Festival at Japan American Culture Center Proves a Sizzling Success

At 1 p.m. Sunday, there wasn’t enough breeze to budge the balloon arches that festooned the plaza at the Japan American Culture Center in downtown Los Angeles.

It was hot outdoors, verging on beastly. And Jack Shakely, director of the California Community Foundation, was worried.

The free, multicultural festival scheduled from 1 to 5 p.m. was to be a 75th birthday party for the CCF, which has endowments of $90 million and gives away $10 million each year to Californians involved in the arts, education, environment, health, human services and public affairs. But what if nobody came?

Dressed for the tropics in navy polo shirt and khaki shorts, Shakeley surveyed the near-empty plaza with food tents ready to serve those not yet there, and chairs set up in front of an empty outdoor stage. He explained that this was CCF’s first attempt at a multicultural street festival of the arts, and “it will probably be our last.”

By 3 p.m. he had changed his tune. And by 5, with the plaza filled, he thought maybe this should be an annual affair.

Shakely’s expertise as head of the under-publicized foundation is, as he puts it, “to know what the community needs and to invest in those things.” And what the community needs, it became apparent on Sunday, is a festival where people can congregate, free of charge, to celebrate the cultural diversity and creative energies of Los Angeles’ most talented new artists. Actors, dancers, poets, musicians, composers and performance artists of many stripes offered their creations to an audience which responded with joy and gratitude.

All who entertained were recipients of grants from the CCF. The impassioned monologue of actor Roger G. Smith was an excerpt from a work in progress about a self-educated slave, “Frederick Douglass Now.” It will be presented at the Inner City Cultural Foundation later this year, with help from a CCF grant. (Smith, who grew up in the Crenshaw area of Los Angeles, played the stuttering Smiley in Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing.”)

Also on the outdoor stage were a variety of ethnic dance troupes (Peruvian, Persian, African, Croation), including a rousing crowd pleaser, Trinidadian limbo dancer Perry Hernandez. All now live and work in California.

As food lines lengthened and outdoor action continued, performances of a more delicate nature took place in the air-conditioned Japan America Theater that opens onto the plaza. Actor-writer Michael Kearns presented excerpts from his solo performance piece, “more intimacies,” in which he portrays a priest with AIDS.

Rhapsody in Taps tap-danced to jazz; The Theatre Workers Project presented seven Latino immigrant workers never on stage before, in a piece focusing on their lives and aspirations. Cold Tofu (a comedy improvisation group), the Lula Washington/Los Angeles Contemporary Dance Theater and the Koto String Society were among other groups who performed indoors.

The crowd eventually swelled to between 1,000 and 3,000 people; civilized people who didn’t push, shout or litter and many of whom said they’d like to come back if the event were held again.

“I envisioned 500,000 people here, fighting for 300 parking places. But it wasn’t like that at all,” said Michelle deLude, a writer for the auto club. Lois Arkin didn’t worry about parking, because she pedaled downtown to the festival on her bicycle. Arkin loved the entertainment and food, she said, but worried that the “elegant” clear plastic plates on which it was served might not be recycled.