History – WACO Theater Center

WACO Theater Center History

Since 2017, WACO has presented, commissioned, developed and produced significant award-winning and critically acclaimed works by an array of African diasporic artists in the performing and visual arts. Our programming has been grounded in maintaining the vibrancy and continuity of artistic creation with a commitment to artist development and audience engagement.

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.

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.