NOW 2025: Week Two
Gabriela Burdsall; Orin Calcagne and Jenson Titus; Divya Victor, Carolyn Chen, AMOC*
- Price
- $25*
- Genres
- Dance, Music, Theater
- Season
- Fall 2025
- DATE
- NOV 13-15
- IN-PERSON
- THU-SAT, 8 PM
- STREAM
- SAT, 8 PM (PT)
- RUNTIME
- Approx. 90 minutes, with intermission
- PROGRAM
- Not yet available
* Discounts available for REDCAT members, students & the CalArts faculty and staff
Join the conversation in the REDCAT LOUNGE
About
The 22nd annual New Original Works continues with a program of works by Gabriela Burdsall; Orin Calcagne and Jenson Titus; and Divya Victor, Carolyn Chen, AMOC*.
BUY A FESTIVAL PASS! SEE ALL 9 WORKS FOR $50!
Gabriela Burdsall
MENEO
Gabriela Burdsall presents the body as a fluid canvas for identity, resistance, and celebration in this solo dance performance. The artist takes up el meneo, a movement rooted in Caribbean social dances, in conversation with la clave, the core syncopated rhythm of Cuban music, in a dynamic interplay between rhythm, body, and cultural heritage. MENEO presents dance as a fleeting monument that questions power and its political symbols. As Burdsall’s body meanders and sways, she moves between trance-like states of ecstasy and introspection. Her raw physical presence becomes a vessel for primal energy, as the pulse viscerally binds her to history.
Orin Calcagne and Jenson Titus
Mommy
Mommy is a comedy-horror play about a family plagued by their mother’s mental illness. When Daddy announces that he will be moving his homosexual lover into the family home, an already unstable Mommy is pushed past her limit and descends into emotional chaos, dragging the rest of her family down with her. In this surreal family farce, the artists utilize their clowning backgrounds to bring humor to painful circumstances. A live foley soundscape and musical score composed and performed by Cleo Henman bring further texture to this absurd melodrama. Mommy ultimately uses comedy to dissect relationship dynamics and traditional norms in an exploration of what makes society sick.
Divya Victor, Carolyn Chen, AMOC*
Thresholds
In Thresholds, composer Carolyn Chen presents a musical adaptation of poems from Divya Victor’s books KITH and CURB, which explore immigrant experiences of everyday life amidst racist violence in the United States. Reading selections live, Victor traces an arc of arrival, assimilation, and loss as immigrants move through the paperwork of visas and citizenship, mythic underpinnings of air travel, diasporic memories of homeland, and white-supremacist violence against South Asians. The music responds to the expressivity of Victor’s text with notated compositions and improvised materials developed for an ensemble integrating Western and Carnatic music assembled by American Modern Opera Company (AMOC*).
NOW 2025: Week Two will be presented as one shared program of all three works on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
Please note: Mommy contains mature content, loud sounds, gunshot sounds, and mentions of suicide and self-harm.
about the artists
Gabriela Burdsall is a Los Angeles-based Cuban dance artist and choreographer working in theater, dance, performance, and film. Her work blends Cuban dance traditions with experimental movement to explore cultural memory through embodied research. She has created and performed in Cuba, Europe, and the US. Recent works include Lecture by the Idiot (Berlin, 2024), Derrotero (New York, 2022) with William Ruiz Morales, and Naama Tsabar’s Estuaries (Hamburger Bahnhof, 2024). From 2007 to 2015, Burdsall was a lead dancer with Danza Contemporánea de Cuba, touring globally in pieces by Mats Ek, Jan Linkens, Àngels Margarit, and Carlos Acosta. She holds a BA in Contemporary Dance from the University of the Arts of Cuba and trained in folkloric, classical, modern, and contemporary dance at the National Dance School.
Orin Calcagne is a transgender playwright, clown, and experimental theater creator. Calcagne’s notable works include an unlicensed production of Cats: The Musical starring an ensemble of twenty clowns at the Lyric Hyperion which he produced and directed alongside Ember Knight, a spot-on recreation of Lady Gaga’s Pepsi Zero Sugar Super Bowl Halftime show, and, most recently, two sold-out runs of his original play, A Finger Pointing at the Moon, which he produced and starred in alongside director Jenson Titus. Calcagne also proudly sits on the Steering Committee for One Institute’s Circa: Queer Histories Festival.
Jenson Titus is an all-around clown. After studying at The Pig Iron School in Philadelphia, he went on to develop new works with The Pig Iron Company and Lightning Rod Special (Obie Award-winning creators of Underground Railroad Game). Titus has trained and worked with artists including Geoff Sobelle, The Russo Brothers, Josephine Decker, Trixie Mattel, and many more spanning the realms of experimental theater, television, and film.
Divya Victor is a Tamil American poet, essayist, and educator. She is the author of CURB (Nightboat), which won the 2022 PEN America Open Book Award and the 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and of KITH (Fence Books, 2017). Her next book, KIN, a collection of essays, is due out from Graywolf in 2027. She is the recipient of a 2025 Creative Capital Award to support her work on KIN. She is an Associate Professor of English and Writing at Michigan State University, where she is the Director of the Creative Writing Program.
Carolyn Chen has made music for supermarkets, a demolition district, and the dark. Her work reconfigures the everyday through sound, story, light, and movement. Her studies of the guqin, a Chinese zither traditionally played for private meditation in nature, have informed her thinking on listening in social spaces. Recent projects include an audio essay on a scream, and commissions for Klangforum Wien and the LA Phil. Described by The New York Times as “most consistently alluring,” her work has been presented in 25 countries and supported by the Berlin Prize, Fulbright, and ASCAP’s Fred Ho Award. Recordings and writings are available on Populist Records, INNI, Leonardo Music Journal, MusikTexte, and the New Centennial Review. In recent years, she has served as special faculty at The Herb Alpert School of Music at California Institute of the Arts.
AMOC* is a company of creators. Founded in 2017 by composer Matthew Aucoin and director, choreographer, and dancer Zack Winokur, AMOC* (American Modern Opera Company) comprises 17 of today’s most sought-after composers, choreographers, directors, vocalists, instrumentalists, dancers, writers, and producers, all united by a commitment to collective authorship and long-term, generative relationships with other artists.
