NOW 2023: Week One
JOJO ABOT, Tuixén Benet, Jordi & Cade & Ironstone
Past event
- Price
- $25*
- Genres
- Dance, Music, Theater
- DATE
- AUG 17-19
- IN-PERSON
- THU-SAT, 8:30 PM
- STREAM
- SAT, 8:30 PM (PT)
- RUNTIME
- Approx. 90 minutes, with intermission
- COUNTRY
- USA
- Program
- Download Program Notes (PDF)
Join the conversation in the REDCAT LOUNGE
About
The 20th Annual New Original Works Festival kicks off with a program of works by JOJO ABOT, Tuixén Benet (‘20), and Jordi & Cade & Ironstone. With a sharp interest in rituals, fantasies and memories, these works use history and technology to formulate diverse, other-worldly futures that provide a counterpart to our reality while allowing us to examine the injustices around us.
JOJO ABOT
A GOD OF HER OWN MAKING
A GOD OF HER OWN MAKING is an immersive spatial opera performed by interdisciplinary artist, vocalist and composer JOJO ABOT. Accompanied by voices, dancers, and mesmerizing visuals, JOJO ABOT explores the power of new and ancient technologies for collective healing by drawing from her own heritage as an Ewe woman from West Africa. From these influences and histories, a new kind of ritual is born, one that leads to a trance-like realm in which the senses awaken and portals open to the divine.
Listen to JOJO ABOT on Spotify
Tuixén Benet
Some more
Some more is a dance performance by choreographer and filmmaker Tuixén Benet (‘20) that explores the process of mortality, while being concerned with the concept of eternity. In a world of mass shootings and police violence, pandemics and catastrophic events, where cascades of deaths are treated as statistics, is the reality of death being processed by those who simply hear about it on the news? Benet’s work will stop time to examine the choreography of a dying body and how it relates to its surroundings, to nature, to animals and to you.
Jordi & Cade & Ironstone
2300 She
Jordi, Cade, and Ironstone–three transgressive performers of vast imaginations–conjure a queer fever dream drenched in new music, efficient scenics, slaughterhouse fashion and original choreography in 2300 She, a vision of the future that transcends description and language. According to The World Economic Forum, women will achieve equal pay for equal work in the year 2276. Set twenty-four years after such ‘equality’ has been achieved, this collaboration is a clarion call, a cry that erupts to examine our impending imperial wasteland destiny.
NOW 2023: Week One will be presented as one shared program of triple bills on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
Please note: A GOD OF HER OWN MAKING contains nudity and strobe lights; Some more contains fast-paced camera movements and recreations of death; 2300 She contains nudity, strobe lights, and mature content.
New Original Works Festival 2023 is organized by Edgar Miramontes and Rolando Rodriguez with Sola Bamis (‘11), Dami Spain, and Rosanna Tavarez.
about the artists
JOJO ABOT
JOJO ABOT is an interdisciplinary healer exploring evolving themes of spirituality, identity and community through music, film, fine art, fashion, photography and various other expressions. Committed to a philosophy of “Message Over Medium”, the artist aims to provoke larger conversations and actions towards collective elevation, healing and harmony. An Ewe woman born in Ghana and currently based in LA, JOJO ABOT offers intimate invitations into the practice of true freedom, love and re-membering through sacred ceremonies of togetherness, reflection and transformation engaging the self as the starting point to unity, universal connection and ascension. Serving as a bridge between the physically and metaphysically, her offerings invite us into a spiritual dance that allows for a coming together of ancestry, traditions and global cultures.
Fresh off the premier of her immersive spatial opera, A GOD OF HER OWN MAKING ft Esperanza Spalding, she expands a blossoming career offering interdisciplinary works in collaboration with the MOMA, Brooklyn Museum, The Ghana Pavilion at La Biennale Di Venezia, Frieze art fair x Theaster Gates x Prada, Hult Center, Armory week NYC, Perez Art Museum Miami and many others. JOJO ABOT has toured with Ms Lauryn Hill, played stages like Afropunk, Roots picnic, Radio city music hall, The Apollo Theater, Kennedy Center, Greek theater and more while being the first unsigned artist to perform live for NYC’s Times Square new year’s eve concert to over a million people.
