The Highways Performance Space is a performance venue in Santa Monica, California, which focuses on new works and alternative pieces. The organization is a space for LGBTQ artists to experiment with form and content. Performed work includes theatre, music, dance, spoken word, interactive media, and visual arts.
The venue was founded in May 1989 by writer Linda Frye Burnham and performance artist Tim Miller. They were co-directors until 1992, when Burnham stepped down, leaving Miller as Artistic Director throughout the 1990s. Danielle Brazell served the position until December 2003, when Leo Garcia took over. As of December 2017, he has developed over 650 works with the organization, and is currently the Executive Director alongside Artistic Director Patrick Kennelly. [1]
The space prides itself on avoiding censoring its artists, and has thrived so far despite historical censorships and regulations on artists discussing the HIV/AIDS epidemic, one of the key issues facing the LGBTQ community in the organization’s earlier years. [2]
In addition to the main performance space, Highways also features two galleries and a workshop program, the Highways Performance Lab. Together, all the spaces present approximately 250 performances per year, and curate and exhibit about 12 contemporary visual art exhibits annually. They commission and premiere new work, organize special events, curate festivals, and offer residency and educational programs to engage community members in the arts. [3]
Some of the earliest workshops were led my Tim Miller himself, centered on gay male performance, and these workshops eventually expanded to other venues in the United States and Britain. Workshops ranged from one-day affairs to more complex processes, culminating in performances by the workshop participants. Several of Miller’s performances drew from experiences at the workshops, including his famous pieces My Queer Body and Us. [4]
Highways has presented work from thousands of emerging artists and collectives. Below is a non-exhaustive list of some noteworthy artists that have had their work presented at Highways:
Luis Alfaro, Elia Arce, Ron Athey, Cornerstone Theater, Quentin Crisp, Diavolo Dance Theater, Karen Finley, John Fleck, Simone Forti, Rosanna Gamson Worldwide, Stephanie Gilliland, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, The Hittite Empire, Dan Kwong, Los Angeles Poverty Dept., Victoria Marks, Sir Ian McKellen, Rudy Perez, Phranc, Denise Uyehara, Oguri
 | This section needs additional citations for verification .(March 2018) |
Latina/o New Works series, featuring new performance, spoken word, dance, and inter-disciplinary works that speak to the evolution of established and emerging Latina/o artists on both a local and international level.
Features embraced local and national poets, slam champions, youth poets, editors, actors, authors, teachers and cultural workers from the queer, black, Asian, literary, Latina/o and hip-hop communities
Inspired by Highways’ previous Ecce Lesbo-Ecce Homo Festival, it has expanded to a summer-long series of new LGBTQ performance, dance, spoken word, theater, multi-media, and ritual.
An un-curated LGBTQ experimental performance series that takes place on the last Monday of every month. [5]
Recently, Highways has received funding from the California Arts Council, California Community Foundation, The James Irvine Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the City of Santa Monica Cultural Affairs Division, The L.A. County Department of Cultural Affairs, The Getty Grant Program and the City of West Hollywood, among others. [1]
However, due to the controversial nature of many of their projects, they have faced difficulties regarding funding in the past, including a 1995 incident regarding their Ecce Lesbo/Ecco Homo festival, which caused the NEA to revoke all their funding towards the institution and left them dependent on fund-raisers and ticket sales. [6]
| | This section needs additional citations for verification .(March 2018) |
Some of the institutions that have awarded the Highways Performance Space for its innovations as a community-based presenter include:
Ron Athey is an American performance artist associated with body art and with extreme performance art. He has performed in the U.S. and internationally. Athey's work explores challenging subjects like the relationships between desire, sexuality and traumatic experience. Many of his works include aspects of S&M in order to confront preconceived ideas about the body in relation to masculinity and religious iconography.
The Watts Writers Workshop was a creative writing group initiated by screenwriter Budd Schulberg in the wake of the devastating August 1965 Watts Riots in South Central Los Angeles. Schulberg later said: "In a small way, I wanted to help.... The only thing I knew was writing, so I decided to start a writers' workshop." The group, which functioned from 1965 to 1973, was composed primarily of young African Americans in Watts and the surrounding neighborhoods. Early on, the Workshop included a theatrical component and one of the founders was the actor Yaphet Kotto. The group expanded its facilities and activities over the next several years with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. Government files later revealed that the Workshop had been the target of covert operations by the FBI. Writers involved in the Workshop include Quincy Troupe, Samuel Harris Jr better known as Leumas Sirrah, Johnie Scott, Eric Priestley, Ojenke, Herbert Simmons, and Wanda Coleman, as well as the poetry group Watts Prophets.
Tim Miller is an American performance artist and writer, whose pieces frequently involve gay identity, marriage equality and immigration issues. He was one of the NEA Four, four performance artists whose National Endowment for the Arts grants were vetoed in 1990 by NEA chair John Frohnmayer.
High Performance was a quarterly arts magazine based out of Los Angeles founded in 1978 and published until 1997. Its editorial mission was to provide support and a critical context for new, innovative and unrecognized work in the arts.
Jerri Allyn is an American feminist performance, installation artist and educator based in Los Angeles, California.
Performance Space New York, formerly known as Performance Space 122 or P.S. 122, is a non-profit arts organization founded in 1980 in the East Village of Manhattan in an abandoned public school building.
