![Los Angeles Performance Practice presents the 10th edition of the Live Arts Exchange [LAX] Festival](https://performancepractice.la/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Festival-Pass.png)
The Live Arts Exchange (LAX) Festival, Vol. 10, will take place from September through November 2023 across cultural institutions and venues in DTLA. The festival features electrifying new work in contemporary dance, theater, music, and cross-genre performance at Los Angeles venues including Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater (REDCAT), Automata, L.A. Dance Project (LADP), and The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA).
Since its inception in 2013, the LAX Festival has illuminated the creative spirit of Los Angeles, highlighting the city’s most innovative artists and independent companies. Over the years, the festival has fostered a powerful platform for ongoing artistic exchange and collaboration. Each edition encourages artists, curators, and organizations to partake in performance presentations, thought-provoking dialogues, and creative encounters aimed at nurturing mutual exploration and long-lasting connections.
“As the LAX Festival reaches its 10 year anniversary, I wanted to root the festival in the city where LAX was first created and celebrate the incredibly rich landscape already in existence in contemporary performance through partnerships,” says LAPP Producer + Director of Programs Patricia Garza. “Featured artists in this year’s Festival are a revisiting of artists who have been foundational to LAPP’s innovative aesthetic while also inviting artists who are setting a new paradigm for contemporary performance through content and form.”
Festival Artists
The LAX Festival opens with LAPP producing artist Anna Luisa Petrisko’s experimental opera All Time Stop Now on Friday and Saturday, September 29-30 at 8:30 PM PT at Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater (REDCAT), CalArts’ downtown center for contemporary arts. All Time Stop Now is a contemplation on listening, impermanence, and kinship. Her signature prism of mutant pop yields spiritually infused anthems that encompass beauty, sorrow, and discovery.
On Saturday-Sunday, October 14 & 15 at Automata, join Gabrielle Civil in Black Weirdo School (Pop Up Critique), to witness, experiment, study, and play with other artists/creatives/weirdos. Part workshop, part ritual, part improvisation, this show will activate instant art education and recharge CREATIVE ENERGY.
On Thursday, October 19, San Cha will perform Asunción: A Workshop at L.A. Dance Project. Asunción is a highly stylized, decadent, surrealist and tragic telenovela that dispels cis and heteronormative love and marriage archetypes. With a live soundtrack fusing Mariachi, punk, classical music, and electro, Asunción celebrates the liberating power of ascendant relationships.
On Friday, October 20, Roger Q. Mason shares a reading of their play Hide & Hide directed by Jessica Hanna at L.A. Dance Project. Set in seedy 1980 Los Angeles, two immigrants (Billy, a rent boy fleeing the Texas police, and Constanza, an immigrant from the Philippines who’s stayed past her visa), enter a sham marriage in search of freedom and a better life.
On Saturday, October 21, Marissa Brown / Lone King Projects will perform at L.A. Dance Project her piece How lonely sits the city. How lonely sits the city is a poetic layering of dance film and live performance that tells the quiet interior stories of Black identifying dancers who take on angelic-like characters. Personal and historical narratives unfold throughout the films that have been formed publicly in and around historically Black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, CA.
On Saturday-Sunday, October 21 & 22, Marsian De Lellis will perform a work-in-progress of Model Killer: Giant Crimes + Tiny Cover-Ups at Automata. A disgruntled dollhouse maker turned investigator transforms herself from lonely crafter to blood thirsty serial killer in this noir walk-through puppetry experience that uses fragments of dollhouses as staging areas.
On Friday, October 27, Elisa Harkins will perform Wampum / ᎠᏕᎳ ᏗᎦᎫᏗ at L.A. Dance Project. An act of Indigenous Futurism, Wampum / ᎠᏕᎳ ᏗᎦᎫᏗ is the electronic music project of Elisa Harkins. Singing in Cherokee, Mvskoke, and English languages, Harkins becomes a language guardian, fighting extinction whilst crafting a head-bouncing beat.
On Saturday, October 28, Spenser Theberge will perform Intimates, a work-in-progress showing at L.A. Dance Project. Irreverent and interdisciplinary, Spenser’s showing is a virtuosic, multidisciplinary piece on themes of longing and the performance of self. Designed to not only be a work-in-progress, but also to very much be about process, Intimates is searching for that true sense of self – at times faking it, and at other times too tired to fake it.
