State of Incarceration

January 28-29 and February 4-5 at Highways

June 15-18 as part of RADAR LA Festival

“This latest work from Los Angeles Poverty Department doesn’t just tell audiences what it means to be trapped in the California penal system. It dropkicks them into the experience, with inescapable force.”

David C. Nichols --- L.A. Times

State of Incarceration - LAPD's examination of the personal and social costs of incarceration in the U.S. > also see State of Incarceration

SKIDROPLAYAS

> Also see Festival for All Skid Row Artists

COME see for yourself!  JAN 27-28, 2012 for our expanded 2 day,

2nd annual ‘Festival for All Skid Row Artists’. 

Gladys Park, corner 6th St. and Gladys, noon to 4 pm.

Jeff Dietrich and Catherine Morris

LAPD will invite the audience to travel with us through Skid Row, guided by a brass band that will lead us to 36 places associated with the achievements of community visionaries living and working in Skid Row. The performance will animate the neighborhood and bring the history of the community to life.

With the Community Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles, LAPD is creating 36 permanent public artworks with images of neighborhood visionaries whose actions have contributed to re-knitting the social fabric of Skid Row, designed by Mr. Brainwash. Mr. Brainwash is, along with Shepard Fairey and Banksy, one of the most recognized street artists in the world. He has also gained a huge amount of recognition for his gallery shows in New York, Europe and Asia. As a street artist he has had ongoing interaction with people who live on the margins and an education in compassion and understanding. We expect to install the artworks around the same time as WALK THE TALK.

COLD WAR a performance project, developed over 3 years by the PeerGrouP and Los Angeles Poverty Department

The finished piece will be presented as part of the Noorderzon Festival in Groningen, the Netherlands, from16-26 August 2012.  The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Cultural Exchange International initiative has supported two phases of this collaboration between LAPD and the Netherlands-based PeerGrouP .  Both groups create theater work that engages with current social issues, but the communities they work with are very different: PeerGrouP builds projects in rural locations in Drente and L.A. Poverty Department builds projects in the heart of Skid Row, downtown LA.

Excerpt form an interview with women from Paula Panke, a women’s center in East Berlin.

"I lived in a very small village. My grandfather went to war and came back a changed man: he never wanted to talk about it. We never talked about politics. We were very poor, no running water or toilet in the house, but we had a garden and we had enough to eat. We were happy. After the Wall fell our teachers started teaching us about the rest of the world. From one day to the next the socialist system was not the only possible, right system anymore. I could not understand it. I could not believe in my teacher anymore. It was as if we all had migrated to another country, only, we had not moved at all."

A Micro History Of The World Economics, danced

is a performance written and directed by French director Pascal Rambert. He is the director of Theatre de Gennevilliers , a national theater in Gennevilliers, a low-income suburb of Paris, France. ‘A Micro History’ has been performed in France and Japan and we are planning to re-create the performance in Los Angeles with a combined cast of 45 Angelinos and a French group of 4 actors and an economist. The LA group will consist of 30 performers: a mix of LAPDers and other performers in the age range of 7 – 77 years old, and a 15 member choir.

LAPD participated in the Arts in One World conference in Cal Arts and made presentations at Scripps College, Woodbury University and the Otis College of Art and Design Public Practice Program.  Otis Public practice students assisted us in installing prison beds in the performance space, mounting our gallery exhibition and in photo documenting our State of Incarceration performances at Highways.  And Otis students were on camera participants in our “Warhol-esque” 9 hour movie of 184 Californians, each reading a page of the court decision on overcrowding in the CA prison system.

LAPD contributed to exhibitions Police and Thieves curated by Karla Diaz and Mario Ybarra Jr. at the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Living as Form exhibition curated by Nato Thompson for Creative Time, NY, participated in the Portraits in Dramatic Time directed by David Michalek at the Lincoln Center, NY and the Critical Campout by Los Angeles Urban Rangers at MOCA.

The Police and Thieves exhibition brought together current artistic production in Los Angeles and Chicago that deals with the historical and inherently conflicting power  dynamics between law enforcement and crime.  Timeout Chicago wrote: “In Los Angeles Poverty Department’s videotaped performance State of Incarceration (2010), actors (many of them ex-convicts) play prisoners and guards in a gallery filled wall to wall with bunk beds—just as a California jail would be. The video conveys such an environment’s mind-warping claustrophobia and sadism with devastating efficacy.”

FESTIVAL FOR ALL SKID ROW ARTISTS

January 27-28, 2012

12-4 pm, Gladys Park

2^nd annual

The first festival was one-day event.

This year’s is two.

Come visit this year’s!!!!

WALK the TALK

performance dates: April 24-29, 2012.

WALK the TALK is a walking, talking and music making parade traveling Skid Row, and stopping for sidewalk sized performances at the exact spots where 36 extraordinary people have made done their community transforming lifeswork. Many of these amazing people will join us for concurrent community conversations. All 36 community builders faces will forever grace Gladys Park as the ravishing public artwork created by Mr. Brainwash.

COLD WAR by the PeerGrouP and Los Angeles Poverty Department

Feb. 13-25: residency PeerGouP in Los Angeles

July 15- Aug. 15: residency LAPD in Drente, The Netherlands

August 16-26: Performances at Noorderzon Festival, Groningen, The Netherlands

BIGGEST RECOVERY COMMUNITY ANYWHERE

Fall 2012: begin work process, anticipated performance of finished work: May 2013

LAPD will start a new performance project that highlights the fact that Skid Row is one of the most significant recovery neighborhoods in the country.  Homeless people living in tents and boxes are the visible, static image of Skid Row. The dynamic reality of people transforming their lives and community is not a photo op. Biggest Recovery Community Anywhere explores the personal meaning and cultural significance of the recovery culture in Skid Row Los Angeles. This performance will reveal the multi-faceted lives, struggles and aspirations of people transforming themselves and their surroundings, those who would otherwise be invisible. As someone who works in the neighborhood pointed out in a forum we convened: "[Skid Row] has been perceived as a place to dump what you don't want. But the fact is that Skid Row is the only answer in the entire region, for problems of homelessness, and recovery."

3^rd annual FESTIVAL FOR ALL SKID ROW ARTISTS: fall / winter 2012

That’s right, building on numbers 1 and 2. Next years will be constructed in response to this year’s.

STATE OF INCARCERATION Installation / Performance residencies

Fall 2012 through Summer 2013. Exact dates to be determined.   

LAPD’s State of Incarceration, addressing prison as a surrogate social welfare system will tour, as a residency project to New Mexico, Arizona and New York.  The performance will be created in each location with a combined cast of LAPD’ers and local residents who’ve lived what they are talking about.  Host producers:   

VSA Arts of New Mexico, North Fourth Art Center Albuquerque, NM. 

Tucson-PIMA Arts Council, Arizona.

The Queens Museum, NY.

Pascal Rambert’s ‘Micro History of World Economics, danced’: Spring 2013 LAPD’s 3^rd collaboration with Pascal with 5 French performers and 45 from LA and LAPD.