Pacific-Themed L.A. Fest Has 72 Programs, 300 Performers : Arts: Director Peter Sellars promises more participants before September, despite only $2.9 million in pledges for a $4.9-million budget.

“Los Angeles is going to be the largest showcase of international performing and creative artistry . . . ever,” proclaimed Mayor Tom Bradley on Thursday at a downtown press conference unveiling the first list of programs to be included in the Los Angeles Festival.

Announced were 72 programs of dance, music, visual art, theater, poetry, film, video and performance art, including 14 international groups comprised of nearly 300 performers.

Festival director Peter Sellars noted, however, that Thursday’s announcement of programs was only a partial one for the Pacific-themed festival, which is scheduled for Sept. 1-17.

“We will have a couple more announcements of major programs on the way as negotiations are completed and the money is raised,” Sellars said. He refused to say, however, when he would make the next announcement of programming for the festival, which has yet to come up with a final version of its logo.

More than $2.9 million in pledges has now been received toward a $4.9-million total budget, $1 million less than the 1987 L.A. Festival, which had 352 artists representing 31 companies and 21 nations.

Included in the announcement were about two dozen film and video programs by local, national and international artists, including a weeklong Latin American Film Festival and more than 20 hours of KCET (Channel 28) broadcasts including documentaries, feature films and performance works.

Also announced were nearly 40 local projects, which festival executive director Judith Luther said represented $700,000 worth of programming.

Included in the local works are marimba, gospel and jazz groups, music and dance programs by members of Los Angeles’ Pacific Island communities, the restoration of murals by artists Barbara Carrasco and Willie Herron, an anthology of poetry and fiction by Los Angeles writers and a “micro opera” led by artist Daniel Martinez in collaboration with playwright Harry Gamboa, composer Vinsula, lighting designer Aubrey Wilson and visual artist Diane Gamboa.

Represented in the heavily dance oriented international component are groups from Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, the islands of Wallis and Futuna, Australia and Chile, in addition to a group of harp players from several Latin and South American nations. Also considered part of the international programming are two groups of Native American musicians and dancers from California, Inupiat Eskimo dancers and musicians from Alaska, and traditional hula kahiko dancers from Hawaii.

While Thursday’s announcement in most cases did not include venues for individual programs, Sellars did list 38 confirmed sites for festival programs, including such outdoor locales as Griffith Park, Angels Gate/Point Fermin Park and the African Marketplace at Kenneth Hahn Park; and such usual indoor venues as Highways performance space in Santa Monica, the Woman’s Building, Hollywood Bowl and Japan America Theater.

No announcements were made of programming for the connected Open Festival, which will be open to local artists not selected for the L.A. Festival. Those performers, while receiving promotional help from the festival, will be required to produce their own shows.

The Highlights

Program highlights, according to Calendar writers, of the festival as announced Thursday:

VISUAL ARTS--This component of the festival is not huge but includes some promising exhibitions of fine arts, artist’s video and design.

Among enticing solo exhibitions are Cal State Long Beach’s presentation of Gu Wen Da, a Chinese artist who lives in New York. He attacks traditional Asian ideas of harmonic art by distorting calligraphic characters to create large-scale room installations.

Veteran Bay Area painter Raymond Saunders will show affectionate jazz-beat painting that incorporates aspects of Abstract Expressionism with funky collage and popular imagery at Santa Monica City College’s gallery.

The Long Beach Museum of Art will bring Seattle artist Norman Lundin to town with soft-focus poetic interiors and landscapes that catch the dissolving light of the Pacific Northwest.

Guerrilla artist Robbie Conal, known for his outlaw street-poster political satires, will come indoors for a paradoxical “major retrospective” at the Pasadena Armory for the Arts.

Respected video artist Bill Viola will make a festival-commissioned piece on a theme of personal isolation and collective revelation at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.

Interesting group exhibitions include UCLA’s survey of Latino visual art in the Wight Gallery’s “CARA: Chicano Art and Resistance 1965-1985.” The show will echo in Loyola Marymount’s “Chicana Art in Los Angeles.” The legendary refinement and visual clout of Japanese graphic design will materialize at the Japan American Cultural and Community Center in a 50-year retrospective.

THEATER--As promised, very little theater will be featured in the L.A. Festival, and the highlight may well be the appearance of the Bread and Puppet Theatre.

Rarely seen in the Southland, this collective combines pageantry, community involvement and giant puppets to make unabashedly political statements.

Beyond this event, what we’ll get is mostly new and untested. Mixed disciplines and multimedia performance appear to be the order of the festival.

Announced offerings include “The Undead,” an interdisciplinary, collaborative work by Peter C. Brosius (of the Mark Taper Forum’s Improvisational Theater Project), Dennis Cooper and Ishmael Houston Jones, dwelling on issues of identity and interaction among gay teen-agers.

