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Purpose History Community Programs - Theater - Visual Arts - Poetry - Film - Online Board Members Funding |
ABOUT US : Programs Although our organization aims to encourage work that crosses disciplines, we have divided our programs into several distinct areas of emphasis for the sake of clarity: Theater Theater is an ever-evolving artform which has historically been an important medium for the development of new cultural concepts. It is also a comparatively inexpensive way to tell a story to an audience. Many people, especially in Los Angeles, feel that theater has been rendered irrelevent by the advent of film and television. We feel the opposite is true. Theater is the place to tell the stories that would never be told by television broadcasters and motion picture studios, the stories that can't fit on the screen. Its a medium by which to transmit the immediate, real-life emotions that can only travel between two people in the same room. In 2000 we established The Simple Stage, a workshop in which playwrights and actors could share new work and discuss ideas in development. The workshop provided an encouraging environment for discussion and elaboration in order to guide people towards expressing themselves in a theatrical form. We have hosted about six plays a year and hope to increase this number in the upcoming years. Visual Arts Trade City has hosted seven art exhibits in the last year. Each show has involved the creation of an entire environment in which to view paintings, photographs, sculpture, and performance pieces. Its our aim to not only bring new artists into the spotlight, but also to establish a context in which audiences are invited to participate in the pieces themselves. The curators and organizers at Trade City have found that the manner in which art is presented can often help to dissolve the distinction between artist and patron, and de-emphasize the space that separates a work from the person who sees it. We hope to continue our experimentation with this idea in future shows. Performance Poetry / Literature In the summer of 1999, Trade city co-founder Maureen Weiss helped to form the New York chapter of Youth Speaks, a program which offers free creative writing and spoken word poetry classes to teenagers. This experience inspired the formulation of Trade City's Out Loud event, a spoken word poetry showcase in which poets and writers could share their work and develop the presentation of their pieces. The event, was made possible, in part, by a grant from the LA County Arts Commission. In the future, we plan to hold after-school performance poetry classes and publish a literature periodical to help cultivate the next generation of voices. Film Innovations in digital technology have made film-making tools more accessible to the individual story-teller working on a small-scale. Many of the artists and actors associated with Trade City have created films which demonstrate the flexibility of the motion picture medium by moving beyond the aesthetic constraints of the traditional film-making process. In The fall of 2000, Trade City organized and presented The Bare Bones Film Festival, a three-night event which provided filmmakers with a rare opportunity to present their work to a large audience. In addition to future festivals, we hope to establish an event which will showcase the work of a new independent filmmaker on a weekly or monthly basis, and to eventually develop, in cooperation with other organizations, a network of venues in which to circulate and distribute small-scale films. Online Trade-city.org is the online headquarters for information about the company and its productions. Its an on-going, ever-expanding projects which will, at some point, encompass a gallery in which to present the work of artists, writers and filmmakers to a global audience. A number of web-site-specific art pieces are also in development. |