Redcat

There is much to celebrate about REDCAT's annual New Original Works Festival, which opened its three-week, three-program run Thursday. To begin with, there is a fair amount of assurance by now that, after five years, the festival's selections, chosen out of a pool of more than 100 applicants, will more than reward one's sense of adventure. And, as the first program amply demonstrates, the work may be fresh out of the box but the phrase "under construction" is hardly apt. Certainly, Baker & Tarpaga Dance Project's "Sira Kan/On the Road" will benefit from future pruning of a messy middle section, but the piece has "good bones" -- a strong premise and structure, studded with provocative images.

He's at it again -- Beowolf, that is, the 8th century Anglo-Saxon hero given yet another incarnation in Heidi Duckler and Collage Dance Theatre's ongoing exploration, "My Beowulf." Seen at REDCAT on Thursday as part of its annual three-week multidisciplinary NOW (New Original Works) Festival, the four sections are intended as part of a full-evening production scheduled for November.

Making art isn't easy, and for many artists the hardest part is getting started. The first invention must be a strategy for facing a blank page, canvas, computer screen. Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu's ritual was to begin the day by playing a Bach prelude and fugue on the piano. Terry Riley likes to greet a favorite tree. Some turn to the bottle. The extraordinary Indonesian dancer, choreographer and visual artist Sardono W. Kusumo has come up with a far more fanciful ritual for making an action painting in his "Rain Coloring Forest," which opened the REDCAT season Thursday night.

The first thing you see when you walk into British musician David J's apartment in the historic Villa Carlotta in Franklin Village is a gigantic painted portrait of 1960s icon Edie Sedgwick perched on one wall. "I say hello to Edie every day," the musician wryly notes. Andy Warhol's tragic muse is the inspiration for David J's theatrical production "Silver for Gold (The Odyssey of Edie Sedgwick)," which plays at the REDCAT downtown through Sunday. As bass player and founding member of seminal '80s goth-rock art band Bauhaus and later Love and Rockets, David J, who has lived in the U.S. for 16 years, turned his dark vision toward the "Factory Girl" in a melancholic song suite he originally created in 2008.

MOVIES The Tingler Capping a monthlong Halloween celebration, the Cinefamily screens William Castle's 1959 horror-thriller, starring Vincent Price, about a centipede-like parasite that feeds on human terror. In keeping with the film's original release, the showing is presented in Percepto (with vibrating seats). Cinefamily, 611 N. Fairfax Ave., L.A. 8 p.m. $12. (323) 655-2510. http://www.cinefamily.org . MUSIC Zola Jesus The dark-wave synth-wrangler and powerhouse vocalist Nika Danilova just released "Conatus," the biggest statement yet in an already-long career for the young singer-producer.

In his younger and more vulnerable years, director John Collins flatly rejected the idea that theater is about bringing words on paper to life. He instead placed his trust in actors, space and movement as the most basic building blocks of stagecraft. "I wanted my plays to be made from what happened between actors moving around in rehearsal," said Collins, founder of the New York-based experimental theater company Elevator Repair Service. "That to me was fundamental to theater, more fundamental than text.

No one ever called Sandra Bernhard a simple girl at heart, and her latest show, "Sandrology," which opened Wednesday at REDCAT, is a kind of loosely constructed seminar on her glamorously defiant complexity. Looking as stylish as ever in a black "off-the-rack" designer cocktail dress with deep pockets that prompt all kinds of apocalyptic scenarios of how they might one day come in handy, she has come back to Los Angeles to "bring the realness. " And the taunting redhead whose résumé includes stints as Bravo TV's "pop culture anthropologist" doesn't pull any punches in her survey of the celebrity world, where not even those who open doors for her are safe from her skewering.