For the Dispatches column, Jessi DiTillio reports on three standout efforts from the 2023 New Original Works Festival (NOW) at REDCAT in Los Angeles.
Jordi, Cade, and Ironstone, 2300 SHE. Performance, REDCAT, Los Angeles, August 17–19, 2023. Photo: Angel Origgi.
This summer marked the twentieth edition of REDCAT’s annual New Original Works (NOW) Festival, a self-described “catalyst for creativity and new ideas.” Each week featured three performances in a shared program in REDCAT’s black box theater. These works, mostly untested, were selected via an open call that encourages emerging and early-career artists, then bolstered with an artist fee, technical support, and rehearsal space. This makes NOW a relatively rare platform for brand new, experimental performance in Los Angeles.
The laboratory vibe was palpable in the festival’s communal experience—there was a sense that we were there to cheer the artists on, even when their work felt a little germinal, a little raw, at risk of failure. The MC of the program, Rolando Rodriguez, who co-organized this year’s festival with Edgar Miramontes, encouraged audiences to stay, chat, and offer feedback to artists in the lobby of the theater after the shows ended. To be frank, I had feedback, but I’m not the type of critic who dwells on disappointment or technical imperfections. While watching performance art, I often think of critic Jennifer Doyle’s articulation in her book Sex Objects (2006) of the poetic function of boredom as “an affective state that helps us get from one place to another.” The performers in NOW typically lacked the virtuosity and polish often associated with REDCAT’s regular season, but when sitting in the audience with a receptive openness to boredom, in partnership with like-minded art freaks, one could sense a communal affect of excitement embodied in the possibility of seeing something completely unexpected.
As psychoanalyst Adam Phillips explains in his book On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored (1993), boredom is manifest in the “experience of waiting for something without knowing what it could be.” During these uncertain moments, Phillips suggests that “the individual does not know what he was waiting for until he finds it, and that often he does not know that he is waiting.” Perhaps, then, a critic who tolerates boredom—who is, paradoxically, excited to find themselves yawning in a theater—is one who holds space for something not only redemptive and new but that “includes a multiplicity of moods and feelings that resist analysis.”
What follows is a narrative of one of the three performances from each week, the pieces that most surprised, delighted, or moved me.
Jordi, Cade, and Ironstone, 2300 SHE, 2023. Performance, REDCAT, Los Angeles, August 17–19, 2023. Photo: Angel Origgi.
Jordi, Cade, and Ironstone, 2300 SHE
A fellow audience member in the lobby, an overtly eccentric woman in her mid-60s wearing a mesh tank top and glittered bangles, doled out an unexpected dose of excitement. She told me she’d come all the way from San Juan Capistrano, an hour to the south, but was so moved by Jordi, Cade, and Ironstone’s performance that she’d extended her trip an extra night to absorb it again.
Their multimedia spectacle, titled 2300 SHE, began in darkness, as dancer/choreographer Ironstone crawled onto the stage, growling, moaning, and breathing heavily like a wild animal in a trap. Without any stage lights, reflections hinted at the costume dripping in glitter and sequins that hovered around the dancer’s writhing, panting body. From this affect-laden, non-narrative beginning, the performance took a sharp turn when Cade confidently strolled onto the stage. Sporting a short platinum haircut gelled into sharp spikes reminiscent of the cyberpunk style popularized in the 1995 movie Hackers, Cade launched into a monologue that moved fluidly between the personal and political, and tied in with an equally cyberpunk slide show projected on the screen behind them. They described being a gender-nonconforming art school graduate turned corporate graphic designer, boxed into a space that is highly gendered in specific, late-capitalist, postmodern ways. Cade’s story critiqued the Sheryl Sandberg “lean in” girlboss-style feminism that began to dominate public discourse about gender equity and “having it all” in the early 2010s. Cade sardonically poked fun at a 2014 cover story for Bloomberg Businessweek with the headline “Freeze Your Eggs, Free Your Career.” By weaving a personal narrative of their own experiences of gender-affirming medical intervention together with their observations about the corporate support for egg-freezing, Cade questioned the sinister agenda of workplaces that sponsor expensive fertility medicine. The juxtaposition illuminates the ideologically suspect apparatus of corporate-sponsored healthcare, which endorses certain technological manipulations of so-called “natural” gender characteristics, and not others, without proffering moralistic judgments. Jordi contributed to the heady narrative with ecstasy and humor, rolling onto the stage in a giant plastic bubble-cum-egg, teasing the audience, “I want to be born! Somebody inseminate me!”
