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Visionary Artist Janie Geiser Collaborates with Alpert Award Winner, Playwright Erik Ehn for the Theatrical Odyssey, Invisible Glass

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April 11, 2005, Los Angeles--Inventive filmmaker, visual artist and director Janie Geiser collaborates with Alpert Award-winning playwright Erik Ehn and the highly original Los Angeles composer Tom Recchion to create Invisible Glass, to be performed at REDCAT, the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater from April 28-May 1. This multimedia world premiere employs bunraku-like puppets, live actors and film to explore the idea of the "doppelgänger"--the spirit double made flesh--and was inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's short story William Wilson.

This new work evokes the ephemeral realm of memory, seen through the disorted lens of protagonist William Wilson. Through the use of multiple carved puppet versions of Wilson and his double, in scales ranging from miniature to larger than life, Invisible Glass suggests an uncanny world of shifting identity. Recchion's music creates an atmosphere of fragile beauty and suspended dread.

Janie Geiser is a theater director, designer and filmmaker who contributes to the field of contemporary theater through her innovative original works. Her work has been recognized with numerous awards, including an Obie and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her theater works have been presented nationally and internationally, and her films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, as well as numerous other venues. Geiser is also currently the Director of the Cotsen Center for Puppetry and the Arts at CalArts.

Erik Ehn was the recipient of the 2001 Alpert Award in the arts. A graduate of New Dramatists, his plays have been produced nationally and internationally. He was recently announced as the dean-elect of the CalArts School of Theater.

Tom Recchion's work as an artist composer in Southern California has been substantial since the 1970s, starting out as co-creator of the Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS). He has collaborated with numerous musicians such as Paul McCarthy, Joe Potts, Fredrik Nilsen and Mike Kelley, and plays in the improvisational group Extended Organ. Most recently, Recchion was awarded a 2004 Cola Fellowship in the visual arts, and a recent commission to compose works for the Kronos Quartet. In the summer of 2004 he was awarded best new Genre Uncategorizable Artist by the LA Weekly Music Critic's Poll.

REDCAT, CalArts' downtown center for innovative visual, performing and media arts, is located at the corner of W. 2nd St. and S. Hope St., inside the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex. Invisible Glass will be performed Thursday-Sunday, April 28-May 1 at 8:30 p.m. Ticket prices range from $28-20. Seating is general admission. Tickets may be purchased at the REDCAT box office--located at the corner of 2nd and Hope Streets, by calling 213.237.2800 or by clicking here.

Invisible Glass is co-produced by the Center for New Theater and the Cotsen Center for Puppetry and the Arts and is funded in part by The National Endowment for the Arts, the Henson International Festival of Puppet Theater and The Jim Henson Foundation.

REDCAT's 2004-05 season programming is generously supported by The Herb Alpert Foundation; American Center Foundation; The Annenberg Foundation; Anonymous; Asian Cultural Council; Bank Julius Baer; Booth Heritage Foundation; Canada Council for the Arts; Hyon Chough; CONACULTA; Cotsen Family Foundation; CNMAT; Cultural Contact, the U.S.-Mexico Foundation for Culture; Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States and the French Consulates in Los Angeles and San Francisco; DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art; Discover Signs; Robert B. Egelston; Étant Donnés, The French-American Fund for the Performing Arts, a program of the French American Cultural Exchange; Factory Signage & Graphics; The French-American Fund for Contemporary Music, a program of FACE; The J. Paul Getty Trust; Harriett and Richard Gold; Lenore S. and Bernard A. Greenberg; The Jim Henson Foundation; Henson International Festival of Puppet Theater; The James Irvine Foundation; The Japan Foundation; The Japan Foundation, Los Angeles; Korea Art Foundation of America; The Korea Times; The Korea Culture and Art Foundation; Korea Foundation; The JL Foundation; The Sharon D. Lund Foundation; Meet The Composer, Creative Connections Program; México Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores; National Dance Project; National Endowment for the Arts; Pasadena Art Alliance; Wendy Keys and Donald A. Pels; Poets & Writers, Inc. through a grant from The James Irvine Foundation; Lee and Lawrence J. Ramer; Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation; The Judith Rothschild Foundation; Dorothy R. Sherwood; Shiseido Co., Ltd.; The Skirball Foundation; SRE/Consulate of Mexico; Eve Steele and Peter Gelles; Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust; Dallas Price-Von Breda; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; Yamaha Corporation and The Walt Disney Company.

The Center for New Theater at CalArts was established in 1999 as a forum for the creation of groundbreaking theatrical performance. Productions include Macbeth (A Modern Ecstasy) with Stephen Dillane; Chen Shi-Zheng's Peach Blossom Fan at REDCAT, nominated for three Ovation Awards; King Lear at the Brewery Arts Center and Frictions Festival in Dijon, France; and Richard Foreman's Bad Behavior. Seminal artists from around the world are brought to the CNT to develop work that expands the language, discourse, and boundaries of contemporary theater. The Center supports a producing model that is artist and project specific, giving priority to performance that cannot be easily produced in other circumstances. The avant-garde aesthetic of the California Institute of the Arts provides the ideal context for rigorous collaborations between significant guest artists and the CalArts community. CNT operates under the leadership of Travis Preston (Artistic Director), Carol Bixler (Producing Director) and Jon Gottlieb (Acting Dean, School of Theater at CalArts).

California Institute of the Arts, CalArts, the first U.S. higher educational institution to integrate the visual and performing arts under one roof, is recognized as the nation's leading laboratory for the arts. Housing six schools-Art, Critical Studies, Dance, Film/Video, Music and Theater-CalArts embraces creative cross-pollination among diverse art forms and traditions, and strongly encourages each artist to pursue his or her vision within a broad context of social and cultural understanding.

Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, REDCAT, is an interdisciplinary arts center that introduces diverse audiences, students and artists to the most influential developments in the performing, visual and media arts from around the world, and gives artists and future artists in this region the production opportunities and creative support they need to achieve national and international stature.

For other news about CalArts, please visit www.muse.calarts.edu.
For other news about REDCAT, please visit www.redcat.org.

Coming soon:

Fall 2005
What to Wear?
World Premiere

What to Wear is a new music theater creation from one of this nation's most uncompromisingly distinctive artistic voices, Richard Foreman, created in collaboration with composer Michael Gordon.

Foreman's What to Wear? creates "a fashion show pageant in which spiritual emptiness allows for the exploitation of millions of lost souls. These lost souls dream of the dead glamour embodied by a group of fashion models - who parade through the world at inappropriate moments."

Richard Foreman, one of the seminal figures in the American avant-garde, first worked with the Center for New Theater in 2000. In association with Sophie Haviland, he created the enormously successful Bad Behavior. Michael Gordon is founder of the Bang on a Can Festival in New York and a prolific creator of innovative music-theater.

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