Hands and Hearts Together at REDCAT

When they look back in 100 years, the only theater being done now which will matter will be the work John Malpede is doing with the LAPD.” —Peter Sellars, acclaimed theater director REDCAT.

CalArts’ downtown center for contemporary arts, presents the world premiere of the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD)’s newest stage work I Fly! or How to Keep the Devil Down in the Hole, Thursday, April 4 through Saturday, April 6, 2019.

What’s a low-income neighborhood of color to do, targeted by the police, often with lethal outcomes?

What to do beyond despair, beyond protest? A neighborhood de-colonizes public safety. They put heads and hearts together and evolve practices that create public safety through joyous communal activity and collective problem-solving. Over many years Skid Row has emerged as a neighborhood with a number of profound and important values: empathy, looking out for each other, sharing, second chances, recovery, inclusion, tolerance, and embracing difference. And Skid Row has found ways to articulate these values in numerous community practices.

These values and practices are celebrated, analyzed, mused upon, and sung and danced on in Los Angeles Poverty Department’s new performance I Fly! or How to Keep the Devil Down in the Hole.

“When people feel one another, they feel safe, Public Safety for REAL.” – LAPD I Fly! was devised through many months of workshops by the 13-member LAPD core company. It is set at LAPD’s annual “Festival for All Skid Row Artists.”

The performance starts at the Festival, and then quickly cuts away to other locations and times, some imagined and some reconstructed from true-life efforts of cast and community members to generate a safe and healthy environment in Skid Row.

The performance repeatedly returns to The Festival, which “holds down the bottom” of the performance, like the rhythm section of a band. Fittingly there is plenty of rhythm in I Fly!, including The SkidRoPlayaz, a 5 member Skid Row percussion group, and The LA Playmakers, a funk/soul band also from Skid Row. I Fly! also includes individual performances by “Festival for All Skid Row Artists.” All in all 25 performers are part of the production. I Fly! is co-directed by Henriëtte Brouwers and John Malpede. ABOUT THE ARTISTS Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) was founded in 1985 by director-performer-activist John Malpede. LAPD was the first performance group in the nation made up principally of homeless people, and the first arts program of any kind for homeless people in Los Angeles. LAPD believes in the power of imagination to motivate people—and not only artistically—by acknowledging the hopes, dreams, rational and spiritual power at the core of everyone’s humanity.

Success for LAPD

LAPD’s success has encouraged many Skid Row agencies to integrate arts into their programs, and has informed policy. LAPD’s activities and projects have used theater and other arts to thematically focus on a constellation of inter-related issues of continuing importance to Skid Row and other low-income communities. A common element is to create acknowledgment for the accomplishments of the neighborhood. In articulating the new reality of the neighborhood, LAPD creates a narrative that causes re-thinking a variety of issues, including gentrification and community displacement, drug recovery, the war on drugs and drug policy reform, the status of women and children on Skid Row, and mass incarceration and the criminalization of poverty. Based on continuous, committed work on Skid Row, LAPD has been invited to create residency projects in communities throughout the US and in the UK, France, The Netherlands, Belgium, Bolivia and Nicaragua, working with drug recovery programs, shelters, policy advocates and arts organizations. LAPD has won a number of awards including LA Weekly Theater Award; New York’s Bessie Creation Award; the San Francisco Art Institute’s Kent Award; Theater L.A.’s Ovation Award; Cornerstone Theater’s Bridge Award; and an Otto Award for political theater.

In 2008, LAPD was nominated for “Prix du Souffleur” award for “Best Ensemble” in Paris theater, for our production “Red Beard, Red Beard.”LAPD creates recognition of the community and its values. LAPD tells the rest of the story, the one you don’t hear elsewhere. They create change by telling the story of the community in a way that supports the initiatives of community residents, resulting in a narrative of the neighborhood to be in the hands of neighborhood people which supplants those that perpetuate stereotypes and are used to keep the neighborhood people down or to justify displacing the community. John Malpede, Founding Artistic Director, Los Angeles Poverty DepartmentJohn Malpede directs, performs and engineers multi-event arts projects that have theatrical, installation, public art and education components.

