FESTIVAL ’90 : Green Festival Featuring Earth Tones : Environment: Ecology is the unifying theme in a series of events that begin today in the largest single-theme grouping in the Open Festival.

Using art to address ecology is the unifying theme of this year’s Green Festival, an environmentally focused segment of the Open Festival, taking place during the next three weeks in locations from San Pedro to the San Fernando Valley.

Fourteen organizations conducting 18 events are scheduled for the festival, which began with “Celia: High Priestess of Shimkin” at the Carpet Company Stage in Los Angeles last weekend. Several events, scheduled for this weekend, will kick the Green Festival into high gear.

A thread of eco-consciousness links performances encompassing theater, performance art, music, video and children’s events into what Open Festival Director Aaron Paley calls a “self-selecting” festival.

Paley says the Green Festival, which he says is the largest single-theme grouping in the Open Festival, stemmed from a series of Open Festival applications he received last fall that independently centered on environmental issues.

“We thought these groups under one umbrella would make each a lot stronger and we put out a newsletter to see if there was any interest,” Paley said. “That was the catalyst. The groups took it from there. Earth Day gave a lot of impetus to artists who were not involved or marginally involved with Earth Day.”

According to Paley, only three of the events, “Family Day at TreePeople,” “Urbanites Evolve!” and the “Heal the Earth: Music and Arts Festival,” present visual art, with most artists opting for theatrical and family oriented acts.

A majority of acts are held outdoors, and some sites have presented challenges for groups adapting their theater pieces to the outdoors.

“We work collaboratively with the site,” said Hallowed Aire Ritual Players member Anusia Pomaska, 44, of the group’s “. . . Out of the River, She . . .” performance.

Scheduled Sept. 8 and 9 on the Los Angeles River, the work was last performed in March, but the script has changed to accommodate changes in the setting since then.

“The part of the river we work with is the only part that doesn’t have a concrete bed, because the water table is consistently high. . . . The foliage and vegetation there are almost tropical, and, because of the growth, it’s difficult to get on some of the islands. . . . The river dictates how the piece will go.”

“We feel the river is the star of the piece.”

Jennie Webb, 28, managing director of the Rough Theatre, part of the “Urbanites Evolve!” collective, said the presentations, which will be altered on each of the four sites where they are performed, are altered as a matter of principle.

The three acts of their dark comedy “Green House,” will move from site to site around the “overgrown” Runyon Canyon for performances Sept. 15 and 16 but will “move in a direct linear push toward the end” down a concrete trench when the piece is performed at a mortar shell bunker at San Pedro’s Angels Gate on Sept. 1 and 2.

Laura Lee Coles is applying a similar philosophy to man-made terrain. Coles, 37, a self-proclaimed “trash artist” who has built art from refuse since 1977, used the now-defunct Toyon Canyon Landfill as the setting for the Trash Lizards show Sept. 8 and 9.

Inspired by Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock,” Coles calls a tiered garbage mountain on the landfill site “as ugly as it is awesome.” The landfill will provide the setting for a children’s walk-through play about a character named the Junk Witch Goblin.

One nonprofit environmental organization, TreePeople, became involved in an effort to extend their educational program, which in-school coordinator Julie Anne Taylor, 24, says teaches 100,000 children “environmental leadership” each year through school visits and operation of their Coldwater Creek Park in Beverly Hills. Rather than adapting to their natural environments to shape their two events, TreePeople shaped their “Family Day at TreePeople,” Sept. 8 at Coldwater, from each member’s educational talents.

Some of the events go beyond the save-the-Earth message and attach a mystic or mythological quality to them. “Celia: High Priestess of Shimkin,” according to director Sean Fenton, 31, relies on “Mayan legends with a heavy dose of ‘60s L.A. television.”

The “Urbanites Evolve!” performances include Laughter Walking, a group of American Indian “sacred clowns.”

The “Heal the Earth” festival will include, according to director John Tibayan, 44, a “peace meditation to direct healing energy to the Mideast.”

”. . . Out of the River, She . . .” will contain a ritualistic tone--Pomaska said of the Hallowed Aire group, “We’re not showmen, we’re shaman.”

Green Festival events run through Sept. 16. Information: (213) 315-9444.