The selected honorees are interviewed by LAPD (and others who wish to attend). The interviews are distilled into short performance scripts that we perform on the sidewalk in front of the place where each honoree does their work. A visual artist does a portrait of each honoree, and a New Orleans style brass band leads performers and the crowd as we dance through the streets of Skid Row from the site of one scene to the next. The parade route is different for each biennial parade, as it is determined by the location of each honoree’s work. In April 2015, LAPD opened it’s Skid Row History Museum & Archive. The museum 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 resistance strategies. The current exhibition, “How to House 7,000 People in Skid Row” identifies land-use policies that could generate 3.5 billion dollars to house people un-housed in Skid Row. The Skid Row History Museum & Archive hosts hundreds of events yearly, LAPD events and those initiated by community members and groups. It also serves as a literal and artistic common ground, a space for Angelenos to meet and explore civic issues together. Skid Row History Museum & Archive 250 S. Broadway, LA CA 90012 Open: Thu. Fri. Sat. 2-5pm
1985 Talent Show Los Angeles Poverty Department – Thieves Corner © Axel Köster
Los Angeles Poverty Department – LAPD Founded in 1985 by director-performer-activist John Malpede and based in Skid Row, Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) is a non-profit arts organization, 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 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. John Malpede and Henriëtte Brouwers are co-recipients of the 2018 City of Santa Monica Visual Artist Fellowship.
1989 Jupiter 35 – Highways Performance space © LA Poverty Department
Henriëtte Brouwers is the Associate Director of the Los Angeles Poverty Department since 2000. She co-directs, produces, and performs in many LAPD performances. Born in the Netherlands, Brouwers has performed, directed and taught throughout the Netherlands, France and the US. In Paris, she became a member of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed group (1979-82) and studied corporeal mime with Etiènne Décroux. In the Netherlands, she founded movement theater ACTA and performed with Shusaku & Dormu Dance Theatre, Grif Theater, Nationaal Fonds, and others. In 1993, the Theatre Project in Baltimore presented her work, “A Traveling Song.” In the same year, 7 Stages theatre invited her to perform the solo “Maya in The Decline and Fall of the Rest” by Jim Grimsley and was movement director for “Blue Monk” by Robert Earl Price for the 1996 Olympic Arts Festival in Atlanta. She performed her solo Malinche and La Lengua, the Tongue of Cortès in the US and the Netherlands and directed a series of devised performances based on the Mexican legend of La Llorona: The Weeping Woman. She is featured in artist Bill Viola’s renowned “The Passions” series. Henriëtte Brouwers worked with John Malpede on the creation of RFK in EKY (2004) a communitybased re-enactment of Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 trip to investigate poverty in Appalachia.
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2014 Walk The Talk © LA Poverty Department
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Worlds Of Homelessness
