With support from the California Arts Council, The Actors’ Gang [TAG] will deliver 5 theatre workshops at the Ivy Substation, home to TAG, for elementary and middle school students, offering skills-based workshops in our unique style of theatre which explores emotional states, characters of the Commedia dell’Arte, and ensemble building. Students work in an artistically safe space, collaborating with their peers and professional actors. Each session culminates in an original theatre piece.
Our plays and programs create theatrical experiences that entertain, inspire and engage active ongoing dialogues about society, culture and the human condition. We hope to provoke new thinking and activism on a variety of issues including arts education, the school-to-prison pipeline, criminal justice reform, equality and tolerance. The Education Department began in 2000 and provides programs that are vital and unique empowering children and teens to discover, develop and share their individual creative voices with their community of peers. TAG Education Department (TAG-ED) provides free in-school, after-school and summer theater programs for diverse youth populations in Los Angeles County. In 2006 The Actors’ Gang Prison Project (TAGPP) was launched and currently conducts weekly and seven-day intensive programs inside 14 of California’s prisons on 16 yards. In 2016 TAGPP created the Reentry Program for recently incarcerated men and women coming home and the Youth Project for justice-involved children. The Alumni Advocacy Project was launched in 2018 to empower formerly incarcerated people through the arts and the Mentorship Project launched in 2024 pairing justice-involved youth with alumni for support and growth.

