Los Angeles Performance Practice is thrilled to announce our 2024 RESEARCH + DEVELOPMENT cohort. Piloted in 2019, RESEARCH + DEVELOPMENT provides early project support at the very beginning stages of a new performance work. We received close to 100 applications this year– the most we have ever received!– and we are very excited to see what the invited artists explore.
Our R+D artists for 2024 are SAN CHA, WESLEIGH GATES and FOUR LARKS. Our R+D: FOR PARENTS/GUARDIANS artists for 2024 are REGINALD EDMUND and MAYA GURANTZ. Please enjoy the following details about the artists and their work, and keep an eye out for future blog interviews with each individual artist.
R+D
SAN CHA
San Cha (she/they) is a queer Latine musician and performance artist who uses ‘novela’ inspired performances to tell stories about colonization and heartbreak with the aims of liberation and healing. With influences ranging from Catholic hymns, Mexican corridos, rancheras, and cumbias to punk queer electroclash, drag, and nightlife, San Cha weaves together parts of her identity that were often severed and compartmentalized. For her, music is a personal and political vehicle to usher socio-political change and liberation.
San Cha has had projects, performances, and residencies with the Getty, LACMA, Performance Space New York, Ballroom Marfa, PICA’s TBA Festival, Long Beach Opera, and many more. They also showed as part of Los Angeles Performance Practice’s LAX Festival 2023, and we are honored to continue that relationship with this work.
For R+D, San Cha will be adapting their album La Luz De Esperanza into an experimental opera titled Inebira me. Inebria me interrogates and dispels the cisgender and heteronormative archetypes that dominated the telenovelas of San Cha’s youth. With a live, original soundtrack fusing Ranchera, punk, classical, and electro, Inebria me celebrates the liberating power of ascendant relationships.
WESLEIGH GATES
Wesleigh Gates (she/they) is a transfeminine artist building collective structures of connection and care through performance. Trained in theater, seduced by choreography, and inspired equally by seminars and raves, she creates assemblages of text and movement that function as temporary spaces of community.
Wesleigh is invested in collaging material that proposes strategies for solidarity between queer/trans bodies; in previous work she has reimagined text by Andy Warhol as a showcase for contemporary drag artists (Honor Fraser Gallery, Philadelphia Fringe), digital data algorithms as scores for approaching queer archival collections (Kelly Strayhorn Theater, Pittsburgh), and the Salem witch trials as a series of spells cast by trans performers in collaboration with a pre-ChatGPT text bot (New Hazlett Theater, Pittsburgh). As a performer, she has collaborated with artists including Caden Manson/Big Art Group, Julie Tolentino, Jamison Edgar, Emily Barasch, Brendan Drake, and Dan Safer/Witness Relocation. She holds an MFA in Directing from Carnegie Mellon and is currently a PhD candidate in Culture and Performance at UCLA, where her research focuses on trans performance practices in public space.
Wesleigh’s work with queer/trans collaborative teams will continue in the R+D process. Performed by three trans artists who self-identify as currently transitioning, The Grafters will be a lecture performance slash dance piece slash horror fantasia exploring the dynamic, generative, and occasionally frightening process of gender transition. Through text, movement, and live video, The Grafters explores what acts of grafting— from community horticultural practices to urban planning to the brutal experiments of body horror films— might illuminate about what we are afraid to call changing sex.
FOUR LARKS
FOUR LARKS is a queer collaborative comprised of director/composer Mat Sweeney and designer/choreographer Sebastian Peters-Lazaro, whose ‘junkyard operas’ are designed, composed, and staged using found/repurposed materials to reimagine recurring narratives for our age of limitless information, dehumanizing technologies, and ecological crisis.
Recent projects include The Temptation of St Antony, described as a “sensual, intellectual and vastly entertaining feast” (LA Weekly), and Katabasis, a promenade opera that led audiences around the grounds and gardens of the Getty Villa, heralded as a “brilliant postmodern opera” (Fabrik). They swept all categories at the most recent Ovation Awards, were named Best of LA by LA Weekly, and have recurred on the LA Times’ Critic’s Choice and KCRW’s Best of the Year lists.
