CalArts Center for New Performance and Luna Ray Media production of
The Hendrix Project
Conceived and Directed by Roger Guenveur Smith
Developed in cooperation with Experience Hendrix, LLC
About
12 disciples have come to New York City's Fillmore East Auditorium to listen to the Gospel According to Jimi Hendrix. It's New Year's Eve 1969, and Hendrix has assembled an electronic blues trio called Band of Gypsys. They bring the heat of a nation at war to a city frozen in mid-winter chill. Hendrix dedicates their performance to the soldiers fighting at home and abroad, where "bullets fly like rain." It was his final New Year's Eve.
Press
"Roger Guenveur Smith gets it all and gets it brilliantly."
- Margo Jefferson, New York Times
Upcoming
The Hendrix Project
Directed by Roger Guenveur Smith, Cal Arts Center for New Performance, presented by Under the Radar and BRIC House January 11-14, 2018
Available for Touring
For Booking Inquiries:
Roger Guenveur Smith
Roger Guenveur Smith adapted his Obie Award-winning solo performance of A Huey P. Newton Story into a Peabody Award-winning telefilm. His Bessie Award-winning Rodney King is currently streaming on Netflix. For the 2018 Frederick Douglass Bicentennial, Mr. Smith is reviving his signature solo, Frederick Douglass Now. His presentations for the international stage also include Christopher Columbus 1992, Who Killed Bob Marley?, In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat, The Watts Towers Project, Juan and John, inspired by baseball greats Juan Marichal and John Roseboro, the volcanic love story Iceland, and histories of Philadelphia (Two Fires) and the Panama Canal (500 Lives Per Mile). Inside the Creole Mafia is a “not too dark comedy” in collaboration with New Orleans native sons Mark Broyard and Branford Marsalis. He has recently directed Steven Berkoff’s Agamemnon and Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop, as well as the Ovation and Bessie Awarded-winning Radio Mambo: Culture Clash Invades Miami. His many screen credits include Do The Right Thing, for which he created the stuttering hero Smiley, Eve’s Bayou, The Birth of a Nation, Marshall, and American Gangster, for which he was nominated for the Screen Actors’ Guild Award, and the HBO series K Street and Oz. Mr. Smith studied at Yale University and Occidental College, and has taught at both institutions. He currently directs his Performing History Workshop at CalArts.
CalArts Center for New Performance
CalArts Center for New Performance is the professional producing arm of California Institute of the Arts, established to provide a unique artist- and project-driven framework for the development and realization of original theater, music, dance, media and interdisciplinary projects. Seminal artists from around the world are brought to CNP to develop work that expands the language, discourse, and boundaries of contemporary theater and performance. CNP fosters the future of live performance by infusing the work of such transformative artists with the talent, vitality and impulses of emerging artists in the CalArts community.