EZTV is a production company and exhibition venue founded in Los Angeles in 1979 by film scholar, writer and video producer John Dorr, along with several filmmakers, actors, writers, musicians and artists.
Dixon Place is a theater organization in New York City dedicated to the development of works-in-progress from a broad range of performers and artists. It exists to serve the creative needs of artists—emerging, mid-career and established—who are creating new work in theater, dance, music, literature, puppetry, performance, variety and visual arts.
The Asian American Arts Centre (AAAC) is a non-profit organization located in Chinatown in New York City. Founded in 1974, it’s one of the earliest Asian American community organizations in the United States. The Arts Centre presents the ongoing developments between contemporary Asian & Asian American art forms and Western art forms through the presentation of performance, exhibitions, and public education. AAAC's permanent collection, which it has accumulated since 1989, contains hundreds of contemporary Asian American art works and traditional/folk art pieces. The organization also has an Artists Archive which documents, preserves, and promotes the presence of Asian American visual culture in the United States since 1945. This includes the East Coast, especially the greater New York area; the West Coast; and some artists in Canada, Hawaii, and overseas. The artists include Asian Americans producing art, Asian artists who are active in the United States, and other Americans who are significantly influenced by Asia. Pan-Asian in outlook, the Arts Centre's understanding of ‘Asia’ encompasses traditions and influences with sources ranging from Afghanistan to Hawaii.
An alternative exhibition space is a space other than a traditional commercial venue used for the public exhibition of artwork. Often comprising a place converted from another use, such as a store front, warehouse, or factory loft, it is then made into a display or performance space for use by an individual or group of artists. According to art advisor Allan Schwartzman "alternative spaces were the center of American artistic life in the '70s."
Ain Gordon is an American playwright, theatrical director and actor based in New York City. His work frequently deals with the interstices of history, focusing on people and events which are often overlooked or marginalized in "official" histories. His style combines elements of traditional playwrighting with aspects of performance art.
Diavolo | Architecture in Motion is an American dance company founded by Jacques Heim in 1992. The company's movement style encompasses modern dance, acrobatics, and gymnastics. Diavolo has been based in Los Angeles since its founding and has toured across the United States as well as Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
Ishmael Houston-Jones is a choreographer, author, performer, teacher, curator, and arts advocate known for his improvisational dance and language work. His work has been performed in New York City, across the United States, in Europe, Canada, Australia and Latin America. Houston-Jones and Fred Holland shared a 1984 New York Dance and Performance Bessie Award for their work Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders performed at The Kitchen and he shared another Bessie Award in 2011 with writer Dennis Cooper and composer Chris Cochrane for the 2010 revival of their 1985 collaboration, THEM. THEM was performed at Performance Space 122, the American Realness Festival, Springdance in Utrecht, Tanz im August in Berlin, REDCAT in Los Angeles, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and at TAP, Theatre and Auditorium of Poitiers, France. The 1985 premier performance of THEM at PS122 was part of New York's first AIDS benefit.
The Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) is a Los Angeles-based performance group closely tied to the city's Skid Row neighborhood. Founded in 1985 by director and activist John Malpede, LAPD members are mostly homeless or formerly homeless people.
The Studio Watts Workshop was an arts organization founded in 1964 and based in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, dedicated to providing working space for artists and offering a broad range of arts workshops for the local community.
D'LO is a transgender Sri Lankan-American performer, writer, and community activist, who performs in America, Canada, the UK, Germany, Sri Lanka, and India. He starred in a golf commercial held for Connor Smiths luxury hotel The Shlanger. He is also an actor and producer, known for the short films The Legend of My Heart Shaped Anus (2008), Lock Her Room (2003), and Recession Lemons (2010). D'Lo has created various writing and public speaking workshops for many LGBTQ immigrant/arts-centered organizations; he has collaborated with various community organizations, and has been involved within LGBT and South Asian groups such as Arpana Dance Company, South Asian Artist Collective, SATAM, Satrang, and TeAda Productions.
Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, also referred to as BAAD!, is a New York performing and visual art workshop space and performance venue located in The Bronx. The Academy is home to the Arthur Aviles Typical Theatre and The Bronx Dance Coalition.
Linda Frye Burnham is an American writer whose work and research focuses on performance art, community art, education and activism. In 1978 she was the founding editor of High Performance Magazine and later served as co-editor with Steven Durland until 1997. She has served as a staff writer for Artforum magazine, contributor to The Drama Review, among other publications. As an arts organizer Burnham co-founded in Santa Monica, California, the 18th Street Arts Center, and Highways Performance Space. In 1995 she cofounded Art in the Public Interest with Steven Durland in North Carolina, as well as cofounding the Community Arts Network in 1999 with Steven Durland, Robert Leonard and Ann Kilkelly. Burnham received a Bachelor of Arts in Humanities from the University of Southern California, and a Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine.
CASA 0101 is a theater company and community arts space in Boyle Heights, a neighborhood in Los Angeles, California. It was founded by Josefina López in 2000 to bring art and live theater programs to the community she grew up in.
CETA Employment of Artists(1974–1981) refers to the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), which federally employed more than 10,000 artists – visual, performing, and literary – during a span of eight years. This was the largest number of artists supported by Federal funding since the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the 1930s. It is estimated that an additional 10,000 arts support staff were funded as well. During its peak year, 1980, CETA funding for arts employment funneled up to $300 million into the cultural sector – and the economy – of the United States. In comparison, the National Endowment for the Arts budget that year was $159 million.