For R+D, Four Larks will initiate a collaboration with filmmaker, performer, and visual artist Mohammad Shawky Hassan. Hassan’s works have premiered at the Berlinale and been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (NYC) as part of its permanent collection. His long-term artistic research project explores the forms, aesthetics, and languages of popular cultural artifacts that have contributed to the shaping of common frameworks of memory for Arabic-speaking queer communities over the past four decades. He is currently a visiting lecturer at Humboldt University’s Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies.
R+D for Parents/Guardians
REGINALD EDMUND
Reginald Edmund (he/him) is a theatre artist and the Co-Founder and Managing Curating Producer for Black Lives, Black Words International Project. His work with BLBW has been recognized by the Gard Leadership Award.
He was a Resident Playwright at Tamasha Theatre in London and an Alumni Resident Playwright at Chicago Dramatists Theatre; an Artistic Associate at Pegasus Theatre-Chicago and an Artistic Patriot at Merrimack Repertory Theatre; he was also a Many Voice Fellow with the Playwrights’ Center. His play Southbridge was runner up for the Kennedy Center’s Lorraine Hansberry and Rosa Parks National Playwriting Awards, and most recently named winner of the Southern Playwrights’ Competition, the Black Theatre Alliance Award for Best New Play, and the Edgerton Foundation New American Play Award. His nine-play series titled The City of the Bayou Collection (including Southbridge, Juneteenth Street, The Last Cadillac and All the Dying Voices), was developed at esteemed theaters including Pegasus Theatre, Deluxe Theatre, Actors Theatre of Charlotte, Bush Theatre (UK), The Theatre @ Boston Court, The Landing Theatre, Playwrights’ Center and The National Theatre (UK). Reginald received his BFA in Theatre- Performance from Texas Southern University and his MFA in Playwriting from Ohio University.
His R+D project, OF A DARKER HUE, is a chilling series of horror stories told in monologues from the African American perspective. This anthology of dark tales explores the unknown, the unseen, and the unspoken fears that lurk in the shadows of the African American experience in Los Angeles. Each monologue delves into the darkest corners of the human psyche, confronting themes of racism, trauma, and the supernatural. Through the voices of diverse characters, this collection will masterfully weave together a tapestry of terror, exploring the ways in which our deepest fears are often rooted in our collective histories and experiences and where the horrors that lurk in the shadows are not just monsters, but also the very fabric of our reality living in America.
MAYA GURANTZ
Maya Gurantz (she/her) uses video, dance, installation, social practice, and writing, to make accessible spaces to experience difficult things. Her work transforms whatever place contains it into a ritual site for visceral encounters with dark historical forces and the unsettling feminine divine.
Solo shows include: LA Artcore (As recipient of Prospect Art’s PRESENT WORK award), Pitzer College Art Gallery, Catharine Clark Gallery (Box Blur Commission, collaborative with Ellen Sebastian Chang & Sunhui Chang), Grand Central Art Center , MCA Denver, among others. Group shows and performances include: HomeLA, MoCA Utah, LAND (Nomadic Division), Art Center, Navel LA, Angels Gate Cultural Center, Oakland Museum of California, High Desert Test Sites, Beaconsfield Gallery Vauxhall, Autonomie Gallery, and Movement Research at Judson Church, among others. Maya’s films have been Official Selections at festivals worldwide, her writing has been published extensively including in The LA Review of Books, This American Life, and The Frame at KPCC, and she is co-host of The Sauce, a podcast that explores how culture and politics produce one another.
Maya’s R+D project, The Sunworshippers, is a lecture-demonstration in dance and storytelling that explores the history of a Los Angeles-based cult leader who left an indelible—and to this day, almost entirely unexplored—mark on the 20th and 21st century. Telling the story of Mazdaznan and its founder, the Rev. Dr. Otoman ZarAdusht Ha’nish, Maya will dance against a backdrop of richly composited video— calling up early film techniques— and perform and lead the audience through Mazdaznan exercises. Along the way, she will reveal connections between new age culture, eugenics, and right wing conspiracy theories; call up the traumas enacted by male leaders; and both create and undermine the notion of group spiritual spaces.
Read Maya’s interview on the LAPP blog.
We look forward to supporting these artists as they research and develop their new performance projects. Intrigued by their work? Keep an eye on this blog for upcoming interviews with each individual artist.
