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Tuesday 1pm - 7pm Wednesday 2pm - 7pm Thursday 1pm - 7pm Friday 2pm - 11pm Saturday 7pm - 11pm

Highways Performance Space & Gallery

Name: Highways Performance Space & Gallery
Address: 1651 18th Street, Santa Monica, CA, 90404, US
Telephone: +13104531755
Rating: 4.1

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Highways Performance Space & Gallery

http://www.highwaysperformance.org
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12/16/2025

🔊 THE LEGACY GOES LIVE 📡 We’re thrilled to partner with Performance Art Museum, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and 18th Street Arts Center on High Performance: A 2-Year Conference (2025–2027)—a bold, city-wide initiative honoring the legendary magazine that reshaped performance art and gave radical voices a public stage. 📚⚡

From archives to actions, this multi-year collaboration brings exhibitions, performances, readings, and live convenings across LA—connecting generations of artists, scholars, and communities. 🎭🧠

✨ And in July 2027, our Santa Monica space transforms into an immersive, multi-room performance environment, inspired directly by High Performance—where risk, experimentation, and social imagination take center stage once again.

The work continues.
So do we. 🧩🔥 

12/09/2025

🚨 CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS — for the bold, the unruly, the uncategorizable.

Highways is seeking SoCal-based disruptors in performance / dance / music / visual art to carve up our January–June 2026 calendar with something unforgettable.

🖤 Raw rituals, polished chaos, full-length odysseys, bite-sized explosions. Gallery takeovers welcome.

💣 EXTENDED Submission Deadline: December 12, 2025

Click on the link in our bio or send your full vision — project pitch, bios, dream dates, links, photos/videos — to [email protected].

📢 Please share with your communities + repost — let’s uplift the wild ones.

✨ Pictured: highlights from 2025 at Highways.

12/05/2025

🚨 CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS — for the bold, the unruly, the uncategorizable.

Highways is seeking SoCal-based disruptors in performance / dance / music / visual art to carve up our January–June 2026 calendar with something unforgettable.

🖤 Raw rituals, polished chaos, full-length odysseys, bite-sized explosions. Gallery takeovers welcome.

💣 Submission Deadline: December 9, 2025

Click on the link in our bio or send your full vision — project pitch, bios, dream dates, links, photos/videos — to [email protected].

📢 Please share with your communities + repost — let’s uplift the wild ones.

✨ Pictured: highlights from 2025 at Highways.

12/01/2025

Today is World AIDS Day.

Highways will be open from 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm for anyone who wishes to visit the AIDS Memorial Floor.

You are invited to join us in re-inking the floor with the names of those we’ve lost to AIDS — a quiet space for remembrance, community, and collective honoring.

All are welcome.

11/21/2025

🚨 CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS — for the bold, the unruly, the uncategorizable.

Highways is seeking SoCal-based disruptors in performance / dance / music / visual art to carve up our January–June 2026 calendar with something unforgettable.

🖤 Raw rituals, polished chaos, full-length odysseys, bite-sized explosions. Gallery takeovers welcome.

💣 Submission Deadline: December 9, 2025

Click on the link in our bio or send your full vision — project pitch, bios, dream dates, links, photos/videos — to [email protected].

📢 Please share with your communities + repost — let’s uplift the wild ones.

11/07/2025

coming soon 🔥 Nov 21-22 | 8PM

Two choreographers. Two new works that burn through illusion + intimacy.

Maya Billig’s Not My Queen teeters between witch trial + 80s pageant—a delirious spectacle of female power, punishment, and performance. Think glitter over hysteria, sequins at the stake, femininity as both weapon + witness.

Camila Arana’s For Better or For Worse dissects love’s most exquisite brutality—the ache of devotion, the beauty in destruction, the tenderness that cuts both ways.

Together, they conjure a world where beauty turns perilous and love devours as it adores.

💋 Nov 21–22 | 8PM 📍 Highways | Santa Monica
🎟️ link in bio 🩰

10/22/2025

🎭 LIFE IS A DREAM / SUEÑOS DE LIBERTAD 🌙🔥
Calderón’s 1600s classic gets cracked open and reimagined for now. Ilse Castro Corona and an international crew drop Life is a Dream into the world of detention centers and carceral myths — where Segismundo’s prison starts to feel uncomfortably familiar.

Three Segismundos. One Basilio. A thousand questions: 💭 What happens when dreams are policed? 🔥 Who decides what freedom means?

This isn’t dusty theater — it’s a live collision of poetry, power, and resistance, asking what happens when the system fears your wildness more than your silence.

🎟️ Tickets via the link in our bio — step into the dream before it disappears.

