NOW 2025: Week Three
Lu Coy, jeremy de’jon guyton, Luna Izpisua Rodriguez
- Price
- $25*
- Genres
- Dance, Music, Theater
- Season
- Fall 2025
- DATE
- NOV 20-22
- 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 concludes with a program of works by Lu Coy, jeremy de’jon guyton, and Luna Izpisua Rodriguez.
BUY A FESTIVAL PASS! SEE ALL 9 WORKS FOR $50!
Lu Coy
Becoming the Moon
Lu Coy (Music Performer Composer MFA 18) crafts an opera that illuminates the Florentine Codex’s account of Tecciztecatl—a gender-expansive Mexica moon deity. Blending original poetry with translation of the 16th-century Nahuatl manuscript, this performance unfolds through song, animation, storytelling, and movement. Guiding audiences through transcestral memory, Coy conjures a retelling that connects to their own lived experiences of the ache and radiance of transfeminine rebirth. Excavating queer narratives from colonial materials, Coy combines experimental electronic music with virtuosic vocal performance and pre-Columbian instrumentation in an examination of the beauty found under the cover of darkness.
jeremy de’jon guyton
notes on building a foundation, 1963
Blending lyrical text, fluid movement, and nostalgic audio-visual elements drawn from his own family archive, this poetic autofiction by jeremy de’jon guyton is a meditation on legacy, displacement, and the urgent desire for sanctuary. notes on building a foundation, 1963 brings audiences into a survival bunker where memory, movement, and myth converge as Q.S. excavates ancestral artifacts from their family’s flight Westward in 1963 and stories passed down over three generations. As Los Angeles fires, both literal and political, force new waves of migration, this interdisciplinary dance performance asks: How do we preserve what matters when the world around us is burning? This timely performance dares to reimagine survival through the unrelenting search for home.
Luna Izpisua Rodriguez
Open House
At the foreclosure sale of a beachfront home in Southern California, a realtor masked in plastic surgery feeds the desperation of ownership. Two first-time buyers grip each other in the primary closet, lost in the fantasy of a real estate flipper. Neighbors walk around nervously—who will be next? Visitors test the way their bodies sink into the shiny staging sofa, unaware that a coyote is nursing her young in the guest room. The ghosts of California’s keepers and takers slip out through the cracks in the drywall. Yet no matter what befalls, no one relinquishes the desperate belief that this land can be possessed. Directed by Luna Izpisua Rodriguez (Art and Theater Directing MFA 24), Open House is a meditation on erosion, both geological and psychic—on how losing land can feel like losing self.
NOW 2025: Week Three will be presented as one shared program of all three works on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
Please note: Becoming the Moon and notes on building a foundation, 1963 contain loud sounds; Open House contains nudity and mature content.
Becoming the Moon was made possible in part by a Foundation for the Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.
about the artists
Lu Coy is a queer mixed-media artist and musician of Mexican and Ashkenazi Jewish heritage based in Los Angeles, California. Known for their mastery of woodwinds, elegant use of electronics, and agile vocals, Coy embraces modern technologies and compositional techniques while drawing inspiration from ancient texts, stories, and musical traditions. Their composition “Xochimilco,” for solo voice and electronics, inspired by the 16th-century Nahuatl Codex Cantares Mexicanos, premiered in 2019. Following performances at the Broad Museum, the Craft Contemporary, and Coaxial Arts Foundation, Coy joined the Getty Research Institute’s Digital Florentine Codex project, culminating in work on their newest compositional project, Becoming the Moon. Coy holds degrees in Music Performance and Composition from the Boston Conservatory (BM 15) and California Institute of the Arts (Music MFA 18). They have taught at institutions including The Hammer Museum, CalArts, Plaza de la Raza, and LAUSD.
jeremy de’jon guyton is a performance artist primarily researching Afro//queer archives to examine club dance spaces through the lenses of sound, sweat, and sex(uality). Born and raised in Los Angeles, he spent most childhood summers in his great-grandparents’ backcountry home in Millport, Alabama; during this time, his imagination incubated as he whipped up mudpies and fantasized characters for friends. He returned to the West with a slight twang in his tongue and nature’s imprint on his spine. In 2012, he landed in New Orleans and immersed himself in the vocabulary of second-line footwork and bounce. He traced lines from jerking to buckjumping to wu-tanging and emerged as a tri-linguist of sorts. With an MFA in Choreography & Performance from Florida State University and a BA in Theatre & Performance Studies from Georgetown University, his choreographic research weaves together devised theater-making practices, text and spoken word, media, and social and club movement languages to build immersive worlds that urge audiences to listen deeply, question critically, and dream big.
Luna Izpisua Rodriguez is a Romani-Spanish-American artist whose practice spans performance, sculpture, video, and text. She holds an MFA in Art and Theater Directing from CalArts, an ME in Industrial Engineering from UC Berkeley, and a BS in Chemistry from UC Berkeley. Her work has been awarded by the Princess Grace Foundation, the CalArts Interdisciplinary Grant, the Fung Fellowship, and The Reef, where she is currently a resident artist. Izpisua Rodriguez’s practice is currently in the process of being upheaved and reshaped by her five-month-old, Pablo Niño.