Honoring the call to limitless expression, JOJO ABOT remains an exhibiting artist showing works in various solo and group exhibitions featuring sculpture, textile, painting, installations and mixed media offerings that echo her visions of worlds past, present and future. An alumni of the New Museum’s incubator program, New Inc, and former resident at National Sawdust, JOJO ABOT continues to develop and present her interdisciplinary practice through POWER TO THE GOD WITHIN and other curatorial projects.
Tuixén Benet
Tuixén Benet is a Filmmaker/Choreographer from Barcelona now based in Los Angeles. With a background in live performance and choreographing for music videos and commercials she’s now focused on creating her own experimental films, a selection of which was curated at the DA2 of Salamanca as a retrospective of the artist. Her works Aloma i Mila, Lazarus and Solution for Sadness have screened at Cinedans Fest, Leeds International Film Festival, Cucalorus, Palm Springs ShortFest or Dance Camera West among others, and granted her an award for the Outstanding Contribution to Dance Film at Choreoscope. She’s been nominated on multiple occasions for Best Choreography at the UK Music Video Awards for her work on the music videos of artists such as Tame Impala, Juanes, Polo & Pan or Two Door Cinema Club. She directed the live show of chilean artist Javiera Mena’s world tour with teams of performers in Chile, Mexico and Spain. Benet was the co-director of the dance company Les filles Föllen, Best New Talents by the Dance Association of Catalonia 2011, with performances at Mercat de les Flors, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Le Lieu Unique, KUMU Art Museum of Estonia and Zoofest Montreal among others.
She graduated in Choreography and Interpretation Techniques at the Institut del Teatre de Barcelona and earned an MFA in Film Directing at California Institute of the Arts, where she now teaches Dance and Film to Graduate and Undergraduate students. She’s continued her education in the field with a course on Body Poetics by MasterLav and a Certificate in ChoreoCinema by Agite y Sirva.
Jordiana
Jordiana is a gender expanding, multidimensional artist, facilitator, and guide, weaving healing energy into all of their practices. Their performance art work has been welcomed at the Getty Center and Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity expanding from her 20+ year background in Theatre and Entertainment Industries. Informed by her individual self healing practices, Jordi has been able to guide group care workshops centered around meditation, ritual, herbalogy, and decolonial organizing for the liberation of marginalized groups of people.
Jordi creates an environment of healing through sharing wisdom informed by her experiences as a Black Gender-tired Queer person, and it is receiving information in this space that people are able to grow individually as well as collectively benefiting their own expansion and the communities they are a part of.
Cade
Cade is a multilingual artist from Curitiba, Brazil, working across film, poetry, installation, and performance. They received their BFA from Otis College of Art & Design after relocating to Los Angeles.
During their time in LA, Cade gained recognition as a cis femme video vixen and car show model, often catering to the male gaze under the label of a ‘sexy latina.’ Seeking to dismantle a binary identity, Cade embarked on a profound exploration of trans-masculinity. Since, Cade has authored a manifesto on the experience, produced short films, directed music videos, and actively engaged in collaborative performances and installations. Cade was a protagonist in Seek Bromance, which was awarded a Silver Lion by the Venice Biennale in the category of Theater.
Influenced by the intersections of queerness in Body Horror Cinema and Magical Realism in South American Literature, Cade strives to redefine notions of words like Feminist, Erotic, and Brazilian.
Ironstone
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Ironstone’s dance career begins with the percussive American Dance form, Tap. Under the direction of Arlene Kennedy at Universal Dance Design (now demolished), he was able to join her internationally performing company. He returned to concert dance training in high school at Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, and later Juilliard. Returning home in 2017, he began choreographing and dancing for artists such as Dorian Electra, Pussy Riot, Rachel Mason and JJ Stratford, as well as presenting short form and evening-length works. He enjoys the kinesthetic logic and intuition of movement invention. In this, his independent works consider universal decay, conserving isospin and are based on queer and trans acts.
