Grand Park Presents OUR L.A. VOICES: A POP-UP ARTS+CULTURE FEST

By: Apr. 10, 2019
Get Access To Every Broadway Story

Unlock access to every one of the hundreds of articles published daily on BroadwayWorld by logging in with one click.




Existing user? Just click login.

Grand Park Presents OUR L.A. VOICES: A POP-UP ARTS+CULTURE FEST

Grand Park celebrates Los Angeles creative voices at the week-long Grand Park's Our L.A. Voices: A Pop-up Arts+Culture Fest, a free performing and visual arts exhibition and marketplace. Featuring more than 100 L.A.-based artists and creatives, the event culminates in a weekend-long (April 27-28, 2019), family-friendly festival that will feature dance, music, film, theatre performances and visual artwork, as well the Jardin del Arte, a public marketplace with more than 50 artists who sell their work on-site. Free lunchtime workshops will be held the week leading up to the festival, April 22-26, 2019, and will focus on creative practice, as well as practical skills related to making art in Los Angeles. While open to all, the workshops require pre-registration.

"Grand Park's Our L.A. Voices: a Pop-up Arts+Culture is an opportunity for Angelenos to celebrate the incomparable diversity of the region's arts community and embrace the multicultural roots that make us unique and also unite us," said Rachel Moore, president and CEO of The Music Center. "In this sprawling city of boundless options and opportunities, Our L.A. Voices is a special occasion to experience L.A.'s creative heart in its favorite central gathering place."

"Since its opening in 2012, Grand Park has served as a space for expression and creativity, featuring L.A.-based artists in nearly 1,000 programs that have showcased a multitude of genres and art forms," said Julia Diamond, interim director, Grand Park. "Grand Park's Our L.A. Voices: a Pop-up Arts+Culture Fest is a time for us to immerse audiences in an array of sights, sounds and creative expression about our region. Through this event, we want to evoke deeper curiosity in Angelenos to explore and discover, and be delighted and amazed."

The festival is an extension of Grand Park's year-long programmatic theme, "Origin Stories," which celebrates Los Angeles as the beautiful and complex place that is home to rich, diverse communities. Grand Park's Our L.A. Voices: a Pop-up Arts+Culture Fest brings together artists and partners who will explore their own cultural origins, the sources of their creativity, the lineage of their activism and the reason for their passion. Through these experiences, participants can find inspiration to reflect upon their own origin stories and sense of belonging to Los Angeles.

Festival highlights include:

  • Viver Brasil, known for its irrepressible blend of bold Afro-Brazilian dance theater, will perform two world premieres: a new work that will take place in Grand Park's Arthur J. Will Memorial Fountain, and "Samba Shula," choreographed by Rachel Hernandez and performed to live music.
  • KPCC's Unheard L.A., a live, community-driven storytelling series, will share true stories of life in Southern California as told by a line-up of people who live and work throughout the region.
  • Playwrights Arena will produce three new works of site-specific Flash Theater, or short plays that explore "Origin Stories" that reflect upon timely topics. Each work will focus on movement and presented in different areas throughout Grand Park.
  • Jardin del Arte 2019, a public marketplace comprising L.A.-based visual artists from gallerists to collectives will feature wares by emerging and established artists, in partnership with Molcajete Dominguero and Residency Gallery.
  • NoOne Art House will perform multidisciplinary "pop-up" dance experiences in locations throughout Grand Park and serve as guides, leading audiences to larger performances throughout the event.
  • Photoville LA, New York City's premier photo festival created and produced by United Photo Industries, will feature the work of L.A.-based photographer Lluvia Higuera, whose portraits portray inspiring L.A.-based artists who have helped shape art, education and public space in Los Angeles. Higuera's pop-up installation will be displayed in a photo cube lightbox. Higuera is among more than 200 other artists whose work will be featured at Photoville LA, happening over two weekends at the Annenberg Space for Photography.
  • The National Endowment for the Arts Big Read program will host an interactive workshop, "Place It!", led by urban planner James Rojas. Inspired by this year's Big Read title, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, by Dinaw Mengestu, this participatory experience will build community through the exploration of topics such as where we come from and where we settle, using model-building, storytelling, artmaking and play.
  • Audiences will also enjoy short films dedicated to dance, curated by award-winning choreographer/director Sarah Elgart, as well as films for children, curated by the Northwest Film Forum. All of the films, filmmakers and choreographers are rooted in Los Angeles.

The weeklong workshops focus on both the creative and entrepreneurial sides of being an artist in Los Angeles. The workshops include:

  • Rachel Moore, president and CEO of The Music Center, will lead a business and arts workshop based on her book The Artist's Compass: The Complete Guide to Building a Life and a Living in the Performing Arts. Moore-a former dancer in American Ballet Theater's corps de ballet who rose to become CEO of that organization and who now heads the nation's third largest performing arts center-will guide aspiring performers to understand and embrace the business and marketing skills they need to launch their careers and achieve personal and professional success.
  • Playwright and director Gina Young will lead the Feminist Acting Class workshop, which she founded as a series of experiments to determine if the form and content of an acting class can both be made feminist;
  • Shamell Bell - mother, community organizer, choreographer and original member of the Black Lives Matter movement - will lead a Dance Movement Activism workshop focused on meditation, theatre games and street dance as community building tools, manifestation practices and healing modalities;
  • Dan M. Forman and John L. Geiger will lead Law Library - Business Series: Protecting Your Intellectual Property: Copyrights and Trade Secrets;
  • The Center for Cultural Innovation will facilitate two workshops, one focused on marketing and branding, and the other focused on funding and fundraising; and
  • Jennifer Cuevas will discuss how to use strategic planning to create a vision for retirement and introduce basic institutional financial retirement account options for longer-term financial planning as independent contractors.

For more information about Grand Park's Our L.A. Voices: Spring Arts Festival, and updates about additional performances, visit grandparkla.org/event/ourlavoices2019/.



Videos