THE END IS NEW

Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff
WORLD PREMIERE

About

Created by the founders of New Theater Hollywood, this new play traces what happens when a collective dream dissolves. Relying on the tension between supposed reality and self-imposed narrative, the performance follows a film editor who is hired to take over the project of a recently deceased documentary filmmaker. Unsure of the original premise of the documentary, the editor navigates hours of video interviews, rants, and confessions, to find meaning amidst a dramatic collective of once-united characters. This performance marks the latest chapter from the narrative world of Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff’s episodic film THEATER that weaves a fictional narrative with documentary rehearsal and backstage footage from plays presented at their black box performance space in Hollywood. THE END IS NEW engages with theater, labor, and memory as it reflects on the desire to rewrite the past in the name of the future.

 

On December 12, there will be a post-show Q&A with Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff, moderated by REDCAT Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Performing Arts, Katy Dammers.

about the artists

Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff are an artist duo who work at the boundaries of visual arts, theater, and filmmaking. They currently operate New Theater Hollywood, a black box theater in Los Angeles. Henkel and Pitegoff’s practice is embedded in the founding and running of venues as sites of social and collaborative artistic work. Their expanded documentation of these spaces takes form through filmmaking, photography, sculpture and writing, and traces the economic, political, and personal rules or conditions under which shared space can exist. 

Before relocating to Los Angeles, Henkel and Pitegoff lived for over a decade in Berlin, where they ran TV Bar, a bar and performance space, as well as New Theater, a storefront where they wrote and produced plays with artists, writers, and musicians. In 2017-2018, they were the artistic directors of the Grüner Salon at the Volksbühne Theater in Berlin.

New Theater Hollywood, founded in 2024 in a black box theater on Santa Monica Boulevard, produces experimental theatrical productions with artists, musicians, filmmakers, writers, and performers. Since opening, they have produced and hosted shows by Diamond Stingily, Asher Hartman, Caye Castagnetto, Tarren Johnson & Joel Cocks, PRICE, Stephanie LaCava, Casey Jane Ellison, Klein, Kalena Yiaueki, David Louis Zuckerman, Colin Self, Jasmine Johnson, Karl Holmqvist/Arto Lindsay/Klara Liden, Ruby McCollister, and Lily McMenamy.

Their work is included in Made in L.A. 2025 at the Hammer Museum, and has been exhibited recently at Fluentum, Berlin; MAMCO, Geneva; Fri Art Kunsthalle, Fribourg; and the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, Berlin, among other venues. 

Calla Henkel is also the author of two novels: Scrap (Abrams, 2024) and Other People’s Clothes (Doubleday, 2023).

Instagram: Calla HenkelMax PitegoffNew Theater Hollywood

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