Highways Performance Space & Gallery

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.

09/27/2025

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

07/11/2025

🎪 STEP RIGHT UP... 🎪
✨ THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH V.3 ✨
2 NIGHTS ONLY!
Friday + Saturday, July 18 & 19 | 8PM
📍 Highways Performance Space, Santa Monica

🎤 LADIES, GENTS, AND GLORIOUS IN-BETWEENS...
The tent is up. The lights are hot.
The performers? Ferocious, fearless, and full of fire.

Back by demand after their explosive debut, TRIN Dance Theatre invites you into a world of q***r spectacle where anything can happen — and nothing is what it seems.

🎟️ Daring DRAG
🎭 Chaotic CLOWNERY
💃🏽 Delicious, DEFIANT DANCE
🩸 And raw, unfiltered performance you’ll feel in your bones

Directed by Monica Williams, Tippy Dringman & Mason Gray, this is a circus of the soul — a sweaty, s*xy journey through desire, identity, heartbreak, and healing.
🔥 Come for the fantasy. Stay for the truth.

🎟️ TICKETS IN BIO
🎪 The ring opens at 8PM — don’t be late.
👯‍♀️ You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You might leave transformed.

***rCircus ***rArtMagic

06/19/2025

🌞 Celebrate Pride & the Summer Solstice with Q***r Ritual, Art, and Radical Joy

Join us for a full-day immersive experience weaving together q***r spiritual practice, solstice energy, and radical creative expression. This vibrant gathering features transformative workshops, embodied rituals, poetic performances, and healing encounters designed to connect us to our senses, ancestors, and the natural world.

Highlights include:

✨ One-on-one grief rituals with Marcus Kuiland-Nazario
🎨 Embodied artmaking with Ruby Vartan
🌀 Ritual movement & guided meditation with Kyoko Takenaka & Yumi Sakugawa
🌿 Community spell procession with Edgar Fabián Frías
🌲 A meditative tree-honoring installation with Meghan DeRoma & community
🌈 Evening performances, sound, and poetry by André Atkins, Ari Salka, and Kuiland-Nazario.

Curated by Dorado 806 Projects & The Style Guyde, this day honors the Solstice as a portal: a still point for collective transformation, q***r celebration, and sensory democracy.

🎟️ Reserve your spot now — some workshops require separate admission.
🌙 BONUS: The Solstice evening program (starting at 4:30 PM) is now FREE to the public, thanks to the generous support of art patron Diane Allen ().
RSVP with code: LAIcons

06/17/2025

🌞✨ I’M HERE AND I LOVE YOU ✨🌞
A Performance & Healing Workshop with Kyoko Takenaka + Yumi Sakugawa
Sat, June 21 | 1 PM | Highways

Enter the sacred threshold of the Summer Solstice through this immersive offering of performance, ritual, movement, and collective healing.
Part of “At the Still Point of the Turning World: Solstice Esoterica & Q***r Spiritualism,” this workshop invites you to meet your past, present, and future selves with radical presence and love.

🌸 What’s Included:
🎭 A powerful solo performance + talkback by Kyoko Takenaka, in communion with their past self — a meditation on time, healing, and artistic resilience
🌀 A gentle, guided movement practice rooted in Butoh & Qi Gong, honoring the Four Directions
📝 A contemplative journaling + image-based ritual session led by Yumi Sakugawa, guiding you into nature’s wisdom, ancestral connection, and your inner wildness

🧘‍♀️ Bring: your journal, writing tools, a blanket, water, and anything that helps you feel grounded.
💫 Sign-up now via the “At the Still Point of the Turning World” page on our website — link in bio. 💫

Come exactly as you are. Let this solstice be your threshold. 🌿

***rHealing ***rSpirituality

06/09/2025

This Week @ Highways:
MARKET DEMOGRAPHICS by Tsiambwom M. Akuchu
📍 Highways, Santa Monica
🗓️ June 13 & 14 | 8PM
🎟️ Tickets in bio

You are not the target market. You are the market.

What if everything—your skin tone, your swagger, your silence—was up for sale?

💥 Market Demographics doesn’t just ask the hard questions. It moves them. Hard.

💃🏿 Krump meets House.
🕺🏽 B-boying meets brute truth.
🎭 Street dance fused with physical theater to crack open masculinity, race, and how identity gets branded, boxed, and sold back to us with a price tag.

👁️‍🗨️ Watch what happens when histories of oppression collide with the dopamine drip of consumer culture—and masculinity becomes a market study.

Whether you’re deep into dance, drowning in capitalism, or just want to see a body tell the truth—this is the show. This is the moment.

Created and performed by Tsiambwom “T” Akuchu, choreographer, movement director, and one of L.A.’s most incisive voices in street dance theatre.

06/04/2025

🌵🎭✨ A gambling goat. A sharp-tongued cactus. A magical nose.
Step into “The Legendary Narizona” — a surreal, bilingual journey of identity, trickery, and ancestral memory told through handcrafted puppets, masks, and myth.

🗓️ TWO NIGHTS ONLY
📍 Highways Performance Space & Gallery
📆 June 6 & 7 | 8 PM
🎟️ Link in bio

Blanca wakes each morning painted by ghostly birds, but when her hummingbird-grandmother whispers a secret, she flees into the desert... and into the truth.

Written & directed by Susan Jagosz | Made possible by the Puffin Foundation



05/30/2025

LOSER is a Stage Raw TOP TEN PICK!
4 More Performances Left!

“A smart and innovative dissection of the psyche that physically and mentally pulls you into a life you might [would?] never want to pursue. But with Kennelly’s direction and Royer-McHugh’s performance, it feels slightly more possible, a testament to the magnetic energy created from the unconventional."

Info + 🎟️: https://www.highwaysperformance.org/events/loser-2025-06-01-19-30

05/30/2025

DONNA STERNBERG & DANCERS – GLIMPSES
🗓 May 30 & 31 | 8PM | Highways, Santa Monica

An evening of new work by Donna Sternberg and company artists Alyssa Milligan, Anna Kazwell, Rebecca Aguilar, and Alexandria Paige Amstutz. Each piece explores the quiet tension between vulnerability and control—what we show, what we conceal, and what slips through anyway.

Thoughtful, rigorously made, and emotionally specific, Glimpses brings together distinct choreographic voices linked by their willingness to confront the uncertain.

🎟 $20 Advance | $25 at the door
🔗 Tickets in bio