AT ARTS CENTER : JOSE FELICIANO, BURL IVES TO SING AT ‘IMAGINATION’

Singers Jose Feliciano and Burl Ives will headline the county’s second annual Imagination Celebration Internationale concert May 10 at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, organizers have nnounced. The concert will be at 3 p.m.

Sponsored by the Historical and Cultural Foundation of Orange County and the Orange County Department of Education, the concert will be composed mostly of student dancers, singers and musicians from various ethnic community groups in Orange County.

Feliciano, a longtime Orange County resident and a 1986 Grammy Award winner, will appear for the first time in the multicultural event. Ives performed at the first Internationale held a year ago at the Santa Ana High School Auditorium. The veteran folk singer and Academy Award-winning actor is involved with numerous arts education programs, especially those affiliated with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.

The Internationale will be the final program in the Imagination Celebration, an arts-for-children festival. The Orange County festival is one of 26 regional sites for the Imagination Celebration program, sponsored nationally by the Kennedy Center.

This year’s Orange County festival, which opens April 25, will offer exhibitions at major museums, as well as performing events at such locales as the South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa.

Meanwhile, Center officials confirmed that a new community group, Pan Pacific Performing Arts Inc., plans to present a concert the evening of Aug. 22. Pan Pacific spokesmen said they are hoping to raise $30,000 to stage the event, which is to include the Yip’s Children’s Chorale from Hong Kong, an opera troupe from Taiwan and student performers from several Chinese-language schools in Orange County.

The Aug. 22 concert would be the first venture for Pan Pacific, a nonprofit group of Chinese-American private citizens interested in the arts. If the group’s first venture goes well, spokesman George Cheng of San Clemente said, Pan Pacific hopes to sponsor other Asian cultural programs in the county.