John Malpede - work in progress_

MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies presents a work in progress
by 2009 Fellow John Malpede
"Bright Futures: Financial Prospects"
Performed by Nell Breyer, Tanya Selvaratnam and John Malpede
Thursday, May 14, 6:30 PM
CAVS, N52 390, 265 Mass Ave, Cambridge MA
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Join CAVS for an in-progress, 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.

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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.