NOW 2024: Week One
Eliza Bagg, Rohan Chander, George R. Miller, Bernard Brown, Meena Murugesan
WORLD PREMIERE
Past event
- Price
- $25*
- Genres
- Dance, Music, Theater
- Season
- Fall 2024
- DATE
- NOV 7-9
- IN-PERSON
- THU-SAT, 8:30 PM
- STREAM
- SAT, 8:30 PM (PT)
- RUNTIME
- Approx. 90 minutes, with intermission
- Program
- Download Program Notes (PDF)
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About
The 21st Annual New Original Works kicks off with a program of works by Eliza Bagg, Rohan Chander, George R. Miller, Bernard Brown, and Meena Murugesan. Committed to an investigation of history and contemporary norms, these works use humor, improvisation, and multidisciplinary collaboration to disrupt power dynamics, craft collective rituals of care, and build new modes of community abundance.
BUY A FESTIVAL PASS! SEE ALL 9 WORKS FOR $50!
Eliza Bagg, Rohan Chander, George R. Miller
7 Early Songs
7 Early Songs is an opera song cycle created by composer-performers Eliza Bagg and Rohan Chander in collaboration with director George R. Miller. Framed by celebrated composer Alban Berg’s rarely-staged song cycle of the same name, Sieben frühe lieder (1905-1908), this new work interweaves Berg’s music with new arrangements of the existing material for voice, electronics, and synthesizers, along with entirely new compositions by Bagg and Chander. Miller stages the work as a series of poetic tableaux, tracing the lonely narrator’s shadowy visions—the sound of a sweet voice, a surveilling gaze, a day of white chrysanthemums, or the sun’s heat—as they process the banality of daily life and the urgency of the threats around them.
Bernard Brown
Sissies: Something Perfect Between Ourselves
Choreographer Bernard Brown spotlights a community of seven Black and Brown men, accompanied by a live DJ, Defacto X, in an uplifting dance performance that celebrates the Black Gay bar as a Queer haven. Taking its title–Sissies: Something Perfect Between Ourselves–from the disco-era ballad by Black Queer music icon Sylvester and Marlon B. Ross’s text Sissy Insurgencies: A Racial Anatomy of Unfit Manliness, this work conjures a future where Queer Men of Color craft their own narratives as central to society. While they swirl, swish and kiki through disco and R&B songs highlighting the lost generation of Queer icons who changed the world, Brown prompts a reconsideration of understandings of masculinity, sexuality, and connection through embodied discourse, text, and sonic power.
Meena Murugesan
Dravidian Futurities: Chapter II
Dravidian Futurities: Chapter II dives into the deep indigo waters where the Bay of Bengal, Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea meet. Meena Murugesan investigates the space where a sunken landmass once connected South India and Sri Lanka to Africa to consider the connections across dark melanin, caste abolition, syncretic spiritual systems, and earth-reverent rituals. Together with an ensemble of diasporic artists based in Los Angeles, they craft a surreal visual art, movement, and music ritual to re-earth ethical possibilities of being together.
NOW 2024: Week One will be presented as one shared program of all three works on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
7 Early Songs is presented in German.
Please note: 7 Early Songs contains strobe lights and simulation of drug consumption.
NOW Festival 2024 was organized by Katy Dammers, Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Performing Arts with Rolando Rodriguez, Administrative Manager through an open application process with NOW alumni Marissa Brown (NOW ‘21) and Emily Mast (NOW ‘12 & ‘16).
