Walk the Talk 2020 Online Celebration + Walk the Talk Website Launch
Saturday, May 30. Live Launch Time: 5pm PDT.
Please click the link below to join the Walk The Talk 2020 webinar: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83837366759
+ live streaming on our FB event!
Or iPhone one-tap: US: +16699006833,,83837366759#
Or Telephone: Dial(for higher quality, dial a number based on your current location): US: +1 669 900 6833 or +1 346 248 7799 or +1 253 215 8782 or +1 312 626 6799 or +1 929 205 6099 or +1 301 715 8592
EARLY PRESS ACCESS TO THE WALK THE TALK WEBSITE WILL BE AVAILABLE ON MAY 26. If you would like early access, please contact John Malpede, [email protected]
WALK the TALK
SKID ROW VISIONARIES celebratedPARADE: PERFORMANCE VISUAL ART and BRASS BAND
IN EXTRAORDINARY FASHION
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, this year —-the parade has been put off until May 2021 (Ojala!)
BUT NOW—-WHAT IS HAPPENING:
THIS YEAR ON MAY 30, WHAT IS HAPPENING IS that we will 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 60-plus 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 60 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.
Join us live / virtually for the LAUNCH party of the Walk the Talk Website at 5pm PDT. The live launch party will feature 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 WHAT MORE AND MORE IS HAPPENING:
We are publishing a limited edition of the 2020 Walk the Talk scripts – available in August- that will be given to the 2020 honorees and distributed to their Skid Row friends and neighbors.
AND WHAT MORE AND MORE AND MORE IS HAPPENING:
OJALA! God willing—- The Parade will take place in a year, with a brass band, as a big blaring celebration.
LAPD mission: Founded in 1985, Los Angeles Poverty Department is made up of people who make art and live and work in Skid Row. LAPD creates performances and multidisciplinary artworks that connect the experience of people living in poverty to the social forces that shape their lives and communities. LAPD’s works express the realities, hopes, dreams and rights of people who live and work in L.A.’s Skid Row.
Walk the Talk is a peoples’ history of the community. LAPD tells the rest of the story, what you don’t hear elsewhere: the story of the community as told by the community. Walk the Talk supports LAPD’s larger social practice methodology, a body of acclaimed work widely acknowledged as “some of the most uncompromising political theater” (C. Carr, Artforum) and “Best political art shows.” (Catherine Wagley, LA WEEKLY).
The Skid Row History Museum and Archive is an exhibition /performing arts space curated by L. A. Poverty Department. It foregrounds the distinctive artistic and historical consciousness of Skid Row and functions as a means for exploring the mechanics of displacement in an age of immense income inequality, by mining a neighborhood’s activist history and amplifying effective community strategies. The space operates as an archive, exhibition, performance and meeting space.
This year’s Walk the Talk and the Walk the Talk website are made possible with grant support from The National Endowment for the Arts, The City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Mellon Foundation’s Community Archive program and by the generosity (and creativity) of Robert Ochshorn and REDUCT, Inc.
