REDCAT: The fifth annual NOW Festival encourages risk and invention to foster new dance, theater, music and hybrid performance works from artists throughout Los Angeles. For three weeks beginning in July, REDCAT launches innovative and interdisciplinary projects that bend traditions and investigate new visions of work for the stage.

Baker & Tarpaga Dance Project: Sira Kan / On the Road
Merging West African and Western dance with live percussion and vocals, this transnational company creates pulsing, rhythmic and physically powerful dance theater. Performed by three captivating male dancer-musicians and directed by Olivier Tarpaga, Wilfried Souly and Esther Baker-Tarpaga, On the Road layers movement, music, and personal and oral histories as it journeys through the physical dangers and political realities of West African men seeking new opportunities across borders.

“Exciting, dynamic, rhythmic energy.” The Star, Kuala Lumpur

Cloud Eye Control: Final Space and Subterranean Heart
With an ingenious blend of projected animation, live theater and upbeat music, Cloud Eye Control generates hyper-live performances of technological fancy. Whether probing outer space for a new habitat or mining earth for embedded gems, the creative team of Miwa Matreyek, Anna Oxygen and Chi-wang Yang seamlessly fuses disciplines to revel in a multidimensional, seductively cinematic experience.

Theatre Movement Bazaar: Model Behavior
In Model Behavior, the acclaimed team of Tina Kronis and Richard Alger shred the story of Jekyll and Hyde into a collage of movement, theater and song that careens through cultural obsessions with mesmerism, CSI, the modeling industry, and more. Drawing on varied source materials, the ensemble creates a truly hybrid performance that morphs theatrical expression into dance athleticism to tell the tale of a group of men who encounter a brutal murder--and their own dual nature.

“From tragic to bawdy to the outlandishly absurd … with nary a visual or aural flaw.” L.A. Weekly

See: http://redcat.org/season/0708/dan/now1.php ($)

See the complete 2008 NOW Festival schedule: http://redcat.org/season/0708/dan/now.php