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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.
A theater-without-walls for people living in Los Angeles’ inner city, LAPD has also partnered with communities and arts organizations across the United States to create powerful original works that speak to a range of political issues. Extended residencies have been held in Chicago, Philadelphia, Miami, San Francisco, Houston, and Minneapolis, among other cities.
LAPD’s perspective of using performance as a socially inclusive process has galvanized the communities in which they work and generated awards and acclaim nationwide. In 1999, the company received Theater LA’s Ovation Award for "Sustained Achievement in the use of Theater Arts to Impact the Community" and in September 2003, Malpede received Cornerstone Theater’s Bridge Award for outstanding community-based theater.
Renowned for their documentary-style performances, as well as pieces that evolve through improvisation, early LAPD performances include: South of the Clouds (1986), LAPD’s first show, for which performer Jim Beame received an LA Weekly Best Actor award; LAPD Inspects San Francisco (1991), for which Malpede received the Adeline Kent award from the San Francisco Art Institute and LAPD received New York City’s Dance Theater Workshop Bessie Creation Award; Jupiter 35 and Call Home, performed at the Los Angeles Festival; I Was Sleeping with My Eyes Open (1995), a collaboration with Chicago’s Goat Island; Bone Story (1996), directed by company member David Halenda; and in 1997, Taking Back My Place, a site-specific performance with choreographer Sara Shelton Mann and the dance theater group, Contraband.
In June of 1999, LAPD and graduate theater students from California State University, Los Angeles performed an adaptation of Race, written and directed by visiting French artist Pascal Rambert and further explored texts from unusual sources in a 2000 production directed by Malpede of Japanese film master Akira Kurosawa’s Red Beard: Red Beard which was enacted simultaneously while the film screened.
In 2001, LAPD created Agents & Assets, dramatizing a 1998 Congressional Hearing about allegations of CIA involvement in cocaine trafficking to fund the Nicaraguan Contras. Directed by Malpede, Agents & Assets is a national theater project that gives voice to people whose communities have been most devastated by drugs and addresses issues at the very core of our notions of democracy, civil liberties, and the separation of powers. Agents & Assets has been produced in Los Angeles (2001), Detroit (2002), Cleveland (2004), back in Los Angeles (May 2005) and in Utrecht in the Netherlands (December 2005) to great critical acclaim.
In 2002, LAPD’s performance/installation Is There History on Skid Row? was presented in a store front at the intersection of Skid Row and new downtown development. Is There History on Skid Row? included performances by company members, a photographic exhibition of the history of the area, video, live interviews and discussions with area residents, community organizers, and local business owners.
In Fall 2003, LAPD presented La Llorona; Weeping Women on Skid Row directed by LAPD Associate Director Henriette Brouwers. La Llorona was performed at the Church of the Nazarene in the Skid Row neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles and at Scripps College in Claremont as part of a national conference,“Women and Poverty”.
The company has also hosted workshops by choreographers and performance artists Sarah Elgart, Dana Laiser, and Jeff McMahon; conducted residencies in inner cities throughout the U.S., and has participated in theater festivals in The Netherlands, Belgium, and the United Kingdom.
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