John Malpede and Henriëtte Brouwers
Picture by Jeseca Dawson: State of Incarceration by Los Angeles Poverty department @ Highways Performance Space, Feb. 2011
Henriëtte Brouwers is a performer, director and teacher. As Associate Director she has worked with the Los Angeles Poverty Department since 2000. Born in the Netherlands, Brouwers has a degree from the Academy for Expression by Word and Gesture in her native country and studied corporeal mime with Etiènne Décroux and “theatre of the oppressed” with Augusto Boal in Paris. She 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 Highschool for the Arts, UT of Knoxville and Touchstone Theatre in Bethlehem. She was movement director for Blue Monk, directed by Ed Smith for the 1996 Olympic Arts Festival in Atlanta, Georgia. Highways Performance Space presented her solo: la Lengua, the tongue of Cortés in 2000. Inspired by Mexican legends about women, Brouwers directed Weeping Women and War at Pomona College, Weeping Women on Skid Row and La Llorona of Echo Park with LAPD. In 2003–4, 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 also featured in artist Bill Viola’s renowned The Passions series, which has been exhibited extensively in major museums throughout the world. Henriëtte started working on Wolf Woman, a project that combines movement, song and drawing during a HOTHOUSE residency at UCLA in 2010.
Photo from John Malpede’s Bright Futures, Performers in photo: Tanya Selvaratnam,, JOhn Malpede, Nell Breyer, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
John Malpede is a director, actor, activist, and writer. “A nationally acclaimed theater radical and social visionary, Malpede has been confounding audience expectations for two decades,” said Linda Eisenstein in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. In 1985, Malpede founded and continues to direct the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), the first performance group in the nation comprised primarily of homeless and formerly homeless people. LAPD’s mission is to create performances that connect lived experience to the social forces that shape the lives and communities of people living in poverty.
Recent work includes LA Poverty Department’s State of Incarceration, co-directed by Malpede and Henriëtte Brouwers and performed at The Box Gallery, Highways Performance Space, and the Radar LA Festival; as a collaborating performer in Wunderbaum’s Looking for Paul, at the Redcat Theater; and Bright Futures directed by Malpede and performed by Nell Breyer, Malpede, and Tanya Selvaratnam at MIT and NYC’s Performa Festival.
1629 18th Street
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