September 15, 2021 [UPDATED Oct. 1, 2021] – Tirgan, North America’s preeminent hub for Persian arts and culture, is proud to announce the virtual presentation of The Scarlet Stone, a multidisciplinary and collaborative music/dance/animation work that merges expressive modern aesthetics with Persian traditions. Composer/Director Shahrokh Yadegari created this profound cultural experience in conjunction with dancer/choreographer Shahrokh Moshkin Ghalam based on the Shahnameh by Ferdowsi and the last work of Siavash Kasrai, Moher-ye Sorkh (The Scarlet Stone). Read the rest of this entry »

REDCAT presents the Los Angeles premiere of Infinitely Yours by animator, designer and performer Miwa Matreyek for the debut of her latest work. Running for three performances from Thursday, January 16 through Saturday, January 18, 2020, the award-winning interdisciplinary creator brings her nightmarish vision of climate grief to Los Angeles audiences before heading to Park City, Utah for the works’ world premiere during Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier program. Infinitely Yours will then embark on a North American tour throughout June. All music for Infinitely Yours was composed, recorded and performed by Morgan Sorne who will join Matreyek for the REDCAT show as live musical accompaniment.

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Coin & Ghost, LA’s theatrical home for remixed mythologies, will present its latest World premiere, Bad Hamlet, at the end of July, as the inaugural production of its second season. The emerging theatre company’s new work—devised by the ensemble and directed by Rob Adler—is an irreverent, interactive, and inventive play that places Shakespeare’s masterpiece directly up against the many interpretations of it, whether accurate, misremembered, or re-invented entirely. Bad Hamlet will run from Thursday, July 25, through Saturday, August 24, 2019, at New American Theatre in Hollywood. The first show will be the designated preview performance, with opening night taking place on Friday, July 26th. Read the rest of this entry »

Coin & Ghost, LA’s theatrical home for remixed mythologies, is thrilled to announce its second season: MYTH-REMEMBERED. The emerging theatre company will launch its season with the World Premiere of Bad Hamlet, an irreverent, interactive, and inventive play that places Shakespeare’s masterpiece directly up against the many interpretations of it, whether accurate, misremembered, or re-invented entirely. Devised by the ensemble and directed by Rob Adler, Bad Hamlet will run from Thursday, July 25th, through Saturday, August 24, 2019, at New American Theatre in Hollywood. The first show will be the designated preview performance, with opening night taking place on Friday, July 26th. Read the rest of this entry »

Mount Wilson Observatory—the scientific marvel above Pasadena, atop Mount Wilson—is pleased to announce the third date in its Sunday Afternoon Concerts in the Dome six-month series, to take place on Sunday, July 7, 2019. The performances are presented inside the iconic vaulted dome of the 100-inch telescope. A season of musical adventures thoughtfully curated by Artistic Director Cécilia Tsan are offered on the first Sunday of each month through October with two shows per date. The July concert program, entitled Songs of The Spheres, feature all vocal compositions, each one a World Premiere, by composers Bruce Babcock, Anthony Constantino, Todd Mason, Mark McEncroe and Danaë Vlasse. Performers for the two vocal concert include Hila Plitmann, soprano, Sangeeta Kaur, soprano, Marcia Dickstein, harp, Reina Inui, violin,  Rachel Mellis, flute, and Shea Welsh, guitar. Also performing is a special guest chamber choir, the Sterling Ensemble, directed by Michelle Jensen. Read the rest of this entry »

Overtone Industries is proud to present a revival of one its very first shows, Katy Cruel: A Play with Songs, running for two performances over the second weekend of June on Saturday, June 8 and Sunday, June 9, 2019 at a private site-specific location near Burbank, California. Directed by O-Lan Jones with libretto and music by Jones and Kathleen Cramer, Katy Cruel is an intense slice of life that takes place during the American Revolutionary War where we see the beginnings of America. This show is being presented as part of Overtone Industries 40^th anniversary of mythic story telling through theatre and music.This limited engagement will take place at a rustic farm in Shadow Hills. Read the rest of this entry »

