Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center Programs
Arts Education
LHPAC provides affordable, quality arts training across generations to create outstanding youth and intergenerational arts education programming for the whole community. The Summer Youth Performing Arts Academy is a 9-week theatre arts training program culminating in an all youth theatrical musical production. The Summer Youth Performing Arts Academy is Seattle's premiere theater arts training program for youth of color and at risk youth.
Film
The Langston Hughes African American Film Festival is held annually in April. This 9-day festival presents a powerful array of documentary and narrative films that explore the historical and contemporary experience of African Americans and Black people from around the world.
Theater
Each fall, the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center produces a professional mainstage theatrical production directed by Langston's Artistic Director, Jacqueline Moscou. These works are designed to showcase the work of African American artists and provide a quality, accessible arts production that the whole community can enjoy regardless of income.
Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center offers a variety of dance, music, and theatre offerings in partnership with local arts organizations. These collaborative arts partnerships offer arts and cultural organizations much needed space to rehearse, perform and build audience wor their works.
Recent Successes and Current Challenges
The Langston Hughes African American Film Festival has seen consistent growth since its inception. 2011 marked the eighth year of the festival and brought the festival to a new level of national engagement. The festival became one of the founding partners of AFFRM, the African American Film Festival Releasing Movement.
AFFRM is a collaborative effort of five of the country's top Black film festivals to do something that no other festival group had done before- release a film for national distribution. In March of 2011, we released the film "I Will Follow" across the nation. The success of this release spread rapidly throughout the country and allowed us to open the film in 10 additional cities.
The Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center is currently closed for much needed seismic and electrical upgrades. While our building is closed, we have taken our programming on tour to dozens of sites across the city of Seattle and through partnerships with local cultural and arts groups.
Remaining operational while our physical facility is closed has presented opportunities to bring our programming directly to the community, building new and distinct relationships and audiences throughout metro Seattle and King County.
We look forward to our grand reopening, currently scheduled for 2012. Construction is progressing on schedule and we hope to dedicate our renewed space with arts programming of the highest caliber, offer opportunities to emerging and established artists and bring the power of place to our neighborhood bringing local, national and global arts that reflect our heritage and culture for all to enjoy.