RFK in EKY, The Robert F. Kennedy Performance Project, is a series of public conversations and activities centered around the real-time, site-specific intermedia performance that recreated, on September 9th and 10th 2004, Robert Kennedy’s two-day, 200 mile “poverty tour” of southeastern Kentucky in 1968. An Appalshop project directed by John Malpede.
Los Angeles Poverty Department was founded in 1985 by director, actor, activist, and writer John Malpede. At its inception, LAPD was the first performance group in the nation made up principally of homeless people. LAPD is dedicated to building community on Skid Row, Los Angeles. Since 1985, the company has offered performance workshops that are free and open to the Skid Row community— partnering with numerous social service and advocacy groups, including SRO Housing, Inc.; LA Community Action Network; The Downtown Women’s Action Coalition; St.Vincent DePaul Center; The Salvation Army’s Women’s and Men’s drug recovery programs; and the Inner City Law Center.
Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) creates performance work that connects lived experience to the social forces that shape the lives and communities of people living in poverty. LAPD is committed to creating high-quality, challenging performances that express the realities, hopes, and dreams of people who live and work in Los Angeles’ Skid Row, and is dedicated to building community and to the artistic and personal development of its members.
John Malpede, founding Artistic Director, LAPD
Malpede is a director, performance artist / actor, and writer who has collaborated with dancers, poets, videographers, painters and architects, and has taught at UCLA Dept. Dance / World Arts and Cultures, NYU Tisch School of the Arts -Dept. Undergraduate Drama, and The Amsterdam School for Advanced Research in Theater and Dance (DasArts)-MFA Director's Program. His individual artist fellowships include new genre grants from New York State Council on the Arts, NEA, and California Arts Council, and a 2008 COLA fellowship from the City of Los Angeles. He founded the Los Angeles Poverty Department in 1985. He has received a Dance Theater Workshop's (NYC) Bessie Creation Award, San Francisco Art Institute's Adeline Kent Award and a Durfee Sabbatical Grant for his work with Los Angeles Poverty Department. He has been featured in five video works by Bill Viola. In 2002-05 he performed as Antonin Artaud in Peter Sellars’ production of Artaud’s For an End to the Judgment of God, in Vienna, Rome, London, Brussels, San Francisco and Los Angeles. In 2004, he directed “RFK in EKY” a site-specific regional recreation of Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 inquiry into poverty in Appalachia. He is a 2008 fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, where he is developing a project on intellectual property.
Henriëtte Brouwers, Associate Director Henriëtte Brouwers is a performer, teacher and director. As Associate Director she has worked with the Los Angeles Poverty Department since 2000. Born in the Netherlands, Brouwers completed work at the Academy for Expression by Word and Gesture in her native country and studied corporeal mime with Etiènne Décroux and 'theatre of the oppressed' with Augusto Boal in Paris. She was invited to present her work A traveling Song, featuring Brouwers and Beppe Costa, in the US by the Theatre Project in Baltimore in 1993 and has since worked with 7 Stages in Atlanta, UT in Knoxville and Touchstone Theatre in Bethlehem. She was movement director for Blue Monk, directed by Ed Smith for the 1996 Olympic Arts Festival in Atlanta, Georgia. Highways Performance Space presented her solo: la Lengua, the tongue of Cortés in 2000. She created a 'Weeping Women‘ performance series and directed Pomona College students in Weeping Women and War in 2003, later that year La Llorona, Weeping Women on Skid Row with LAPD, performed on Skid Row and at a national conference on women and poverty at Scripps College, and recently La Llorona, Weeping Women of Echo Park with a group of Latino women who live in the neighborhood where LA Poverty Department has her office. In 2003–4, Brouwers worked with John Malpede on the creation of RFK in EKY a community-based re-enactment of Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 trip to investigate poverty in Appalachia. She is also featured in artist Bill Viola’s renowned The Passions series, which has been exhibited extensively in major museums throughout the world.
JANUARY 25:Making the Case for Skid Row Culture - Findings
from a Collaborative Inquiry by the Los Angeles Poverty
Department and the Urban Institute -published on the Animating
Democracy Initiative web page of Americans for the Arts. Presentation of the paper at the
Japanese American Cultural and Community
Center for the Skid Row Community.
JUNE 9: STATE OF INCARCERATION, directed by John Malpede.
Performed at the Central City Community Church on Skid Row.
JUNE 10: STATE OF INCARCERATION, directed by John Malpede.
Performed
at the LA Community Action Network on Skid Row.
July 22: "REWEAVING
THE SOCIAL FABRIC OF SKID ROW"
A
conversation about LAPD’s ‘Walk the Talk’ a theater project that
chronicles the emergence of a
permanent community and culture in Skid Row at theALOUD series of the Public
library. Panelists:
Pete White
(LA Community Action Network), OG man (Skid Row 3 on 3 basketball),
Clyde Casey (Another Planet), Jeff Dietrich (LA Catholic
Worker) and John Malpede (LA Poverty Department), moderator: Maria
Rosario Jackson (Urban Institute).
2009
MAY 1 and 2: CPR: a Public Training in Life Saving Skills, directed by Henriëtte Brouwers and John Malpede.
