From the Inside Out: Restoring The Performing Arts Society of Los Angeles

• In Event: Poetry, Art, and Cultural Inspiration

Abstract

Informed by internal colonialism theory, this work examines the practices of the Performing Arts Society of Los Angeles (PASLA), its founder Motojicho Vantile Whitfield, the PASLA Community Players, and their mission expressed through PASLA’s motto, “social growth through the performing arts.” Using oral histories, archival research, and textual analysis, the work situates PASLA within the socio-political environment of mid-Twentieth Century Los Angeles specifically. From 1965 to 1992 in South Central and Southwest Los Angeles, PASLA offered workshops in the literary, performance and technical aspects of drama and film, an animation workshop, a children's workshop, and other personal and community development programs, producing stage plays, televisual work, and independent films for public viewing. Emerging at a historical moment of optimal socio-political conditions for its creation, PASLA members were uniquely situated in Los Angeles with proximity and connections to the entertainment industry. Therefore, this work also examines the double consciousness that the PASLA members confronted working in a Black Arts Movement aesthetic environment and modality while working in the contradictory mainstream media industry. The mainstream studios and stages became directly contested spaces over the meaning of Blackness in the public imagination. PASLA members were able to marshal their access to help transform the look of popular culture in the United States while challenging the legacy of minstrel show aesthetics, creating a significant body of work and extending a performance legacy that continues to inform literary and performance styles locally in Los Angeles and recognizable among other African American and African Diasporic communities.

Author

• Wilfred Doucet, Santa Monica College