LAB 2026
Guillermo E. Brown, Carmina Escobar, Matana Roberts
The Industry celebrates the return of its LAB series, in partnership with REDCAT, featuring new works in opera by renowned artists Guillermo E. Brown, Carmina Escobar, and Matana Roberts.
For more than a decade, The Industry has created experimental productions that expand opera’s traditional definition, drawing new and diverse artists and audiences to the medium through interdisciplinary collaborations. The Industry LAB series is at the very core of these experiments, inviting artists who have never worked in opera to reexamine its history and orthodoxies—recasting the art form both onstage and in the gallery to reinvent its shape for our time.
LAB artists, following a period of incubation at REDCAT, will present works in the gallery and on the stage across a two-week program. Designed to showcase works in progress, LAB is a celebration of ideas, imagination, and collaborative risk-taking.
Program
Guillermo E. Brown
Guillermo E. Brown presents a triptych of performative strategies, playing with and about time inside a maximalist, roulette-like approach. With The Instrument—a boundary-pushing performance system fusing drumming, singing, electronics, and custom sensors—a 30-inch, gong-like projection surface becomes both drum and screen, encoding touch into sound and image to shape stories in the ether. Romance, inspired by Claude McKay’s novel Romance in Marseilles, distorts storytelling through the manipulation of time, place, and space. In Bee Boy, Brown charts metamorphosis and community, letting change ring out as a percussion-driven rhythm of resistance.
Carmina Escobar
Soaring vocal artist Carmina Escobar presents Our Voice Is Not at the End of Anything, a spiral-structured opera in gesture and sound that reimagines voice as force, friction, and breath. Across the opera each turn of the spiral asks a question: What is a voice when it is not heard but held, when it resists power, when it becomes collective? Moving through war, grief, and renewal, the work explores the voice-body as an instrument of resistance and repair—a living echo that insists on art, connection, and survival at the edge of collapse.
Matana Roberts
Multimedia artist Matana Roberts presents an immersive sound and image installation shaped by cyclical forms, mediated space, tonal atmospheres, and layered visual fields. Entitled spiral resonance: a study in the abstract, Roberts reframes the gallery space as a site of subtle recurrence and quiet drift. Roberts will present durational performances amidst the installation, joined by special guests to be announced.
Schedule
Guillermo E. Brown + Carmina Escobar
- Friday, February 20, 2026 8pm
- Saturday, February 21, 2026 3pm and 8pm
- Sunday, February 22, 2026 3pm
Matana Roberts
- Tuesday, February 24, 2026 8:00pm
- Wednesday, February 25, 2026 8:00pm
- Friday, February 27, 2026 8:00pm
- Saturday, February 28, 2026 8:00pm
- Sunday, March 1, 2026 3:00pm
Support
LAB 2026 is made possible thanks to support from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.
The Industry’s programming is also supported by Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Amphion Foundation, Alice M. Ditson Fund, Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, New Music USA, Perenchio Foundation, and Ralph M. Parsons Foundation.