A great leap forward for dance in L.A.

Maria Gillespie clearly remembers her excitement upon learning of her acceptance into REDCAT’s first New Original Works Festival.

“It was the first thing I got into where I wasn’t self-producing, and it had a reputation that could help propel me forward,” says the Los Angeles-based choreographer, who founded the company Oni Dance the following year.

Since 2004, Gillespie and some 25 other choreographers and dance-based artists have presented their work in the annual REDCAT festival, now in its seventh year and unwavering in its mission to support experimental dance, theater, music and interdisciplinary works by Los Angeles-based artists both emerging and established. While it welcomes all kinds of performing artists, the event and its venue — the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater — has emerged as a particular boon for the local contemporary dance community, which has historically contended with a lack of funding and presenting opportunities.

“From the start, dance was seen as an important part of our local artists’ programs,” says Mark Murphy, REDCAT’s artistic director. “I had been well aware for years and years of Los Angeles as having a reputation as an underdeveloped dance community with no infrastructure. I had wanted to persuade people that there is interesting dance to be seen in Los Angeles.”

The festival, which begins Thursday and runs Thursdays through Sundays through Aug. 7, typically features eight to nine new works performed over the course of three weeks. Each year, at least one-third to one-half of the festival’s content is dance. And this year, some 40% of the 162 applications to the festival were dance-related projects.

These numbers reflect “the needs of the dance community and what we can provide,” says George Lugg, director of the NOW Festival and REDCAT’s associate director, who notes that the selected artists not only receive honorariums of up to $2,000 but also “all the rehearsal time they need and access to all our existing technical inventory.”

This year, three dance artists contribute to an eight-work lineup that also includes performance artist Miwa Matreyek, theater director Maureen Huskey and the 30-member musicians’ collective Killsonic. Diverse in content and aesthetic, the dance offerings feature choreographer Rae Shao-Lan Blum, who has teamed up with composer Tashi Wada to create interdependent music-movement scores; hip-hop artist Raphael Xavier, who delves into autobiographical material in his new work “Black Canvas”; and Hana van der Kolk, who transformed a previous work for four performers into a solo piece where she explores the juxtaposition of mundane tasks, pop music songs and the relationship between performer and audience.

Van der Kolk, a 32-year-old New York transplant who received her MFA in choreography from UCLA, creates works that blur the boundaries between dance, theater and performance art, and she especially appreciates the interdisciplinary bent of the NOW Festival. “A lot of dance festivals in the United States are not as supportive in extending the boundaries of what dance can be,” she observes. “Plus, it’s great to be performing in a festival where the audience is versed in multiple art forms. That’s the audience I want.”

Having spent this last year mostly performing and teaching outside Los Angeles, Van der Kolk observes that the NOW Festival also affords her a valuable opportunity “to come back to the community.”

“In L.A., there are lots of opportunities to experiment but few opportunities to be supported and produced,” she says.

For Xavier, a 39-year-old choreographer, spoken-word artist and former dancer with Rennie Harris Puremovement, the festival represents a different kind of return. After suffering a spinal injury in 2007, Xavier, who moved to L.A. from Philadelphia that same year, “had to rethink everything that I was doing. For awhile, I wasn’t doing any dancing,” he recalls.

Uninterested in the commercial dance scene and refusing to go “all Hollywood,” Xavier views the NOW Festival as an opportunity to “get the ball rolling again.”

“I want to take this little work in progress and really develop it,” he says of “Black Canvas,” which features direction by fellow Rennie Harris Puremovement alumni d. Sabela Grimes and performances by two other dancers representing Xavier at different ages. “You’re going to see 27 years of my life in 15 minutes,” he promises.

Xavier’s future hopes, which include showing his work in other venues and cities, echo the successfully realized goals of choreographers such as Rosanna Gamson, who showed her work-in-progress “Tov” at the 2008 NOW Festival. That led to performances in other cities, support from the National Performance Network and a full-length, two-week-long production at REDCAT in March.

“Having the imprimatur of REDCAT producing your work permits you to broker relationships with other arts presenters,” she says. “For me, doing the NOW Festival became a stepping stone to a fully realized production.”

“What we’ve seen is the NOW plan coming to full fruition,” Lugg says of Gamson and other L.A.-based choreographers including Victoria Marks and Lionel Popkin, whose participation in the festival helped them create full-length productions. “We’re bringing works into our venue but hopefully putting them back out into the larger conversation about the art that’s being created worldwide.”

Though dance is certainly not the only art form to benefit from REDCAT’s programming, Gamson thinks the NOW Festival and Studio, REDCAT’s other new quarterly works program, “have a lot of significance to the dance community in L.A.

“REDCAT may not be out to save dance alone, but it’s wonderful they believe dance is a viable genre,” she says of Murphy and Lugg. “And that they’re interested in making a healthier ecosystem for L.A. artists who want to work here and not have to leave the city.”

For more information, call (213) 237-2800 or go to https://www.redcat.org.

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