When it was all over, I felt much like the enthusiastic traveler from San Juan Capistrano—I wished I could experience the entire performance again, because so much had happened. Ironstone, Cade, and Jordi are three constitutionally different performers and their unexpected collaboration heightens the impact of all three.
Melissa Ferrari, Relict: A Phantasmagoria, 2020/2023. Performance, REDCAT, Los Angeles, August 24–26, 2023. Photo: Angel Origgi.
Melissa Ferrari, Relict: A Phantasmagoria
In the festival’s second week, each night’s performances opened with the technological marvel of Melissa Ferrari’s Relict: A Phantasmagoria, a documentary that combines the analog effects of antique magic lanterns with digital projections of the artist’s exquisite hand drawn animations. Ferrari and her collaborator, fellow animator Stephanie Delazeri, stood at two tables with their backs to the audience, surrounded by flickering candles, as they manipulated the magic lantern slides thrown onto the screen. The film they assembled live explored the esoteric science of cryptozoology, the study of extraordinary wildlife like Bigfoots or Yetis. Ferrari’s mobilization of this bygone technology reminded me of the relationship between early cinema and carnival conjuring. By featuring her own body as she produced the film, instead of hiding behind the curtain like the proverbial Wizard of Oz, Ferrari pointed to the sleight of hand essential to cryptozoology’s pseudoscience. This eccentric subject matter and its presentation—a combination of animation and found historic images—gelled perfectly, expressing how such fantastic images can mesmerize us even as we’re aware of their fabricated nature.
Erica Bitton, Vacuum Girl, 2021/2023. Performance, REDCAT, Los Angeles, August 31–September 2, 2023. Photo: Angel Origgi.
Erica Bitton, Vacuum Girl
In the third and final week of NOW, Erica Bitton’s virtuosic, mesmerizing Vacuum Girl began with the actor and writer’s tongue-in-cheek assurance that what we were about to see was absolutely not a performance, experimental art, or a piece of theater, but was most assuredly a television pilot, and should be perceived as such. In this heated moment in the Los Angeles entertainment industry, as the screenwriters’ union strike entered its fourth month and the actors’ neared two, her ironic assurance rang out with a particular dark humor. The so-called pilot unfolded in front of us without a screen in sight—Bitton set up the suggestion of a screen by standing behind a folding table, with a TV-shaped rectangle of LEDs framing her figure. For twenty-five minutes or so, Bitton narrated every element of said episode, as if reciting camera and stage directions from a highly crafted script, and performed the show’s dialogue (from all its characters) in different voices.
The story followed Jane, a 31-year-old Jewish actor/waitress, as she moved fluidly between her banal external reality and fantastic internal narrative. As the artist controlled the intensity and colors of the lights that surrounded her, and triggered a score of sound effects and bits of music, one really had the sense that, despite the minimal form, one was watching a fully fleshed out television show. The performance’s immersive quality was a testament not only to Bitton’s charismatic presence, but to the nuance and quality of character development in her writing, which brought her protagonist Jane into passionate, pathetic, and tender life. x
Jessi DiTillio is a curator, writer, art historian, and a co-founding member of Neon Queen Collective and Thunderstruck Collective. Currently she works at the Hammer Museum as Project Manager of Exhibitions and Publications. Her research focuses on 20th century American Art, critical race theory, affect theory, gender and sexuality, and contemporary art engaging the politics of difference. She has forthcoming chapters in A Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework (2023) and The Routledge Companion to African Diaspora Art History (2024). Her upcoming exhibition, A Very Queer Thing, opens at Well Well Projects in Portland, Oregon in December 2023.