“The Chinese Chess Piece” is a multimedia performance work by Los Angeles artist May Sun to be staged in an outdoor park by her husband Guy Giarrizzo and based on chess strategies intertwined with the lives of Chinese and Chinese-American women.

Finally, at Highways, the Los Angeles Poverty Department, a theater that grew out of a workshop for the homeless, will recycle an older piece from its trunk. “Jupiter 35” deals with what happens spiritually to a man crippled by a fall out of a window during a crack deal.

PERFORMANCE ART--Performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena won a 1989 Bessie (N.Y. Dance and Performance) Award for his multicultural perspective as a “border artist” exploring the intersection of languages and traditions. For the L.A. Festival, he is creating a new piece in which he’ll dismantle ethnic stereotypes and suggest a new cultural mythology for North America.

Also seen during the 1987 L.A. Festival, Rachel Rosenthal will create a multimedia work about the time, 250 million years ago, when the Earth was a single continental mass surrounded by water. Dealing with the separation and migration of cultures, Rosenthal’s “Pangean Dreams” will be presented at the Santa Monica Museum.

DANCE--Under the auspices of Festival Indonesia, three programs of Central Javanese court music, dance and puppetry will provide local audiences with an extended look at performance traditions known the world over for their elegance. The late Sultan Hamangkubawana IX agreed to send his sacred gamelan (orchestra) and a complete retinue of dancers and puppeteers (65 performers in all) on their first visit to the United States.

One evening of dance-drama is devoted to the final episodes of “Mahabharata,” the great Hindu epic that was presented in a three-part English version during the 1987 L.A. Festival. Another evening will be shared by two Javanese dance forms, and the final program belongs to shadow puppetry.

Accompanied by didjeridus, sticks, boomerangs and the human voice, 14 Australian aboriginal dancers from Mornington Island will offer rare glimpses of an ancient culture famed for great boldness of design and purity of expression. Mornington Island is in an area between Queensland and the Northern Territory--and the dance style there is known for its nervous, quivering intensity.

Because Pacific Island dancers rarely tour, the visit by a 32-member company from the Polynesian islands of Wallis and Futuna (a territory of France) is one of the major novelties of the L.A. Festival. The style of the dancing has been noted for its lush, almost lyrical energy flow.

MUSIC--John Adams dominates--no, is --the major music component of the festival. The efforts of that privileged composer aside, there will be little if any contemporary, non-traditional music at the festival.

With the original cast, directed by Sellars, Music Center Opera opens the West Coast premiere of Adams’ “Nixon in China”--thoroughly rooted in European grand opera--Sept. 11, with additional performances Sept. 14, 16, 29 and Oct. 7.

Only one performance of the feature-length silent film, “The Cabinet of Dr. Ramirez,” at the Hollywood Bowl, is planned, competing with the “Nixon in China” opening Sept. 11. “Dr. Ramirez” stars members of the New York-based Wooster Group and is directed by Sellars. The accompaniment will be a performance of Adams’ “Harmonielehre”--with its conscious evocation of Schoenberg and Viennese Expressionism--by the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Local and Latin American harpists and marimba groups will be presented at parks. Two local groups of taiko drummers will also be presented outdoors, along with international percussion groups including kulintang ensembles from the Philippines.

FILM/VIDEO--Besides a tribute to Akira Kurosawa, on the tentative schedule are mini-retrospectives for the Japanese master’s colleague, Kon Ichikawa (“Fires on the Plain” and “The Makioka Sisters”), and his two legendary contemporaries, Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi.

The Japanese section is probably the most impressive of the lineup, but there are also strong retrospectives for Mexico’s Arturo Ripstein and Jaime Humberto Hermosillo--two of Latin America’s most offbeat and accomplished film makers--and for the Philippines’ iconoclastic Lino Brocka.

Then there are the filmmakers even less known here: Bolivia’s Jorge (“Blood of the Condor”) Sanjines, China’s Dai Sijie, Korea’s Im Kwon Thek, Colombia’s Sergio Cabrera and Thailand’s Prince Chatri Chalerm Yukol--whose film, “The Elephant Keeper” is an expose on illegal teak logging.

Any or all might prove major discoveries. But certainly the director whose work seems to hold the greatest promise is Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-Hsien, whose 1989 “City of Sadness,” about the pro-democracy turbulence in 1947 Taiwan--won great acclaim and the Golden Lion at the 1989 Venice Film Festival--and who will reportedly be represented by eight films, including “Sadness.”

Contributing to this report were William Wilson, Sylvie Drake, Lewis Segal, Michael Wilmington and John Henken.