Sellars Shaping Up L.A. Fest With Eye on the Pacific Rim

For more than a year and a half, Peter Sellars has deliberately kept his plans for the biennial arts festival under wraps. He said he needed to “shut down and look inward for a while.”

Now Los Angeles Festival 1990--the Pacific Rim festival--has begun to surface.

According to the 31-year-old director, the festival--spanning the first three weekends and first two weeks of September--promises to be quite different from the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival and the Los Angeles Festival of 1987. Both previous festivals were run by Robert Fitzpatrick, who went on to become president of Euro Disneyland in Paris.

While these two festivals essentially were solo voyages of a single impresario, Sellars insists he wants to shape a more collaborative effort, mixing artists and companies from Asia, Latin America and the Pacific with artists and groups from Los Angeles.

“The basic hope with this festival is to encourage ownership, to have the people of Los Angeles feel that it’s their festival, in their neighborhoods, and they’re participating,” Sellars said recently as he sat in the downtown Embassy Theatre, downstairs from festival headquarters.

Perhaps Cambodian dancers from Phnom Penh, the National Dance Company of Kampuchea (formerly the Royal Khmer Dancers), says Judith Luther, 49, the festival’s executive director, could be combined “if political conditions allow” on a program with a pin peat orchestral classical Cambodian music group from Long Beach.

Sellars’ vision encompasses economic realities and a political awareness. The 1990 festival will have a considerably shrunken budget from the $11-million, 10-week Olympic festival and the $5.8-million, 3 1/2-week 1987 event. Last time, festival officials had to defend their artistic choices to a City Council committee because various council members charged there was not enough local minority participation.

At best, festival officials project a $4-million budget--with $1.8 million in confirmed pledges. However, there are now some important new players. For the first time the Japanese business community in the Los Angeles Basin, through the efforts of Mayor Tom Bradley, has become a major participant in festival fund raising.

Taking over from Toshio Nagamura, former chairman of California First Bank here (a subsidiary of the Bank of Tokyo) who returned to Japan due to illness, Yukiyasu Togo, president and CEO of Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A. Inc., is pledging to match a targeted $2 million from American corporations, government sources and individuals.

Confirmed American pledges currently add up to $1.1 million, including $300,000 from the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency, $250,000 each from Times Mirror Co. and Occidental Petroleum, and $125,000 from AT&T.; Confirmed Japanese pledges--topped by $100,000 each from California First, Toyota, Ohbayashi, American Honda and Sogo Shosha Group, a 10-company conglomerate--total $720,000.

Maureen Kindel, the festival’s board chairman, notes that fund-raising proposals are now being prepared in Japanese.

Next month Togo will bring the festival matter to the 500 leaders of Japanese businesses who belong to the Japan Business Assn., sort of the local Japanese Chamber of Commerce.

Kindel indicated she does not want to see the festival budget go over $4 million. At the start of the year there were serious internal discussions about abandoning the festival altogether. However, the board voted to retain the festival and decided upon a three-festival commitment for 1990, 1992 and 1994. Sellars and Luther see themselves in a 10-year commitment.

The lowered budget, at least one-third less than the 1987 festival, is a result of several factors: loss of a one-time-only $2-million grant from the Amateur Athletic Foundation, part of the surplus from the Games; $700,000 less than the $1 million which the redevelopment agency gave last time; and the fact that Sellars is not anticipating any profit from ticket sales.

In 1987 the festival took in $1.4 million in ticket sales and other earned income. This time Sellars says flatly: “I’m ignoring it. The budgets we are preparing do not involve earned income. The amount of money it takes to sell tickets is basically the same amount of money it takes to bring money in.”

Moreover, there will be a considerable number of free outdoor events in the late afternoon to early evening hours. “I want people in this city to feel they own their culture, and to have this a gift to the people of Los Angeles.”

To stretch the budget and “give bicoastal exposure to a number of important companies,” noted Sellars, the festival, UCLA and the Brooklyn Academy of Music will collaborate on major festival events. Discussions are also under way with UCLA to defray housing costs by establishing Olympic-type artist villages on campus. Other collaborations will involve Los Angeles community groups.

And in association with the festival, the Kennedy Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Houston Grand Opera, the Netherlands Opera and the Los Angeles Music Center Opera will present for the first time here six performances of “Nixon in China,” the John Adams opera developed and directed by Sellars.

Before the massacre of student demonstrators in China, Sellars had been talking about bringing new works by Chinese film makers. He also spoke about bringing in some form of the Beijing Opera, the highly stylized traditional work that is different from Western opera, but then he noted that “in fact the most cutting-edge work is taking place in the provinces. What’s really happening in China is that the film industry is just taking off. A number of these films are stupendous. There’s a new generation of Chinese film directors, and that’s the new China. . . .”

Last week Sellars said that while it’s “too early to know in which direction things are moving,” festival officials, including Judy Mitoma, chair of the World Arts and Cultures Program at UCLA and a volunteer festival consultant, were “very intensively” discussing China programming. “It’s very important that what we bring from China is a cultural expression that has historical context of what we are living through. And film is one of the most powerful mediums for generating man’s consciousness. In China now, all work has political context.”

Sellars declines to name Pacific Rim groups whose contracts are being negotiated. But he says that “a lot of the work will be presented for the first time in the West. It’s not something that if you went to the Vienna Festival or the Adelaide Festival or the Edinburgh Festival you could see. And it will really be quite startling.”

Artists will come from the western edge of Latin America, the countries that border the Pacific, Sellars said. Artists will come from Australia, Papua New Guinea and the Pacific islands; Vietnam, Cambodia and Southeast Asia; Japan, the Philippines and Korea.

“I really want to get a Yakut shaman who is a kind of healer, holy person, medicine man kind of figure from the Siberian coast,” Sellars said. “The Yakut people live on that edge there. We’ll have work from the Pacific Northwest, Canada, Alaska, from San Francisco and of course, Los Angeles. And really this whole festival is about the Pacific. What is this axis?”

International bookings currently under consideration, discloses a key festival source, include an Australian aboriginal music and dance group; a Korean farmers dance and music group; Upik Eskimo dance and music; Chilean street theater; a Vietnamese water puppet troupe who work out of colored ponds with puppetry done behind wreaths and plants (the source said Echo Park or MacArthur Park would be ideal); the all-women’s Takarazuka revue from Japan, which blends East and West and does its own version of “Guys and Dolls.”

In the non-public stage of the 1990 festival, Sellars held a pair of meetings at UCLA with scholars from Asia and Latin America. He has met with education officials in an effort to bring Pacific cultures into the Los Angeles Unified School District and county schools beginning in January. “The great dream,” says Sellars, “is that when the festival arrives, the kids will be able to take their parents and explain it to them.”