In 1985 Malpede founded and continues to direct the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), the first performance group in the nation comprising primarily of homeless and formerly homeless people. LAPD creates performances that connect lived experience to the social forces that shape the lives and communities of people living in poverty. Malpede has taught at UCLA, NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and The Amsterdam School for Advanced Research in Theater and Dance. He is a 2013 recipient of the Doris Duke Performing Artist Fellowship. Currently, he is curating the Skid Row History Museum and Archive, an exhibition/performance space exploring gentrification issues, which opened in April 2015.

In 2014, earlier iterations of the Museum were installed as part of the Queens Museum’s retrospective on LAPD and at the Mike Kelley Mobile Homestead at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.In 2004 Malpede’s project RFK in EKY, was produced by Appalshop, and developed with a host of community partners. This monumental, real-time documentary-style performance by a large community cast, sought to put a historical mirror up to present moment life in eastern Kentucky. RFK in EKY recreated Kennedy’s original “war on poverty” tour in the course of a four-day, 200 mile series of events that included, performance, installations, and in-depth discussion of historic and current events and social policy.

He involved a number of his closest artist/collaborators in elements of this project including, Henriëtte Brouwers, David Michalek, Harrell Fletcher and Sjoerd Wagenaar. Malpede was fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies during the early months of the economic crisis where, at MIT’s business school, he found divergent points of view on causes, extent and remedies for the economic crisis. Malpede’s Bright Futures was extrapolated from these contradictory responses that included a business school pep-talk for anxious future quants (financial engineers) and MIT economist Simon Johnson’s condemnation of the financial “oligarchy.” Bright Futures was realized as a performance, and also as a video installation on the MIT campus. The performance was shown at MIT, in NYC’s Performa 2009 Festvial and in 2010 at Ohio University. Malpede has received New York’s Dance Theater Workshop Bessie Creation Award, San Francisco Art Institute’s Adeline Kent Award, Durfee Sabbatical Grant, LA Theater Alliance Ovation Award, Individual artist fellowships from New York State Council on the Arts, NEA, California Arts Council, City of Los Angeles’ COLA fellowship, California Community Foundation’s Visual Artist Fellowship and numerous project grants.

Also visit: www.johnmalpede.info Henriëtte Brouwers, Associate Director and ProducerHenriëtte Brouwers is a performer, director and teacher. She has been the Associate Director of the Los Angeles Poverty Department since 2000. Born in the Netherlands, Brouwers has a degree from the Academie voor Expressie door Woord en Gebaar. She studied corporeal mime with Etiènne Décroux and was a member of Augusto Boal’s “Theatre of the Oppressed” group in Paris (1979-82). Brouwers was invited to present her work in the US by the Theatre Project in Baltimore in 1993 and has since performed and taught at Towson University and the Baltimore High School for the Arts, UT of Knoxville, Touchstone Theatre in Bethlehem and 7Stages in Atlanta. She was movement director for Blue Monk, directed by Ed Smith for the 1996 Olympic Arts Festival in Atlanta, GA. 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 featured in artist Bill Viola’s renowned The Passions series, which has been exhibited extensively in major museums throughout the world. She performed her solo La lengua, the tongue of Cortès both in the US and the Netherlands and directed a series of performances based on Mexican legends: at Pomona College Weeping Women and War; with LAPD La Llorona,Weeping Women of Skid Row, performed in Skid Row and at a national conference on women and poverty at Scripps College, and La Llorona, Weeping Women of Echo Park, with a group of Latino immigrant Women in Echo Park.

I FLY! is part of LAPD’s Public Safety for REAL project (2016–18), produced with support from the MAP Fund (supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.), The National Endowment for the Arts, and The City of LA Department of Cultural Affairs. Additional funding provided by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and California Humanities (a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities).