About this Event
Echoes of the City: Disability Arts Exchange is a workshop series curated by Vanessa Hernández Cruz in partnership with The Music Center in Los Angeles, CA & Los Angeles Spoonie Collective. The series offers a space for Disabled artists, creators and dreamers of all experience levels to connect, imagine and create. Throughout our journey from Spring 2026-Fall 2027, we will explore powerful themes that shape our lives through the intricate tapestry of time and memory. Featuring guided monthly workshops led by QTBIPOC Disabled facilitators across the arts, we will channel these ideas into a collective body of work in connection with Vanessa Hernández Cruz’s new multimedia dance work “Echoing Memories in a Distant Future,” set to premiere in Fall 2027.
Here is our Spring Workshops 2026 lineup!
Glow in Community: Intention-Setting & Shared Altar Ritual
April 24, 2026 from 10am-noon PST
Facilitated by Glow
Glow’s Collective Care Altar Session is a community-centered workshop that guides participants through creating a shared altar whether in-person or live-streamed. Participants reflect on their personal memories, identities, and journeys while Glow guides and flows through a communal altar using Oaxacan-crafted unlit candle vessel(s) and herbs grown in local community gardens. Through grounding exercises, gentle reflection prompts, and collective intention-setting, the workshop creates an accessible space to connect to themselves and each other. This offering centers cultural wellness, belonging, and interdependence, allowing participants to contribute symbolically even without physical materials.
*Herbs that will be present: Rice, Lavender, Cardamom, Cinnamon, Spearmint, Peppermint, Flowers, Rosemary
Memory Maps in Sound: A QTBIPOC Disabled Songwriting Workshop
May 23, 2026 from 10am-noon PST
Facilitated by NYALLAH
This 2-hour workshop invites QTBIPOC disabled artists to explore memory, identity, and liminal spaces through songwriting and sound. Participants will create “memory maps” — using lyrics, voice, rhythm, or improvisation to chart personal stories, ancestral echoes, or imagined futures. The process emphasizes experimentation, embodiment, and collaborative sharing, encouraging participants to engage at their own pace. Activities are adaptable to diverse abilities and sensory needs, allowing participants to contribute vocally, instrumentally, or through writing and drawing.
Resisting Ableism Through Embodied Practice
June 14, 2026 from 10am-noon PST
Facilitated by Alyssa Rose
This workshop is a somatic-based container to explore crip time, sensations in the body, and the relationship we have to our limitations. Meditative in nature, this workshop begins with a long non-verbal movement session to return to our bodies, collect our attentional field, and perhaps feel safe enough to learn. This offering is rooted in nervous system literacy. There will be many ways to be "in" the practice, so access is an ever alive question in the classroom that honors dynamic disabilities. As we indulge in embodied states, how can we resist ableism through our body/heart/mind? How can we practice not being ableist toward our own bodies? We will lean into community through discussion and reflection, as we learn how to be in a more loving relationship with ourselves.
Stay tuned for our Summer 2026 Lineup announcement!
Access Information:
- Masking required for all participants (K95 masks + rapid tests will be available onsite)
*If unable to mask due to access needs, we do ask participants to COVID test 24 hours before a workshop. - Scent-free environment
- ASL interpreters are available upon a request (a week notice is required)
- Transport chairs & Wheelchairs are available upon request (a week notice is required)
- Access Doula onsite
- Ushers will be available for wayfinding and with wheelchair support
- High quality air filtration system running throughout the building
- Serenity Space available (Quiet Room)
- Sensory kits available (ear plugs and sensory toys)
- Sanitizers
Parking & Rideshare Information
Accessible parking is available in both The Music Center Main Garage and the Walt Disney Concert Hall Garage for vehicles displaying valid, state-issued disability parking placards. If you would like to self-park in these spaces, you will find them on levels two and four in The Music Center Main Garage and on levels three and four in the Walt Disney Concert Hall Garage.
Parking is $10 on weekdays starting at 4:30 p.m. and on weekends all day. At all other times, you will pay the non-event rate of $3.50 for every 15 minutes, with a $20 maximum.The valet rate for vehicles displaying valid, state-issued disability parking placards is $10 for The Music Center Main Campus Valet and $23 in the Founders Circle Parking Garage.
Please be prepared to pay cash; credit card transactions are available at certain garage entry points or in the parking office, but cash transactions still remain optimal and will help enable a more efficient parking experience.
Rideshare is also available. The Music Center has two rideshare drop-off and pick-up points:
- 218 N. Hope St., Los Angeles, CA 90012 (adjacent to Jerry Moss Plaza)
- 111 S. Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012 (in front of Walt Disney Concert Hall)
Event Venue
The Music Center, 135 North Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, United States
