New Original Works Festival showcases artists who cross lines

It’s easy enough to find a straight-up documentary film to experience in L.A., or a play, or a pop music concert. But art, like so much of our day-to-day experience, is fragmenting and recombining, mixing film with dance and music, or a play with computer graphics — creating forms that haven’t been seen much, or maybe even never seen before.

This creative edge, where new art is being born, is somewhat harder to find, scattered here and there throughout the city.

Starting Thursday, the eighth annual New Original Works Festival will run at REDCAT for three weeks of dance, theater, music and multimedia. The festival features eight innovative new works by Los Angeles artists blurring genres and pushing the boundaries of traditional art. Works include a solo performance of African dance, a puppet opera about the mythic Athenian Daedalus and a choreographed dance taking on the tale of Scheherazade, the cunning bride from “One Thousand and One Nights.”

George Lugg, associate director of REDCAT, explains: “It’s all about a commitment to risks — taking risks with artists and asking the audience to come in and take a risk on new projects. REDCAT focuses on contemporary work that reaches across the boundaries of different disciplines and different forms. We want our audiences to experience a range of work so that someone interested in, say, a puppeteer, might experience a composer or dancer that will excite them.”

Lugg says that the festival chooses participants according to the vitality of the proposed project, along with the uniqueness of the vision and the artist’s ability to put that vision in a meaningful form. By selecting works that speak to innovation and experimentation, REDCAT hopes to provide a space and a launching pad for artists whose work is untraditional.

In recent years, collaboration has been the name of the game. Marissa Chibas, the writer and performer behind “Clara’s Los Angeles,” a silent film integrated with live music and theater, discusses her decision to fuse the work of other artists into her own.

“I always find that my work grows enormously when collaborating with musicians or other artists,” she says. “More and more, it feels like performance of the 21st century has to embrace multidisciplinary pieces as part of their programs — it’s vital. Our world is so much about collage and collision of cultures — we need to reflect that in the theater we make.”

Writer and director Robert Cucuzza will present his reinvention of August Strindberg’s classic tale “Miss Julie,” highlighted by line dancing and country-western music written and performed by Julie Crockett. Cucuzza combines the worlds of theater, music, dance and visuals to move his audience. The festival is a rare venue in which he can present his multidisciplinary vision.

“Many people like to know what they are about to be given in a theater,” explains Cucuzza. “As hard as it is to get people to come see your work, it’s even harder when that work is ‘new’ or ‘original.’ The NOW Festival enables us to present our work — in whatever interdisciplinary form it may be — in an established venue, with support, encouragement and the capacity for many people to experience it.”

The theater at REDCAT is a black box that seats 200, but, according to Lugg, the festival will fill that small space with some of the most technically challenging and experimental work in the country. The stage is designed to be exceptionally flexible and support high level performances of various disciplines. And working behind the scenes is a professional and strategic technical team bringing artists the capacity to expand and experiment with their work — limitations are a foreign concept at this space.

This approach has been one of REDCAT’s primary goals from Day 1: to provide a venue where audiences can see and meet new artists and where artists can work with new or unfamiliar technologies, techniques and other artists. Each week, NOW features two or three pieces or artists that run only that week.

Victoria Marks, the Alpert Award-winning choreographer behind “Medium Big Inefficient Considerably Imbalanced Dance,” a piece featured during the third week of the festival, says, “The NOW Festival brings L.A. audiences together and seeds new audiences for new artists. It also encourages artists to view the work of their colleagues across fields. The mixed programming makes for more vibrancy. It is good to have neighbors.”

jasmine.elist@latimes.com