Festival Reaches for the Unknown and the Expensive

Los Angeles arts goers are in for a big surprise when the 17-day Pacific-themed festival opens in September, according to Judy Mitoma, co-curator of the Los Angeles Festival.

“We’ve picked work that is very seldom brought by other people. Our programming is not competitive with any existing presenter in this city,” said Mitoma, referring to the festival’s first group of programs announced Thursday. “Nobody else can afford to do it this way. The people that we’re bringing are not famous celebrities. A lot of this is really unknown, and a lot of people couldn’t take a chance on that. They want established people with good reviews. . . .”

Mitoma, who spent the past couple of years in negotiations with various international groups selected for the festival, said that the biggest part of her job--determining the best way to present the work--is still to come.

“What is risky, however, is if we don’t present it properly and people don’t enter it and therefore they feel alienated.

“We have to find new ways to present the art so people see it in a new way--and we hope that we’ll break new ground in an area that has been ignored,” said Mitoma, noting that the usual Western tendency is to plop everything--whether originally intended for it or not--under hot lights on a proscenium stage.

One new means of presentation, Mitoma said, will be through an “Earth stage” that the festival plans to construct at Angels Gate in San Pedro, where several Pacific Island groups will perform.

“When you feel dance pressing on the Earth, you think about what’s going on in a different way than when it’s on a wooden stage. You feel the Earth move. And when you’re performing, you feel it differently too. (When groups like those chosen for the festival perform in the West) often, they will be presented in a theater and they don’t know quite who they’re dancing to. But we want a feeling of interaction and response--we want the give-and-take, the humanity of it all.”

Mitoma said that she and Festival Director Peter Sellars used “pure aesthetic choice” to select acts for the international portion of the festival: whether the work was representative of its geographic area, and what was relevant and interesting to the city of Los Angeles.

Much of the work curated by Mitoma is religious in nature, from the Aboriginal music, dance and visual arts of the Australian Mornington Islanders to the ritualism of the Korean shamans. While Mitoma admits that such spiritually based art may be foreign to some Angelenos, she hopes that such work will cause festival goers to consider new concepts.

“Our intention is to say, ‘If you look at this work, there is something here that speaks to our life in our city,’ ” she said. “Artists and spiritual leaders do not have to be different people. And it’s funny, because often our artists are spiritual leaders, but they might not be recognized as such. Maybe (the festival can make us re-examine) the role of artists in society and our definition of artists.”

Likewise, she said she hopes the festival will make Angelinos re-examine the role of art in their daily lives.

“A program like the Children of Bali (a group of 28 youngsters selected from a single village to illustrate the high level of artistry common to Balinese villages) is saying, ‘Look, this is from a village--like a neighborhood or your school--and these children play music. . . . They give back to their community.’ That’s something I wish we had more of here.” Mitoma, who is also chairwoman of the World Arts and Cultures program at UCLA, said that negotiations included spending a week on the islands of Wallis and Futuna, a French territory northeast of Fiji. There, Mitoma had to meet and ask permission to bring the 32-member music and dance company from French governmental representatives, a bishop, three separate kings and several cultural chiefs.

“You need to understand how their social networks work, you need to get permission from everyone understandable, and you have to make sure the people you see are seen in the right order,” said the 43-year-old Mitoma, who is a third-generation Japanese-American, and speaks some Japanese and Indonesian.

Mitoma said that personally, the most satisfying work she curated is the 65-member Indonesian Javanese court dancers, who have never visited the United States.

“I don’t know if this will ever, ever be possible again, because of the economics of doing this,” she said. (Festival General Manager Michael Vargas estimated a total cost of about $350,000 to transport the court dancers and their huge instruments and house and produce their performances here. Sharing the costs with the festival is the 18-month-long Festival Indonesia--which will begin during the L.A. Festival (Mitoma is an advisory board member).

But for Mitoma, who herself studied Javanese court dancing and spent almost two years in discussions to confirm the appearance of the Javanese troupe, the way in which the group’s appearance was brought about brings back “intensely emotional” memories.

“I was given audience to the Sultan Hamangkubawana of Jakarta--who was the vice president of Indonesia, a revolutionary hero and also a spiritual hero--one month before his (unexpected) death, and that was a very important moment in my life,” she said. “It was one of those moments when all the paths intersected. To have his enthusiastic support was just a tremendous moment for me.”