The Highways Performance Space is a performance venue in

Santa Monica, California Santa Monica (; Spanish language, Spanish: ''Santa Mónica'') is a city in Los Angeles County, California, Los Angeles County, situated along Santa Monica Bay on California's South Coast (California), South Coast. Santa Monica's 2020 United Sta ...

, which focuses on new works and alternative pieces. The organization is a space for

LGBTQ ' is an initialism that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. In use since the 1990s, the initialism, as well as some of its common variants, functions as an umbrella term for sexuality and gender identity. The LGBT term is a ...

artists to experiment with form and content. Performed work includes

theatre Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors or actresses, to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The perform ...

music Music is generally defined as the art of arranging sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise expressive content. Exact definitions of music vary considerably around the world, though it is an aspect ...

dance Dance is a performing art form consisting of sequences of movement, either improvised or purposefully selected. This movement has aesthetic and often symbolic value. Dance can be categorized and described by its choreography, by its repertoir ...

spoken word Spoken word refers to an oral poetic performance art that is based mainly on the poem as well as the performer's aesthetic qualities. It is a late 20th century continuation of an ancient oral artistic tradition that focuses on the aesthetics of ...

interactive media Interactive media normally refers to products and services on digital computer-based systems which respond to the user's actions by presenting content such as text, moving image, animation, video and audio. Since its early conception, various fo ...

, and

visual arts The visual arts are art forms such as painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, photography, video, filmmaking, design, crafts and architecture. Many artistic disciplines such as performing arts, conceptual art, and textile arts al ...

History

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. 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 Human immunodeficiency virus infection and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) is a spectrum of conditions caused by infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), a retrovirus. Following initial infection an individual ...

epidemic, one of the key issues facing the LGBTQ community in the organization’s earlier years.

Galleries and Workshops

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. 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''.

Past Artists

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 Luis Alfaro (born 1963 in Los Angeles, California) is a Chicano performance artist, writer, theater director, and social activist. He grew up in the Pico Union district near Downtown Los Angeles, and graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in ...

, Elia Arce,

Ron Athey Ron Athey (born December 16, 1961) is an American performance artist associated with body art and with extreme performance art. He has performed in the U.S. and internationally (especially in the UK and Europe). Athey's work explores challenging ...

, Cornerstone Theater,

Quentin Crisp Quentin Crisp (born Denis Charles Pratt; – ) was an English raconteur, whose work in the public eye included a memoir of his life and various media appearances. Before becoming well-known, he was an artist's model, hence the title of ...

, Diavolo Dance Theater,

Karen Finley Karen Finley (born 1956) is an American performance artist, musician and poet. Her performance art, recordings, and books are used as forms of activism. Her work frequently uses nudity and profanity. Finley incorporates depictions of sexuality, ...

, 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 Sir Ian Murray McKellen (born 25 May 1939) is an English actor. His career spans seven decades, having performed in genres ranging from Shakespearean and modern theatre to popular fantasy and science fiction. Regarded as a British cultural i ...

, Rudy Perez,

Phranc Phranc (born Susan Gottlieb; August 28, 1957), is an American singer-songwriter whose career began playing in several bands in the late 1970s Los Angeles punk rock scene. Her musical style later shifted during the 1980s as a solo artist, into ...

, Denise Uyehara, Oguri

Current Festivals

Latina/o New Works Festival & Working Titles

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.

Highways’ Annual Poetry Festival

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

Highways’ BEHOLD! A Queer Performance Festival

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.

Queer Mondays

An un-curated LGBTQ experimental performance series that takes place on the last Monday of every month.

Funding

Recently, Highways has received funding from the

California Arts Council The California Arts Council is a state agency based in Sacramento, United States. Its eight council members are appointed by the Governor and the state Legislature. The agency's mission is to advance California through arts, culture and creativi ...

California Community Foundation The California Community Foundation (CCF) is a philanthropic organization located in Los Angeles, California. Foundation Center, an independent nonprofit organization, ranks it among the top 100 foundations in the nation by asset size and total ...

, The James Irvine Foundation, the

National Endowment for the Arts The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal ...

(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. 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.

Awards and Accolades

{{refimprove section, date=March 2018 Some of the institutions that have awarded the Highways Performance Space for its innovations as a community-based presenter include: * The Alliance of Los Angeles Playwrights, *

GLAAD GLAAD (), an acronym of Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, is an American non-governmental media monitoring organization originally founded as a protest against defamatory coverage of gay and lesbian demographics and their portrayals ...

(Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) (Community Service Award, 1994) * The Los Angeles Drama Critics Association.

References

External links

Highways Performance Space
- official site Culture in Santa Monica, California Organizations based in Los Angeles County, California Theatres in Los Angeles County, California