Good Shows is proud to present The Book of Briarshire, running for five performances in the 2019 season of The Hollywood Fringe Festival from Saturday, June 8^th through Sunday, June 30^th. Written by and starring Kelly Moore, directed by Colleen Doyle, and produced by Conor Hanney, The Book of Briarshire is an epic medieval fantasy comedy, where kick-ass women rule. With an almost entirely female ensemble cast, Briarshire subverts the fantasy genre, packed with both action and laughs. Our heroine Ylva (played by Moore) wants nothing more than to become a knight and live up to her father’s legacy, so she quests to slay The Dragon (played by Lindsey Mallard) along with her clueless sister Skittles (played by Emily Bolcik) who frequently breaks into unsolicited/undesired freestyle raps. Along the way, they encounter magic, soldiers, elves, and even… a cobbler.  The limited engagement will take place at The Broadwater, Second Stage. Audience members are invited to stay afterwards for refreshments in the attached bar The Broadwater Plunge, owned by TV’s Patrick Duffy. Read the rest of this entry »

Highways turns 30! The performance space presents Behold! Highways’ Queer Fest 2019 May–June, its annual queer performance arts festival, which appropriately collides with the enduring creative space’s 30th birthday. From May 3rd through June 30, 2019, two months of new LGBTQIA work will be presented by Highways’ extended family of artists, writers and performers such as solo-theatre legend Tim Miller (a founder and original co-artistic director), eminent artist-activist Michael Kearns, the nation’s first out transgender modern dance choreographer Sean Dorsey, and Black Lives Matter Co-founder Patrisse Cullors. Look for specific Dirty 30 anniversary events that bookend the festival (5/3, 5/4 and 6/29). Behold! will also feature such emerging performance artists and curators as Tyler Matthew Oyer, Marval A Rex, Celeste XXX, Moises Josue Michel, Kyoko Takenaka and Shruti Purkayastha. 

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Wajatta in November 2019
Extended Biography

When beat-boxer/comedian/musician Reggie Watts and electronic music artist/DJ/producer John Tejada first joined forces as Wajatta, the results were hailed as “a surprising and winning new collaboration” (NPR) and “in league with Frankie Knuckles and Jamie Principle’s classic house” (Los Angeles Times). Coming from different worlds, but sharing a passion for the rich history of electronic dance music, Watts and Tejada bring out the best in each other’s formidable skill sets. It’s a cosmic collision of funk-infused techno and soul-steeped vocal acrobatics, equaling and at times surpassing the brilliance of their solo work.

Wajatta (a mashup of the artists’ last names, pronounced wa-HA-ta) began in the most fitting of places: an underground warehouse party in 2016, where John was playing a late-night DJ set and Reggie, a long-time fan of John’s propulsive techno productions, was in the audience. From there a friendship blossomed, formed over strong coffee, similar backgrounds (John was born in Austria and raised in Los Angeles; Reggie moved at a young age from Germany to Montana and later Seattle) and similar interests: ‘80s sci-fi films, old-school hip-hop.

When they began making music together, the chemistry was immediate. In their very first session at John’s home studio in Los Angeles, they completed three tracks. “It was pretty instantaneous,” Reggie agrees. “What he played me was really fun and sparked a lot of possibilities in my head.”

Their initial collaborations resulted in the acclaimed 2018 debut album, Casual High Technology, that seamlessly married Reggie’s mix of beat-boxing, scat-singing and multi-octave, R&B-inspired crooning with John’s nimble, harmonically rich forays into house, techno, hip-hop and beyond. Since that release, the two friends have squeezed more recording sessions into their demanding schedules, continuing to find new inspiration in one another’s talents. 

The best of those sessions are now part of a second full-length, Don’t Let Get You Down, due for release on Brainfeeder on February 28, 2020. As thrilling as Casual High Technology was, Don’t Let Get You Down is a major leap forward, a reflection of the way John and Reggie’s partnership has grown deeper and more intuitive.

They build most tracks from scratch, bouncing ideas off one another from initial spark to finished product. It’s all done in person: “We never just share files,” John notes. They also try to keep their sessions as spontaneous as possible, in a neverending quest to, as Reggie puts it, “capture the freshness.” As a result, Don’t Let Get You Down’s 11 tracks crackle with the energy of fresh ideas captured at the moment of inspiration. It’s electronic music made organically, from two masters at the top of their respective games.