7 Early Songs was supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.
about the artists
Eliza Bagg
Eliza Bagg is an experimental musician, performing as a vocalist in contemporary classical music along with producing and composing her own work. She is a member of Roomful of Teeth, has collaborated with artists including Meredith Monk, Caroline Shaw, and John Zorn, and has performed as a soloist with major symphonies including the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonics. Bagg has originated roles in experimental operas including Ted Hearne’s over and over vorbei night vorbei (Komische Oper Berlin) and Michael Gordon’s Acquanetta (Beth Morrison Projects), along with many others. Her singing has been called “ethereal” and “luminous” by The New York Times and “gossamer” by The New Yorker. Bagg’s compositional work is grounded in the human voice mediated by technology, combining virtuosic singing with electronic processing, and exploring what The Guardian called the “valley between authenticity and artifice.” Dubbed an “electro-pop alien” by NPR, her critically acclaimed album “Patterns For Auto-tuned Voices And Delay” combines medieval and minimalist vocal styles and idioms with vocal effects, re-imagining historical musical languages with a futuristic sensibility.
Rohan Chander
Rohan Chander (a.k.a BAKUDI SCREAM) is an electronic musician and artist based in Los Angeles. Described as “hypersensory” (The Washington Post), “remarkably alive” (The Wire Magazine), and of “transcendent metamorphosis” (I Care If You Listen), Chander’s work explores gothic, science-fiction storytelling as rewriting of personal and shared histories. Performance space collapses into BAKUDI SCREAM’s various avatars of the Architect Prince, somnus, HINDOO, and FUTURANGEL through pursuit of the romantic and gruesome–tales of hackers and lovelorn heroes breaking and restructuring within new ecologies. Positionality is not a constant but a perpetually mutating agent, driving the work of BAKUDI SCREAM to explore the forces behind shared space and the glitches that flower intimacy.
George R. Miller
George R. Miller is a director and producer of operatic performance, deeply dedicated to celebrating and reimagining classical repertoire, as well as developing and championing newly created works. With a background in music composition and the visual arts, George has a strong interest in form, text, image, and gesture in his stagings, which have recently been described as “stunning” (LA Dance Chronicle), “superbly directed” and having “undeniable impact” (San Francisco Classical Voice). Professional highlights include directorial work presented by Opera Philadelphia, Long Beach Opera, Opera Saratoga, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Pioneer Works, The Berggruen Institute, Pageant, and Wild Up among others. Throughout his development, George has worked with companies and presenters in the United States and abroad, including the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC), The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Beth Morrison Projects, Lisson Gallery, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Performa, Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Savvy Contemporary (Berlin), and with artists such as Peter Sellars, James Darrah, Zack Winokur, Kevin Newbury, Thuthuka Sibisi, and Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons.
Bernard Brown
Bernard Brown is a performing artist, choreographer, and educator working at the crossroads of Blackness, Queerness, and belonging. As artistic director of Bernard Brown/bbmoves,he choreographs for stage, specific sites, film, and opera across Africa, Asia, North America, and Europe. Presentation highlights include engagements at On The Boards, Centre de Developpment Choregraphique La Termitierre (Burkina Faso), Dance Camera Istanbul, American Dance Festival’s ADF Movies by Movers, Dance Italia, Seoul International Dance Festival in Tank, and Royce Hall. His activism has been featured in Dance Magazine, Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times. Brown has had an extensive performing career working with leaders and innovators in the field for nearly three decades. A first-generation college graduate, he is a Professor of Dance at Loyola Marymount University, a Certified Katherine Dunham Technique Instructor candidate, and currently a California Arts Council Established Artist Fellow. The Los Angeles Times has called him “…the incomparable Bernard Brown…”
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Meena Murugesan
Meena Murugesan is an award winning movement and video artist living on Tongva-Kizh territory, or Los Angeles. Murugesan creates experimental non-linear narratives at the intersection of live performance, video art installation, and social issues. Grappling with the movement practices of improvisation, somatic bodywork, and brahminized bharatanatyam for over 20 years, as well as the visual arts practices of collage, projection mapping, and sensorial documentary, Murugesan centers an anti-racist, anti-caste, feminist, queer, melanin-rich creative liberatory practice. Murugesan is a current founding member of two collectives: SADDA (South Asian Diasporic Dance Artists, Mellon awardee 2021-2026) and SiriusShapeShifters (with d. Sabela grimes).