On Saturday-Sunday, October 28 & 29 and Thursday-Saturday November 2, 3 & 4, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) presents the West Coast premiere of Moriah Evans’ performance installation, Remains Persist at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Taking choreographic scores as prompts, this four-hour, durational work weaves together residues and histories, both those that are known, transcribed, or embodied and those that are perhaps unmarked but nevertheless retained in the body–inherited traits, muscle memory, or generational trauma.
On Sunday, October 29, ACCELERATEDDDDDD: Works In Progress will be presented at a to be determined venue and time. Join us for this showcase of cross-genre contemporary works by four different artists from LAPP’s ACCELERATOR Program. Featuring: Future Human Support Positions by Chelsea Zeffiro, Untitled Sisters Project by Mireya Lucio, Two of Pentacles by Daniel Corral, and Object Permanence by Daria Kaufman. ACCELERATOR is a program of LAPP which builds a community of independent artists who are actively seeking to resource and develop a current project.
Finally, on Thursday-Friday, November 2 & 3, DaEun Jung’s NORRI will be performed at L.A. Dance Project. NORRI is a new evening-length dance work by Los Angeles-based choreographer DaEun Jung. Re-stylized Korean dance vocabulary, spontaneous pansori (Korean traditional folk opera) sung by Melody Shim, and the continuous pulse of electronic sound composed by Daniel Corral interact with each other as the rhythmic encounters of past/present, formality/spontaneity, and uniformity/singularity suggest a new contemporary movement.
LAX Festival passes offer access to all performances and other benefits at an incredible value ranging from $100 – $500. LAX Festival passes further support LAPP’s presentation of new contemporary performance. Visit https://performancepractice.la/festival/tickets/ for more information.
Purchase single tickets to each show for $14 – $29 – some exceptions apply. Visit www.performancepractice.la/festival/ to purchase tickets online. Access tickets to Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater (REDCAT) and The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) performances via their respective websites—links are available on the LAPP site. All tickets are general admission. All performances require a ticket for entry. Please mention any wheelchair/accessible seating and disability access needs when purchasing. Dates, details, and prices are subject to change.
For updates and more information, including venue locations, visit www.performancepractice.la/festival/
Los Angeles Performance Practice is a non-profit organization devoted to the production and presentation of contemporary performance by artists whose work advances and challenges multidisciplinary artistic practices.
Our mission is to support a unique and diverse constellation of artists and audiences through the active creation and presentation of groundbreaking experiences that use innovative approaches to collaboration, technology and social engagement. Anchored in Los Angeles, our artists and projects have national and global reach.
Across a range of platforms and partnerships, we build an active network of contemporary practitioners—curators and producers, artists and designers, audiences and patrons—all leveraged in service to the ideas and issues of our time.
The LAX Festival is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. Additional support by the LA County Department of Arts and Culture as part of the Creative Recovery LA, an initiative funded by the American Rescue Plan.
All Time Stop Now is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by On the Boards, Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater (REDCAT)/California Institute of the Arts, and NPN. The Creation & Development Fund is supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency). For more information: npnweb.org. Support provided by the LA County Department of Arts and Culture with additional support by Santa Monica Cultural Affairs and Camera Obscura Art Lab.
Asunción: A Tele-Operetta is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana, Performance Space New York, Long Beach Opera, and NPN. The Creation & Development Fund is supported by the Doris Duke Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency). For more information: www.npnweb.org. Long Beach Opera has commissioned the premiere of the production.
Hide & Hide was developed by Page 73 and Breaking the Binary Theatre Festival.
The filming of How lonely sits the city is partly supported by California Institute of the Arts and Lone King Projects. The project also received support from Art Share L.A. Ellsworth Artist Residency and L.A. Dance Project.
Model Killer: Giant Crimes + Cover-Ups has been made possible in part through funding from the Jim Henson Foundation, with development support from The Ucross Foundation, The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, Automata, LAPP, and Santa Monica Cultural Affairs.
Wampum / ᎠᏕᎳ ᏗᎦᎫᏗ is supported in part by the Western States Arts Federation (WESTAF) and the National Endowment for the Arts with additional support from Abby Sher.
NORRI was supported and made possible by L.A. Dance Project, New Music USA’s Creator Fund in 2023-24, and The Korea Foundation.
MOCA’s presentation of Moriah Evans’ Remains Persist is part of Wonmi’s WAREHOUSE Programs. Wonmi’s WAREHOUSE Programs is founded by Wonmi & Kihong Kwon and Family.
Special thanks to L.A. Dance Project for their support.
