LAFPI

The Roy and Edna Disney CalARTS Theater (REDCAT) presents the 23rd annual New Original Works (NOW) festival, a celebration of innovative new work by Los Angeles artists.

REDCAT’s NOW festival has served as a catalyst for experimentation and new work in dance, theater, music, and performance since its inaugural edition in 2004. NOW has presented the work of over 200 artists who continue to be seen on stages throughout the US and abroad. NOW 2026 features nine new original works in dance, theater, music, and performance presented over three weeks from November 5-21.

Each of the three weeks of NOW features three artists in a shared evening on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 8 PM, with Saturday performances livestreamed. Artists are selected through an open application process. All artistic teams are provided rehearsal space, production support, technical support, artist fees, and professional development.

NOW Festival 2026 is curated by Katy Dammers, Deputy Director and Chief Curator.

The NOW Festival features the following works created by femme and nonbinary artists:

Week One: Nov. 5-7, 2026

Scottie Harvey: Hole Gazers

Hole Gazers is a comedic satire about fantasy, surveillance, and life online. Wearing a Halloween muscle costume, Scottie Harvey plays the role of MAN—a gay porn star—who feels violated when he finds his likeness is being used in workplace accident prevention videos. Alone in his claustrophobic apartment, MAN begins messaging the anonymous animator, who has crafted his online avatar, and imagines an escape from his life through the chat box of their relationship. Combining humor, animation, and performance, this piece probes the absurdity and possibility of safety and connection in our slippery virtual world.

Jeonghyeon Joo: how to bathe properly

how to bathe properly is a solo work for haegeum, a two-string instrument, performed in a staged Korean sauna. The piece extends the gesture and sound of bowing an instrument to the repetitive, vigorous body scrubbing offered in a jjimjilbang, or Korean spa. As water flows onstage, Jeonghyeon Joo (Musical Arts PhD 2023) turns the private ritual of bathing into a public performance. Proposing that the labor of being spotless is an endless cycle of erasure, Joo asks what is left behind when we attempt to scrub away the history of our own skin.

Thursday, Nov. 5 at 8:00 p.m. (in-person)
Friday, Nov. 6 at 8:00 p.m. (in-person)
Saturday, Nov. 7 at 8:00 p.m. (in-person and online)

Week Two: Nov. 12-14, 2026

Brenda Barrios: Muñequita Muy Muy

Drawing inspiration from her experience as a first-generation Mexican American, Brenda Barrios ‘ Muñequita Muy Muy blends cultural symbolism, queerness, and disability into a celebration of healing and visibility. Barrios uses sculpture, dance, song, and storytelling to bring life-size replica dolls and a motorized truck onstage alongside live musicians and performers. Barrios composes and performs original music combining pop music and Mexican operatic vocal traditions with ranchera and rock en español, alongside extended vocal techniques including el grito mexicano. Her detailed, hyperrealistic sculptures transform familiar objects into milagritos—Mexican charms to meditate on how bodies hold histories of care, struggle, and evolution.

SUUVI: REGENESIS

REGENESIS is a multidisciplinary work exploring the intertwined cycles of life, death, transformation, and renewal. Drawing connections between regenerating ecosystems and the continual processes of decay and emergence that shape the natural world, the work weaves SUUVI’s personal experience of grief and loss into a broader meditation on the processes of dissolution and renewal through which living systems continually transform. Composed, directed, and performed by multidisciplinary artist SUUVI, the work brings together original music for cello and electronics, live dancers and choreography by Megan Paradowski, cinematic projections and lighting design by Matt Brown, and painted elements by Reed Gibson, creating an immersive work that considers endings as part of an ongoing process through which new forms, memories, and possibilities emerge.

Thursday, Nov. 12 at 8:00 p.m. (in-person)
Friday, Nov. 13 at 8:00 p.m. (in-person)
Saturday, Nov. 14 at 8:00 p.m. (in-person and online)

Week Three: Nov. 19-21, 2026

Chica Barbosa: Marilyn Times

Chica Barbosa’s Marilyn Times revisits the legend of Marilyn Monroe through a Latin American lens to question what might be possible when an icon is liberated. The performance stages a dream-state encounter between three characters: Norma Jeane (the woman), Marilyn Monroe (the myth), and Bia Borinn (the performer). Inspired by Brazilian playwright Sergio Roveri’s play imagining Monroe’s final moments, director and filmmaker Chica Barbosa expands that text in a multidimensional piece layering film projection and solo performance. Created in Marilyn Monroe’s centenary year, Marilyn Times frames Monroe’s life as a site of rupture exceeding the illusions of Hollywood projected onto her.

Tarren Johnson: High Earners Not Rich Yet

In this dance theater piece, Tarren Johnson (Dance and Choreography BFA 2013) reflects on the physical and economic tensions of Los Angeles in a portrait of precarity. Collaging fragments of text, voice, movement, recorded piano, and image, High Earners Not Rich Yet references individuals who earn substantial incomes yet accumulate little net wealth despite outward signs of affluence. This duet follows a guard as she repeatedly assumes and relinquishes her post amid discarded tires and debris, tracing her inner monologue of observation and memory. Searching for the divine in disorientation, Johnson considers how care is negotiated and sustained through the rituals and contradictions of everyday life.

Thursday, Nov. 19 at 8:00 p.m. (in-person)
Friday, Nov. 20 at 8:00 p.m. (in-person)
Saturday, Nov. 21 at 8:00 p.m. (in-person and online)

REDCAT’s 23rd Annual New Original Works (NOW) Festival also features works by:

• Alfonso Abraham Cervera and Irvin Manuel Gonzalez: las cosas que enter(r)amos 
• Cody Perkins / Algorythm.Code: Motherboard
• Friidom: THE TETHER