CONCENTRATE: A Workspace Residency Focused on Desk Access

Los Angeles Performance Practice is excited to launch CONCENTRATE, a six-month workspace residency which provides two arts workers with round-the-clock access to a shared office space with LAPP staff including a rotating desk shared with their fellow resident partner, business services, meeting spaces, and larger opportunities to engage with the WeWork community.

Participants will also have hosted active monthly gatherings for peer support on their journey as well as engagement with the LAPP team.

As our field emerges from a time of severe isolation due the pandemic of COVID-19, there is an ongoing need to combat the loneliness arts workers have experienced during this time as well as boost infrastructure support for them to get back to creating. The life of an arts worker is one filled with visioning, rehearsal, collaboration, and practice but it is also the reality that an arts worker’s life is also filled with paperwork, grant applications, emails and project proposals.

CONCENTRATE’s goals are:

• Provide support to contemporary LA arts workers to deepen their administrative focus in a shared workspace setting;
• Combat isolation and encourage collaboration through cohort gatherings and conversations as well as sharing of resources;
• Alleviate the challenge of focusing in a home environment while providing access to professional business services;
• Document and share how having workspace access impacts an artistic practice.

Residencies were invited based on the following criteria:

• Los Angeles based artists and independent producers who are working in contemporary performance and actively involved in generating new projects.
• Demonstration that a workspace residency would be critical for the arts worker’s administrative focus.
• Interest in participating in a shared workspace setting including collaborating through a cohort model.
• In alignment with our Board-adopted Cultural Equity & Inclusion policy, we will prioritize interest made by female-identifying, non-binary and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color arts workers, however, we welcome forms from independent artists and producers of all backgrounds.

2022 CONCENTRATE Participants

Daniel Soto is an independent creative consultant based in Los Angeles. He has over a decade of experience working in multidisciplinary non-profit arts institutions, including the Skirball Cultural Center, Lincoln Center, and The Music Center. His writing has appeared in L.A. Record, Hyperallergic, and the Crypto, Culture, & Society Journal.

Estrellx Supernova (they/them) is a queer, AfroIndigenous choreographer, performance artist, healer, and Cosmic Energetic Orchestrator of an emergent ecosystem called The Cosmic Angels / The School(s) of Tenderness. Estrellx Supernova focuses on their solo choreographic work, The Cosmic Angels takes the form of a remixed dance company, choreographic healing collective, and The School(s) of Tenderness will be a network of (13) schools / global hive sites located near energetic earth centers. Each site will be its own respective architectural design project (using the beehive as its main organizing principle) composed of the following containers: queer club, healing center/hybrid medical plaza, ritualistic performance venue, farm, innovation incubator. This vision will be created by and for Black, Indigenous, Queer, Trans (BIQTPOC) and Allied Creatives and current branches of programming that exist include PLATAFORMA (2020) and Residencias Rhizomatica (2022).

Estrellx’s core pedagogical offering called, The Rage Room/El Cuarto del Duelo, is a multi-month intuitive coaching container where they support BIQTPOC Creatives with stabilizing their creative visions and spiritual foundations. They implement choreographic kinetics, somatics, and performative rituals to integrate shame, fear, scarcity, and trauma that is imposed by insidious colonial infrastructures. Estrellx’s work tackles BIQTPOC sovereignty, intergenerational trauma, and climate crisis through curated offerings that repattern cognitive dissonance so that new ways of embodied being (that actively divest from capitalism and white supremacy) can emerge. Their offerings acknowledge that implementing systemic change is directly connected to one’s capacity to repattern the same systems within one’s own cellular body. 

Estrellx has been awarded a 2023 Djerassi Residency, a 2020 San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant, and a 2020 Creative Capital Award for their long-term project Encuentrx 33: Queer Neurocognitive Architectures Hidden in Plain Site(s), which is a major milestone in bringing their vision of The Cosmic Angels / The School(s) of Tenderness to life.

Estrellx self-designed a B.A. in Dance & Performance Studies at Williams College (2014), where they integrated international choreographic training via Tanzfabrik Berlin, and completed an exchange semester at Bennington College. 

To follow and learn more about Estrellx and their work, upcoming events and offerings you can find them on IG:
corporealidades.sutiles and via their website.