Agents & Assets - Bolivia 2009 - Los Angeles Poverty Department

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.

Recreating Imbalance
A short description by John Malpede that describes the conceptual links between Agents & Assets and RFKinEKY.

'Findings from a Collaborative Inquiry by the Los Angeles Poverty Department and the Urban Institute': MAKING THE CASE FOR SKID ROW CULTURE

LAPD Funding provided by

Aug. 23: Santa Cruz --- Casa de la Cultura: 20:00

Debate con KevinMichael Key, LAPD; Carlos Lara, actor / sociológo y Henry Baldelomar, politologo

Agentes y Activos dramatiza una audiencia de la Cámara de Representantes del Congreso de los EEUU. Esta audiencia examinó alegaciones sobre la participación del CIA en el tráfico de cocaína con fines de financiar los Contras de Nicaragua en la década de los 80, actividades expresamente prohibidas por el Congreso estadounidense. La audiencia se llevó a cabo el 18 de marzo del 1998. Su realización representa todos los gobiernos que ignoran los intereses de sus ciudadanos, particularmente los pobres, para llevar a cabo otras políticas.

El Departamento de Pobreza de Los Ángeles (LAPD) está basada en una zona de la ciudad que ha vivido un fuerte impacto por la epidemia de adicción al crack cocaína; mucha gente perdieron sus familias, sus casas y sus vidas. LAPD ha co-producido este proyecto con programas de rehabilitación en Detroit, Nueva York y en barrios pobres de otras ciudades. Actualmente, el elenco de actores bolivianos y del LAPD buscamos intercambiar experiencias para investigar en conjunto los costos humanos de las drogas, del narcotráfico y de la guerra contra las drogas.

Five LAPD'ers travel to Bolivia and rehearse with 8 Bolivianos from Cochabamba to create the combined cast of 13. LAPD collaboradted with theater maker Wiler Vidaurre, who through his groundbreaking Abracadabra Project, has worked for eight years creating theater inside the prison in Cochabamba.

FLIM SKYPE POPCORN - LIVE REPORT - g727 Gallery, 727 Spring Street, LA, CA 90014. LAPD invites fellow Angelinos to see and hear our Bolivian tour of Agentes y Activos. We’ve produced a 30-minute film or our 2-month tour. The film features the magnificent larger than life landscape of the Bolivian Andes and the on stage and on the road discoveries of our traveling cast and crew of seventeen: LAPD’ers & our Boliviano collaborators from the The Escuela de Arte y Talentos. See Cochabamba, Oruro, La Paz, El Alto, Sucre and Santa Cruz and all points in between.

WHAT IS AGENTS & ASSETS ?
Agents & Assets is a performance residency project that links people and communities that have been most devastated by drugs and the counterproductive drug policies of US War on Drugs. In Agents & Assets citizens witness the governments, and exercise citizen oversight of government policies.

Agents & Assets’ director John Malpede says: "The 'War on Drugs', as the name clearly states, imposes a military solution on a public health and social problem, and in doing so, turns citizens into 'the enemy”.

The text of the performance Agents & Assets is a March 18, 1998, hearing transcript from the US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The subject of this hearing was to look into CIA involvement in cocaine trafficking into the Los Angeles area in the 1980's in order to support the Contra war in Nicaragua.

Cast members play members of the US Congress and the CIA lawyer who denies everything. James Taylor, theater critic for KCRW-FM radio said of the production: “Having the lawmakers played by people who have probably suffered from the policies enacted by the characters that they’re portraying is a brilliant coup de theatre; but more striking are the words themselves, which are reportedly quoted verbatim from the congressional record. What these words make clear—regardless of who’s speaking them—is that the failures of the War on Drugs (committed by multiple administrations of both parties) are woefully being repeated today in the War on Terror.”

Each performance is followed by a discussion involving journalists, historians, policy reformers and everyone in the community. The lived expertise of community residents is presented and revealed to be as insightful as the thoughts of "professional experts". In this discussion, all present speak on an even footing, as citizens.

During an Agents and Assets residency, LAPD builds engagement by doing workshops with schools, community groups and social justice and human rights organizations. This project builds networks of project participants and organizers who are concerned about the devastating impact of the failed policies of the unending "War on Drugs".

Agents & Assets residencies have taken place in Los Angeles, Detroit, Cleveland, Utrecht (the Netherlands), Compton (CA), Philadelphia, Baltimore and 3 boroughs of New York City.

WHO IS LAPD ?
Los Angeles Poverty Department was founded in 1985 and is based in LA's s Skid Row, the poorest neighborhood in Los Angeles. 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 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.

"The Los Angeles Poverty Department, despite the homeless status of many of its members, has thrived for years from its downtown outpost and continues to offer theater that's often stunning in its honesty and lacking in pretension," stated L.A. Weekly in its Pick of the Week section. "The Los Angeles Poverty Department has become one of the country’s most outspoken and profound theater troupes,” adds Real Detroit. The Los Angeles Times has written of the production Agents & Assets, "For LAPD the weapons are words, explored by actors who have seen policies turned into street-level experience."

WHAT IS SKID ROW?
Skid Row Los Angeles is the poorest area in the city. Skid Row Los Angeles has the largest concentration of homeless people of any neighborhood in the US.
Despite its poverty, Skid Row is an amazing place with amazing human and community strenghts:
1.Skid Row LA has the largest concentration of the most affordable housing in Los Angeles County.
2. Skid Row has the largest concentration and most comprehensive set of services for homeless people in Los Angeles.
3. Skid Row is the biggest recovery culture anywhere. Skid Row’s highly developed drug recovery consciousness includes free recovery programs and numerous AA, NA and CA groups.

The Skid Row community has long been a generative site for visionary answers to social problems. These visionary initiatives have come about through individual and collective concern by community members and moments of enlightened public policy and visionary NGO efforts. Largely underappreciated is the extent to which the visionary efforts have been the work of community members. Without the civic engagement of citizens of Skid Row, the housing stock would not have been preserved, the people and social services would have been dispersed and the Safe Haven recovery community would not exist.

Aug. 5: Cochabamba --- El ABRA prison: 10:00

Aug. 7: Cochabamba --- mARTadero : 18:45 ritual de coca, 19:30 performance

Aug. 8: Cochabamba --- mARTadero: 19:30

Aug. 13: Oruro --- Casa de la Cultura Paraninfo Universitario: 15:00 + 19:00

Aug. 15: La Paz, Mallasa --- Colegio SOS Hermann Gmeiner : 10:00

Aug. 15: El Alto --- teatro municipal de la Camera: 18:00

Aug. 16: La Paz --- Prado: 11:00 – 13:00

Aug. 21: Sucre --- fundación Pachamama: 19:00

Aug. 22: Santa Cruz, Plan 3000 --- Colegio Saint Andrew: 19:30

Aug. 23: Santa Cruz --- Casa de la Cultura: 20:00