Chica Barbosa, Friidom, Tarren Johnson: NOW Festival: Week 3

REDCAT’s NOW Festival: Week 3 brings Chica Barbosa, Friidom, and Tarren Johnson together on one Downtown Los Angeles program. The supplied information identifies them as separate artists appearing in the same week of the festival, rather than confirming a shared band or a fixed ensemble. It also does not specify the individual works, instrumentation, musical repertoire, or performance format for the night. What is clear is that this is a multidisciplinary festival presentation at REDCAT, CalArts’ performance space in the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex, whose flexible black-box theater can be configured differently for each production.

Friidom is Darrel “Friidom” Dunn, a Los Angeles based street-dance artist whom REDCAT describes as a Black Indigenous ambassador for street dance, thespian, director, and movement composer. His work celebrates “the tethers of community” within street-dance traditions and has developed through his Epiic movement practice. His Bandcamp work includes production in Krump, HipHop, soundscapes, and more, including the release The Journeii. REDCAT notes collaborations with NASA JPL, Disney, WACO Theater, and the Debbie Allen Dance Academy. Writing on earlier dance works, L.A. Dance Chronicle called a performance with composer Emer Kinsella “entrancing to witness,” citing its “cinematic sensibility,” while another review observed freestyle movement that seemed to “burst straight from the heart.”