full event calendar  for the Fall 2024 season!