REDCAT presents the world premiere of Reorient the Orient, renowned choreographer Lionel Popkin’s career retrospective on Saturday, March 9 and Sunday, March 10, 2024. Popkin draws from his nearly 30-year archive of dance-making in this durational (8 hours) performance event and installation that takes over the theater, gallery and lobby of REDCAT all weekend.
With videos, ephemeral objects, printed matter that provides historical context, contemporary responses, and movement social agitation, that are all part of Popkin’s response to the dubious history of interculturalism by asking, “How brown South Asian bodies inhabit contemporary art and performance spaces?”
Popkin says, “No person will see it all. This is purposeful. The audience can stay as long as they like and arrive whenever they wish. The project unpacks dubious histories and experiences in multiple trajectories. One track traces how orientalism has dictated the way South Asian performers exist in American art spaces, using a series of historical figures to ground the conversation. Another spans my archive of over thirty years of making art in the U.S. as I have wrestled with the quandaries of my mixed diasporic background. A third is how you (the audience) navigate through the complex modes of display present in the theater, the gallery, and the lobby.”
About Lionel Popkin
Lionel Popkin was born and raised in Bloomington, Indiana, by an Indian mother and a Jewish father. His work engages people, objects, and media to explore issues of hybridity, archival practices, historical inequities, and the confusions surrounding the representations of the South Asian diaspora in North America. His work has been presented on four continents at venues, including Danspace Project and Abrons Arts Center in New York, the Skirball Cultural Center and the Getty Center in Los Angeles, The Palace Theatre in London, the Guangdong Dance Festival in Guangzhou, China, and the São Carlos Videodan Festival in Brazil.
When:
Performance tickets include access to the Reorient the Orient installation in the theater and gallery, on view from 2:00pm to 10:00pm. Performance times are 3:00pm and 7:30pm. Tickets cost $27, with discounts available for REDCAT members, students and the CalArts community ($14-$22).
Tickets:
https://ci.ovationtix.com/34348/production/1185780
Where:
REDCAT (located in Walt Disney Concert Hall)
631 West 2nd Street
Los Angeles, CA 90012
213-237-2800
Image credit: Still from Lionel Popkin’s Reorient the Orient featuring the six-channel video installation, “Six Positions on Uncertainty.”