10/11/2025

NEW SOUNDS ⚡ NEW COLLISIONS

🎶 Marathon: Muscles of Destiny — a murderously dark comic opera where Greek myth hits the remix machine. 🏛️🎛️ The original Marathon runner’s path to godhood mutates into a divine cage match over who gets written into history. 🥊 👯‍♂️ Clone vs. clone. ⚡ God vs. ego. 💪 Muscles vs. destiny. 
Then Sending // Receiving opens the ports: 📦 three ensembles 📡 three conductors 🌍 one tangled system of sonic exchange. Music as movement, freight, code — a living network that crashes and rebuilds itself in real time. 🔁💥

🎧 A double feature from LA’s experimental underground. Irreverent. Glorious. Too loud for Olympus. 🌪️

10/06/2025

🎭 Support Highways This Coming Week
The future of experimental art depends on the places brave enough to hold it. Highways is one of them.

On Saturday, October 11 at 8:30 PM, the lights rise on a legacy nearly twenty years in the making:
From Emmett Till to SNCC & Beyond: Words + Music + Art — the third chapter of Highways’ acclaimed Emmett Till series, first launched in 2005 and revisited in 2010 under curator Kevin Spicer.

This new volume carries the story forward — through performance, music, and visual art — from a 14-year-old whose murder stirred the conscience of a nation to the young activists who built SNCC, turning grief into movement.

Featuring Peggy Trotter Dammond Preacely (original SNCC member), David Crittendon (Freedom Rider), and artists including ADAAWE, Brian Freeman, Joyce Guy, Jason Luckett, Paul Outlaw, Pam Ward, and Gia Scott-Heron.
Visual works by Charles Dickson, Candace Hunter, Toni Scott, and Hana Ward fill the Highways Gallery with memory and momentum.

For decades, Highways has been where history meets the avant-garde — a space for truth, art, and collective courage.

🎟️ Tickets, silent auction, and event details via the link in bio. 📍 Highways, 1651 18th St, Santa Monica

✊🏾 Support the space that keeps art honest. Support Highways.
 

10/03/2025

🔥 From Emmett Till to SNCC & Beyond: Words + Music + Art
📅 Sat, Oct 11 | 8:30 PM
📍 Highways, Santa Monica

A benefit performance and gallery installation marking two turning points in the Civil Rights Movement:
✨ The 70th anniversary of 14-year-old Emmett Till’s murder, a tragedy that galvanized the fight for justice.
✨ The 65th anniversary of SNCC, the student-led movement that organized sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and voter campaigns in the Jim Crow South.

🎤 Featuring:
• Peggy Trotter Dammond Preacely, original SNCC member & artist-activist
• David Crittendon, Freedom Rider & artist-activist
• ADAAWE, Brian Freeman, Joyce Guy, Jason Luckett, Paul Outlaw, Pam Ward, Gia Scott-Heron & Art.Us Mansoir, and more.

🎨 With works by legendary visual artists Charles Dickson, Candace Hunter, Toni Scott, Hana Ward, and others—plus a special tribute piece by the late teen artist Justin Carr.

🍷 General Admission, Student/Senior, and limited VIP tickets available. Early Bird discounts end Oct 5. Includes receptions, art showings, and dessert celebration.

🖼️ Bid in the Silent Art Auction now through Oct 11. Proceeds directly support Highways—home to radical, independent art for nearly four decades.

➡️ Tickets & Auction: LINK IN BIO.

✊🏾 Stand with Highways. Honor Till. Honor SNCC. Carry the movement forward.

09/06/2025

📸✨ In Highways’ Gallery ✨📸
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 13, 5pm Free + open to all

Title IX Training — a two-person exhibition of Polaroid photography by artist couple Dakota Noot & Christopher Velasco.

Title IX, a 1972 civil rights law banning s*x discrimination in education, is now best known through the “mandatory trainings” every teacher and staff member must sit through. Noot and Velasco—both teachers—flip that script with raw, playful Polaroids that stage these workplace scenarios in stranger, seedier, and q***rer directions.

Different backdrops, shifting costumes, bodies in states of undress: compliance theater becomes absurd performance. At a time when q***r expression is increasingly policed by schools and governments, these images lean into parody, humor, and desire as acts of freedom.

***rArt

07/17/2025

🎪🔥 TRIN Dance Theatre THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH V.3 JULY 18 + 19 | 8PM | HIGHWAYS 
This Week : Q***r circus. Clownery. Drag. Melodrama. Glitter. Raw truth in rhinestones. 
Directed with furious tenderness by Monica Williams, Tippy Dringman, and Mason Gray, The Greatest Show on Earth V.3 writhes at the intersection of spectacle and soul-searching. It’s a sweaty love letter to chosen family, radical joy, and the ache of becoming. 
🛎️ TICKETS VIA LINK IN BIO. 💥 This isn’t just a show. It’s a spell. A scream. A sanctuary. Come. Be undone.

👀 Partial nudity. Full liberation. 
***rPerformance

Address

1651 18th Street
Santa Monica, CA
90404

Opening Hours

Tuesday	1pm - 7pm
Wednesday	2pm - 7pm
Thursday	1pm - 7pm
Friday	2pm - 11pm
Saturday	7pm - 11pm

Telephone

+13104531755

Website

http://www.highwaysperformance.org/, http://www.highwaysperformance.blogspot.com/

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