The Roy and Edna Disney CalARTS Theater (REDCAT) presents the 22nd annual New Original Works (NOW) festival, a celebration of innovative performing arts by Los Angeles artists. Since the inaugural edition in 2004, REDCAT’s NOW festival has served as a catalyst for experimentation and new work in the performing arts. NOW 2025 features nine new original works in dance, theater, music, and performance presented over three weeks from November 6-22. 

Schedule:

Lu Coy, jeremy de’jon guyton, Luna Izpisua Rodriguez

Lu Coy
Becoming the Moon

Lu Coy (Music Performer Composer MFA 18) crafts an opera that illuminates the Florentine Codex’s account of Tecciztecatl—a gender-expansive Mexica moon deity. Blending original poetry with translation of the 16th-century Nahuatl manuscript, this performance unfolds through song, animation, storytelling, and movement. Guiding audiences through transcestral memory, Coy conjures a retelling that connects to their own lived experiences of the ache and radiance of transfeminine rebirth. Excavating queer narratives from colonial materials, Coy combines experimental electronic music with virtuosic vocal performance and pre-Columbian instrumentation in an examination of the beauty found under the cover of darkness.

jeremy de’jon guyton
notes on building a foundation, 1963

Blending lyrical text, fluid movement, and nostalgic audio-visual elements drawn from his own family archive, this poetic autofiction by jeremy de’jon guyton is a meditation on legacy, displacement, and the urgent desire for sanctuary. notes on building a foundation, 1963 brings audiences into a survival bunker where memory, movement, and myth converge as Q.S. excavates ancestral artifacts from their family’s flight Westward in 1963 and stories passed down over three generations. As Los Angeles fires, both literal and political, force new waves of migration, this interdisciplinary dance performance asks: How do we preserve what matters when the world around us is burning? This timely performance dares to reimagine survival through the unrelenting search for home.

Luna Izpisua Rodriguez
Open House

At the foreclosure sale of a beachfront home in Southern California, a realtor masked in plastic surgery feeds the desperation of ownership. Two first-time buyers grip each other in the primary closet, lost in the fantasy of a real estate flipper. Neighbors walk around nervously—who will be next? Visitors test the way their bodies sink into the shiny staging sofa, unaware that a coyote is nursing her young in the guest room. The ghosts of California’s keepers and takers slip out through the cracks in the drywall. Yet no matter what befalls, no one relinquishes the desperate belief that this land can be possessed. Directed by Luna Izpisua Rodriguez (Art and Theater Directing MFA 24), Open House is a meditation on erosion, both geological and psychic—on how losing land can feel like losing self.

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