Much of the Flavor of ’84 Festival Retained for Reprise Session in ’87

What can we expect in 1987? The festival will again be international, embrace all the arts, and be at a variety of locations. Sites will include Orange County but center on downtown--a key stipulation of the CRA grant. Also, there will probably be fewer visual arts events, as Festival Director Robert J. Fitzpatrick and museum officials note the long lead time required for museum shows.

Fitzpatrick expects to bring back both Le Theatre du Soleil and Pina Bausch, for instance, and considers it a “real possibility” that the festival will commission work from Bausch as well as from other groups in the U.S and elsewhere. (In April, Mayor Bradley announced commissioning of a Los Angeles-inspired ballet that the Joffrey Ballet would possibly premiere during the 1987 festival.)

The Soleil work Fitzpatrick is currently eyeing is an epic tale called “The Terrifying and Incomplete Story of the King of Cambodia,” a contemporary work that includes a character named Henry Kissinger and that Soleil will premiere in Paris in early September. That work spans several evenings, and so does Peter Brook’s “The Mahabharata,” a dramatization of ancient India’s sacred books that Brook presented at this year’s Avignon Festival. “The impression,” says Fitzpatrick, “is as if one sat down to hear the story of the human race from some sort of ancestral grandparent.”

Fitzpatrick says he is “extremely interested” in the Brook and Soleil works, but the impresario refuses to carve any of his plans in concrete. “This is a period not for final decisions but for thinking, dreaming, looking and trying to sense how things might work together and play off one another.”