• Vitamin Jazz

    Tashara Gavin-Moorehead, featured lead artist of WE THE PEOPOE Festival (2024)

Our History and Impact

Since 2016, WACO has produced and presented significant award-winning and critically acclaimed works by an array of multidisciplinary artists in the performing and visual arts.

Our artistic programs have been grounded in providing a safe artistic process, continually in dialogue with community members, with an ongoing commitment to artist development and dream building.

Our mentorship program has worked to provide holistic and wraparound resources, responding to both immediate and long-term needs of participants and their families. We know that investment in young people must go beyond public education and also address their social, emotional, economic and civic needs to build a clearer pathway for success.

Download our 2022/23 Report of Community Impact and join us as we continue to support the lives of artists, young people and community members.

  • 2017/18

     

    Our inaugural season began with a weekend of performances and events, including a staged reading of The Talented Tenth by Richard Wesley and a screening of the documentary King of the Stage: The Woodie King, Jr. Story directed by Juney Smith. For two consecutive years (2017-19), we partnered with the Billie Holiday Theatre in Brooklyn, NY to co-present 50in50, a performance series best described as “a platform for agency and empowerment so that any woman or girl can share her story, regardless of class, race, age, ability, gender identity, nationality or sexual orientation.” Committed to supporting work by both emerging and established artists, WACO presented solo performances by Vanessa Bell Calloway (Letters from Zora) and Debbi Morgan (The Monkey on My Back). These two plays cemented our place among organizations supporting individual artists in Los Angeles.

  • 2018/19

    WACO produced Charles Gordone’s Pulitzer Prize winning No Place to be Somebody. This piece was originally produced off-Broadway in 1969 and our presentation was directed by Richard Lawson who was a cast member in the play’s early productions. Our season featured work from our first national Artist-in-Residence Lil Buck and Jon Boogz, presenting Love Heals All Wounds, a dance performance of traditional Memphis “buck” style dance. This program year, we introduced film to our season calendar and co-produced the inaugural MPACT: Plan A Women of the World Film Festival, featuring short and feature film work by Black women filmmakers. WACO also hosted exclusive screenings in partnership with film studios of the works Queen & Slim, The Last OG and If Beale Street Could Talk. Select screenings featured post-film discussions facilitated by our artistic director Tina Knowles Lawson.

     

    2018/19

  • 2019/20

     

    We expanded our performance offerings in 2019 with the introduction of a music series providing a platform for Los Angeles based independent musicians. Artists presented included Southside Symphony Orchestra, with conductor Marcus Norris, which featured original and remixed orchestrations for the stage. In addition to performances, the music series included post-show discussions exploring themes related to artmaking, including the history of African American composers in Western classical music. For the first time, we partnered and presented events for the 28th Annual Pan African Film Festival, showcasing film work from the African diaspora. Our second gallery show opened with a guided tour and artist talk in our lobby with work by visual artist Tiffanie Anderson. Later in the year we commissioned Seattle-based choreographer and dancer Jade Solomon to expand her solo performance, Black Like Me: The Exploration of the Word Nigger, a performance piece complimented with two panel conversations with guests. We concluded the year with Dahlak Braithwaite‘s Try/Step/Trip, a performance work about addiction, religion and the law, set in a court-ordered drug rehabilitation program.

  • 2020/21

    This year we introduced our first thematic season, curated under the theme: The Evolution of African Culture. The planned series consisted of performing arts, humanities and educational events conceived to explore how the African artistic aesthetic is represented in contemporary Black art. We featured work by Titus Fotso, a West African dancer and choreographer, Lula Washington, artistic director of Lulu Washington Dance Theatre and artists from Syncopated Ladies, a Los Angeles based tap dance band. A multidisciplinary series was developed providing access to Los Angeles, national and international artists to showcase their talents to WACO’s audiences virtually. Our I Got the Mic program, in collaboration with Eli Lu Entertainment, is a four part series fixated on wordplay, metaphors, expressions and creative storytelling. Distributed as a virtual show on our social media platforms, each episode showcased poets, spoken word artists and wordsmiths, a musical guest performance, DJ, visual artist highlight and a special co-host. ​​Featured artists included Nikki Giovanni, Clay Dub, Abiodun Oyewole and Theresa Tha S.O.N.G.B.I.R.D. In late 2021, we expanded our work in the digital realm by producing a film adaptation of Richard Wesley’s play Black Terror. We partnered with two Newark, NJ based organizations, Newark Symphony Hall, New Jersey’s largest Black-led arts and entertainment venue, and its resident partner Yendor Theatre Company, and cast actors from both Newark and Los Angeles.

     

    2020/21

  • 2022/23

     

    When WACO first opened its doors, there was a limited number of physical spaces and financial support for Black artmaking and storytelling in Los Angeles. We filled a critical void by establishing an artistic home for these artists and invited audiences and young people to see themselves and be inspired. Our 2022/23 season, Black with a Capital B, helped illuminate this mandate. This program year we returned to live performance and in-person events. The season launched with the return of South Side Symphony and lead artist, composer and conductor Dr. Marcus Norris. The all-Black chamber ensemble hosted a weekend of performances exploring sounds of the Black future. We hosted two dance resident artist this season, and presented the work of lead artist and choreographer Friidom Dunn, who presented the work-in-progress Black Hömer revealing an alternative window in which the artist developed—“Epiic”—poetry in motion, a style of dance improvisation born from the origins of krumping. WACO continued to center the experiences of Black women, and this season’s Women History Month programming was grounded by the 8th annual film festival collaboration Plan A: Black Women on the Rise Film Festival, showcasing short films by Black women to empower Black women. The festival provided an cash award for future production and development to the leading film.  The gallery space was transformed into an immersive portal, in our spring exhibition WITNESS, curated by Artistic Director Tina Knowles and Genel Ambrose of Good Mirrors Institute. The exhibition was received with critical acclaim and featured in the LA Times Arts & Entertainment beat. This season we partnered with Watts Village Theatre Company and co-produced Marty and the Hands that Could by playwright Josh Wilder. The production took place at Phoenix Hall in Watts, CA in collaboration with Watts Community Labor Action Center. Our mentorship program hosted the annual Passion Day and Etiquette Workshop for the new cohort of mentees, and we celebrated our first senior class, with 100% high school graduation. In June, we rounded out our season with our second artist residency with Jade Solomon Curtis presenting a new choreographic dance presentation, Keeper of Sadness that illuminates the countless contributions that Black women have made to ensure the livelihood of others. We ended the season with the Films for Teens by Teens Festival sharing the stories of young people, and providing them skills necessary to use their voice.

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