For further information contact Sean LaRocca, Managing Director: sean@artspotproductions.org
ArtSpot Productions is an ensemble of artists dedicated to creating meticulously live theater in New Orleans. Our productions are a sincere blend of disciplines developed through ensemble authorship, physically rigorous training, original music, interactive sculptural environments, and extended research and rehearsal. We practice social justice and shared power in our creative and organizational processes, and we strive to incite positive change in our community with visually stunning performances and empowering educational programs.
ArtSpot Productions is Louisiana’s most accomplished and awarded original ensemble theatre
company. Founded in 1995 by Kathy Randels, ArtSpot has produced dozens of original works
of performance and theater by professional, emerging, student and incarcerated artists.
Our work often addresses particular social or political problems: Louisiana’s disappearing
wetlands; violence against women; the relationship of theatre, history, culture and politics;
Louisiana’s legacy of slavery and institutionalized racism; and the rebuilding of New Orleans
neighborhoods post-Katrina.
Our goal is to empower artists, our community partners, audiences, and learners to harness
the power of their own creativity. We do this by creating opportunities to engage actively in
performance processes and events that promote the principles of collective decision-making,
equity, and the intrinsic value of each indivdual’s life experience.
Mondo Bizarro has been creating original, multidisciplinary art and fostering creative partnerships in local, national and international communities for the last six years. We are a group of artists that have committed to labor as an ensemble over several years with the goal of establishing a body of work inspired by a particular set of commonly shared aesthetic and civic values. We are a collective of individuals that create, present and produce a wide array of imaginative projects aimed at utilizing art as a tool for understanding what makes us commonly human and individually unique. Our work is intentionally multidisciplinary, ranging from physical theater to large-scale community festivals; from social media to site-specific productions. Everything we do is fused with strong desire to develop brave new works of art that illuminate the beauty and travails of the human condition. We believe that every community has a unique memory of itself and trust that the affirmation of seeing one’s story accurately and artfully portrayed can open the mind and heart to listening to the stories of others.
To date, we have created seven original theater works, presented (with ArtSpot Productions and M.U.G.A.B.E.E) over two-hundred fifty local, regional and national artists through our annual State of the Nation Art & Performance Festival, and initiated the I-10 Witness Project which has assisted hundreds of people in the process of digitally recording and archiving their Katrina stories. Through collaborations with over twenty-five community partners, these stories have been featured on public radio stations throughout the country and via installations in Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Arizona, Virginia, Georgia, Tennessee, California, Connecticut, Kentucky, North Carolina, New York, Russia and England.
