THEATRE

Work in progress by 2009 Fellow John Malpede, performed by Nell Breyer, Tanya Selvaratnam and John Malpede. Hybrid performance/reading about the economic crisis. John Malpede promises a "100% non- threatening participatory event" where the audience reads text and the performers perform others. Readings and Performers will bounce off of one another arbitrarily; unpredictable trajectories will afford glimpses of our possible financial futures. Witness and contribute to the first phase of an ongoing project where Malpede remixes texts about the financial crisis. Malpede is an eminent performer, director, and activist who often uses governmental, legal, and media sources as found texts. In 1985 he founded Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), an organization that engages the homeless population of Los Angeles through performance. LAPD's current touring project, Agents and Assets, 2001-, recreates a House of Representatives hearing on the importation of drugs into the United States in the 1980s by Nicaraguan contra rebels with the CIA's complicity. In 2002-05 he performed as Antonin Artaud in Peter Sellars' production of Artaud's For an End to the Judgment of God, in Vienna, Rome, London, Brussels, San Francisco and Los Angeles. In 2004, he directed RFK in EKY, a site-specific regional recreation of Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 inquiry into poverty in Appalachia. Malpede has received the Bessie Creation Award from Dance Theater Workshop, New York; San Francisco Art Institute's Adeline Kent Award; and a Theater LA Ovation Award, as well as numerous government and foundation grants. He has taught at UCLA, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, the Amsterdam School for Advanced Research in Theater and Dance, and the California College of Arts and Crafts, San Francisco. John Malpede is a fellow at CAVS, and is developing a public performance for MIT's campus in the fall of 2009.