That organic approach extends to their live shows, at which Tejada rebuilds the duo’s tracks on his samplers and synths, while the multi-octave Watts conjures vocal symphonies out of little more than a loop station and a delay pedal. Besides a number of concerts in Los Angeles, they’ve performed a handful of shows around the U.S. — San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, Taos — as well as high-profile events and festivals such as Movement in Detroit, MUTEK in Montreal, CRSSD Festival in San Diego, two Dirtybird shows (BBQ in 2018 and Campout in 2019), and a live studio session for KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic.

On Don’t Let Get You Down’s final track, “All I Need Is You,” listeners can get a taste of one of Wajatta’s most unique concerts. The fully improvised song was part of a spontaneously created 90-minute performance for Club Something at The Sweat Spot, an L.A. dance studio run by choreographer Ryan Heffington (Sia, Spike Jonze, FKA Twigs). It’s a six-minute snapshot of the improvisational brilliance that lies at the heart of everything Wajatta does — an approach summed up in Reggie’s off-the-cuff one-liner near the track’s end: “We’re making everything here for you from scratch — just to ensure maximum freshness.”

Watts can currently be seen nightly as the bandleader for CBS’s The Late Late Show With James Corden. He first burst into the American audience’s lives as the co-host of IFC’s groundbreaking variety series Comedy Bang! Bang! Over his 15-year career as a solo performer, he’s honed a unique style that blurs the lines between music and comedy, as is evident in his 9-minute TED Talk in 2012, as well as multiple comedy specials for both Comedy Central and Netflix, and at the invitation of Jack White, the record Reggie Watts Live at Third Man Records. Everything he does is 100% improvised — most notably, the multi-layered music tracks he builds on the fly, looping his beat-boxed rhythms and soulful vocals into spontaneous musical inventions that are funky, hypnotic and often hilarious. See updates at https://www.instagram.com/reggiewatts.

In Wajatta, Reggie infuses those same techniques into John’s sinuous sounds, creating a refreshingly playful take on electronic music — one in which it’s often hard to separate the machines from the human voice. “There’s a lot of stuff happening that you may not realize is Reggie,” John explains. Though he’s a big fan of Reggie’s uncanny beat-boxing skills, John prefers to disguise those effects among the pulses and patters of his analog synths and vintage drum machines. “It’s cool for it to be like, ‘I didn’t know that was his voice.’”

John, for his part, has been at the vanguard of West Coast techno since 1994, releasing a succession of acclaimed albums, singles and EPs for such prestigious labels as Kompakt, Poker Flat, Cocoon, Plug Research and his own long-running imprint, Palette Recordings. Among his best-known tracks are the moody, mesmeric “Farther and Fainter” (from his 2011 Kompakt full-length Parabolas) and the 2005 underground banger, “Sweat (On the Walls)” — now a staple of Wajatta’s high-energy live shows, where Reggie delivers witty, freestyle riffs on the track’s original spoken-word vocals. See updates at https://www.instagram.com/johntejadaofficial.

With influences ranging from Detroit techno to Chicago house, Marvin Gaye to Mantronix, Wajatta’s sound is both familiar and wholly original — and, like all great dance music, ultimately life-affirming, as Reggie vocalizes, sometimes without words, the joyful energy of his and John’s funky, shape-shifting productions. “That’s the great thing about working with John,” Reggie says with an infectious grin. “He’s so steeped in the history of this music. I just pick up on that and run with it.”

Angel City Chorale (ACC), the acclaimed Los Angeles choir led by Founder-Artistic Director Sue Fink, will celebrate its 25th birthday this year with an extraordinary spring concert event, One World, Many Voices II, during the first weekend in June. An exhilarating sequel to ACC’s original 2009 production, One World, Many Voices, this concert will embrace the power of diversity that ACC is known for, with vibrant songs representing different cultures from around the world. Now, globally recognized*, Angel City Chorale welcomes dear friends from South Africa to make this special anniversary edition truly memorable; the show will feature a powerful guest appearance from Cape Town’s Amy Foundation youth choir, as well as a new commissioned work from Grammy award-winning composer Christopher Tin. One World, Many Voices II is set to take place at the Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles over two special evenings on Saturday, June 2, and Sunday, June 3, 2018. Tickets range in price from $22 for children to $75 for VIP packages (see “Ticketing & Venue Details” towards the bottom of this press release). The performances will each start at 7:00pm. Read the rest of this entry »