UCLA, Brooklyn Academy Join to Produce L.A. Fest

The 1990 Los Angeles Festival, second sequel to the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival, will incorporate a major Pacific component to run simultaneously on two coasts and be presented in partnership with UCLA and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Times has learned.

This Pacific festival-within-a-festival will be produced by Peter Sellars, the new director of the Los Angeles Festival; Pebbles Wadsworth, executive director, UCLA Center for the Arts, and Harvey Lichtenstein, president and executive producer, Brooklyn Academy of Music.

“We’ll do it bi-coastally,” Sellars said recently. “When you get all the money to get one of these (Pacific performing) groups to come all the way to America, it makes sense to set up a couple of other gigs.”

Lichtenstein confirmed the plans for the festival partnership through his staff at the academy, but emphasized that they are “very much in the formative stage.”

Wadsworth, however, said that UCLA had “made a commitment to have a Pacific Rim festival in September, 1990--to be part of the L.A. Festival--with its size and scope to be determined by the financial resources the participating organizations can raise.”

She also said that Sellars and Judy Mitoma, chairwoman of the UCLA World Arts and Cultures program, would be curators of the Pacific Rim portion of the festival.

Sellars, Lichtenstein and Mitoma were recently in Townsville, Australia, scouting performance groups and modes of presentation at the 5th Festival of Pacific Arts. (A related story will appear in Sunday Calendar.)

At the conclusion of the two-week multinational event, Sellars reiterated his determination to make the 1990 Los Angeles Festival a “real people’s festival” with a Pacific emphasis.

“I hope the 1990 Festival really responds directly to L.A.’s ethnic makeup,” he said. “We’ll go all around the edge (of the Pacific)--Asia, Latin America, North America--get the Philippines in and the black culture of the Pacific. That covers a lot of terrain and stands for a lot of our citizens.”

Sellars was concerned with the problems of properly presenting non-Western performances, emphasizing the concepts of “community interaction,” placing festival events “in the landscape,” and keeping as many of them as possible free to the public.

“We will assemble a large staff to cope with a set of demands that are going to be beyond belief,” he said.

“What’s great about a festival is that there’s room for both a mass stadium event where you get a crowd of 2,000 cheering rhythmically or a little event where a cluster of people are standing under a tree transfixed by something of otherworldly beauty.

“If we do it properly, the (1990) festival will have long-term implications for American culture,” he said, “because I think it will influence a lot of artists and audiences. . . . A large part of the public in Los Angeles that has no interest in traditional European culture will find itself really taken in by this (Pacific) material.

“It is something completely different. It has its own rules and those rules have nothing to do with Europe and the official progress of European culture.”