Walk the Talk 2020 is the fifth iteration of the Los Angeles Poverty Department’s biennial, peripatetic performance: an on-going chronicle of the accomplishments of Skid Row people and their visionary initiatives.  Normally, Walk the Talk is a parade with a New Orleans Second line brass band and attendees dancing down the street from one performance site to the next.

BUT NOW—-WHAT IS HAPPENING: THIS YEAR we celebrate this year’s honorees with new performances and portraits all wrapped inside THE PUBLICATION OF OUR WALK THE TALK WEBSITE.  The website will provide on-line access to the 68 people whose real-world accomplishments —-from 1970 until today, have been celebrated in Walk the Talk from 2012-2020.  The website, created by artist / technologist Rob Ochshorn, includes: hour-long video interviews and transcripts of the interviews, for each honoree as well as videos and scripts of the scenes distilled from the interviews and performed by Los Angeles Poverty Department in each Walk the Talk performance / parade.

Rob Ochshorn has designed software that offers the viewer unique, surprise means of navigating the content— including the ability of the transcript to follow the honorees speech in the video and the ability to search the entire archive (over 70 hours of interview material):  just type in whatever you want: “affordable housing”, “community mental health”, “broken windows policing”, “compassion”, “recovery”, — -and responses from everyone who spoke to that, appear.

The LAUNCH party of the Walk the Talk Website featured acknowledgement of this year’s honorees, portraits of this year’s honorees created by Man One and a guided tour of the website by artist / technologist Rob Ochshorn and meet this year’s LAPD Walk the Talk performers.

Post launch party you will be able to go to the Walk the Talk Website, watch this year’s ZOOM PERFORMANCES by Los Angeles Poverty Department, and the honoree interviews –as well as the performances, interviews and portraits of all past years’ honorees.

This year’s Skid Row visionaries are community organizer, Coach Ron Crockett, a leader of the Skid Row Brigade that is monitoring the City’s Covid-19 deployed port-o-potties and hand washing stations,  social entrepreneurs Danny Park and Andrew Kang of Skid Row Coffee and The Skid Row Peoples Market,public interest lawyer Gary Blasi, grass roots advocate Angelia “Big Mama” Harper,  informal multi-service provider, Stephanie Arnold Williams, musician and Co-Founding Director of Urban Voices Choir, Leeav Sofer, and deceased, beloved community organizer Leslie Croom.  

AND WHAT MORE IS HAPPENING:
Each month for a year, we will invite an activist, scholar or community resident to engage with the archive and record their thematic response, which will be circulated via our social media and added to the Walk the Talk archive.  The first thematic response will be ready by the end of June and will be created by UC-R historian Cathy Gudis, current scholar in residence at our Skid Row History Museum & Archive.

AND MORE IS HAPPENING:
We are publishing a limited edition of the 2020 Walk the Talk scripts, that will be given to the 2020 honorees and distributed to their Skid Row friends and neighbors.