With a combined cast of OPCC and LAPD, performed at Highways Performance Space to celebrate the 20 year anniversary
of Highways and 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica.
MAY 5: EMPLOYING HIS TELEPATHIC POWERS, MR. SMALLMAN FIGHTS FOR JUSTICE IN THE INJUSTICE SYSTEM, presentation of a year-long workshop, directed by Henriëtte Brouwers and John Malpede with LAMP residents and LAPDers at the LAMP Village.
May 17: Los Angeles Poverty Department receives the Otto Award for Political Theatre produced by the Castillo Theatre in New York.
Aug. 2 - 24: AGENTES y ACTIVOS, directed by John Malpede.
Bolivian tour of the AGENTS & ASSETS performance in Spanish, performed in Cochabamba, Oruro, La Paz, El Alto, Sucre, Plan 3000 and Santa Cruz.
2008
Jan.: AGENTS & ASSETS, directed by John Malpede.
New York: Performances at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, Manhattan,
St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Harlem and at Housing Works in the East
Brooklyn.
Feb. - April: RED BEARD/RED BEARD, directed by John Malpede.
Co-production of LAPD and Theatre2Gennevilliers, Gennevilliers, Paris.
May 19:ROUND TRIP, LAPD recreates an Allan Kaprow "Happening" on Skid Row.
In collaboration with The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA: Allen Kaprow- Art as Life.
June 13: John Malpede performs "Cruel, Unusual Outrages Upon Personal Dignity, Punishment And Humiliating Degrading Treatment" as part of the City of Los Angeles Literary and Performing Fellows Grand Performances at Cal Plaza.
June 21 and 22: La Llorona: Weeping Women of Echo Park, directed by Henriëtte Brouwers. Perfromed at Echo Park United Methodist Church, Los Angeles.
June 28 - Aug. 2: LAPD presents the Skid Row History Museum at The BOX Gallery in Chinatown, Los Angeles.
Live From Skid Row: PERFORMANCE & PUBLIC CONVERSATION JUNE 28 @ The Box Gallery: Jeff Dietrich and Catherine Morris of
the Catholic Worker and the Hippie Kitchen remember remarkable people
and initiatives. Music from SS Jones and Oscar Harvey. Performances
by Ibrahim Saba and Kevin Michael Key.
JULY 18 @
Lamp Community Art Project Gallery: Public discussion with Pete White
and Becky Dennison of LA Community Action Network (LACAN). Music from
Weba Garretson and Ralph Gorodetsky. Performance by Michelle Autry and
Sunshine Mills. JULY 26 @ The Box Gallery: Public discussion with Mollie Lowery,
founder and first executive director of Lamp Community. Music from Code
Zero. Performance by Tony Parker and Charles Porter. AUGUST 2 @ The Box Gallery: Public discussion with Ted Hayes,
founder of Dome Village. Music from Church of the Nazarene Gospel Choir
and Lucky Dragon. Performance by Riccarlo Porter.
October 11 2008 - January 4 2009: Espèces d’espace at MAGASIN - Centre National d'Art Contemporain de Grenoble (France),
curated by Yves Aupetitallotarchives. The exhibition dedicates a room
to the Los Angeles Poverty Department with elements (audio /video,
pictures, notes, performance texts, etc.) of LAPD's archive from 1985
to 1990.
December 20, 27, 28: My Eyes are the Cage in my Head written and directed by Ron Allen. Performed at The Box Gallery in Chinatown, the Church of the Nazarene in Skid Row and the Industry Cafe & Jazz in Culver City.
2007
Jan. / Feb. / March: LEGAL*ILLEGAL, directed by John Malpede.
Co-production
of Nieuwpoort theater and Unie de Zorgelozen, Belgium and LAPD.
Performed in former Tax-building 'de Poel' in Gent, Belgium.
April - December: UTOPIA/dystopia, Los Angeles.
April 19: Is it a crime to be poor? screening of The REAL DEAL, Tom Jones’ film on LAPD at the
ALOUD series at the Central Library.
June- Nov.: Glimpses of Utopia 1 -37: Five evenings of performances and presentations by people who are making
"utopian" contributions to life in downtown Los Angeles.
Nov. 16: 220 Glimpses of Utopia an Outdoor-Utopian-Movement-Chain from Skid Row to City Hall, directed by Henriette Brouwers.
Dec. 6 - 8: UTOPIA/dystopia performances at REDCAT theater, directed by John Malpede.
2006
Jan./Feb.: Fried Poetry, directed by poet, playwright, recovery specialist and Buddhist monk Ron Allen. Bayond Baroque; Literary Arts Center in Venice and the James Wood Center on Skid Row.
March/April: Evacuation plan for the city of Charlotte, directed by John Malpede and Henriette Brouwers.
The Urban Ministry Center and Davidson College, Charlotte, NC.
May/June: Sleepwalking Democracy; co-production of LAPD and Made in da Shade. Directed by John Malpede and Maarten van Hinte.
Westergasfabriek, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Oct./Nov.: AGENTS & ASSETS, directed by John Malpede.
Co-production of LAPD and Art Sanctuary, Philadelphia, PA and the Theatre Project, Baltimore, MD.
About LAPD