FESTIVAL ’90 : Firing New Salvo in Cultural Battle : Stage: Multimedia artist Daniel Martinez masterminds a huge collaboration to create the urban epic ‘Ignore the Dents.’ He calls it ‘an opera for people who hate opera.’

Within earshot of the massive freeway interchange that runs like a fissure through East Los Angeles and separates that Latino community from downtown, Daniel Martinez’s windowless industrial-zone studio is filled with the workaday detritus of the multimedia artist.

On the north wall is a stark image of a skull against a yellow and red background. Sketches, half-finished works and graphics materials seem to ooze out of every corner. It’s a work-crazed environment, and filling the air is the radio voice of President Bush, conducting a press conference on the Persian Gulf crisis.

Talk of a foreign war doesn’t seem to faze Martinez. Recalling how he and his Chicano friends experienced police beatings and invasion of privacy, as well as dragnet operations that would shut down their neighborhood streets, he says, “We’ve been at war all the time. Since my childhood, I’ve been in the middle of a cultural war.”

Now, the 32-year-old Martinez has decided to take the offensive, translate that war into an epic about his city and time (subtitled “a micro-urban opera”) and call it “Ignore the Dents.” The fireworks will happen this Friday and Saturday at the Million Dollar Theatre.

The grand old movie palace on Broadway is a theater Martinez, best-known as a maker of large installations that mix media and explore themes of freedom and totalitarianism, has found an attractive site for some time. He says that he needs the theater’s size to contain what he calls “an opera for people who hate opera.”

It also may be opera for people who love art shows that bring together many forms and sensibilities. As mastermind behind the project--nine months in the making--director Martinez called on the services of Harry Gamboa Jr. (script), VinZula Kara (music), Patricia Pretzinger (choreography), Paul Chavez (sound), Aubrey Wilson (set and light design), Diane Gamboa (costumes and props), Erica Bornstein (assistant director), Liz Young (lobby and theater design) and Gibran and Jim Evans (graphic design).

“I call us ‘The Dents,’ and we’re going to remain a group until the millennium,” Martinez vowed. All of them are rising or established figures in the art world, their individual contributions meant to both stand alone and blend into the whole “Dents” performance.

“Diane has made variations on the kind of paper costumes which she’s exhibited before,” said Martinez. “Liz’s work inside the Million Dollar really is an installation, a well as an entry into the world of the piece. Gibran and Jim have designed a program (over 80 pages, but kept to an affordable $3) that’s a work of art in itself.

“This was a chance to bring 10 minds together. The festival provided us (with a commission) a crack in the door. Now that we’re in, we’ll blow up the city,” insisted the wiry, intense Martinez.

With so many combined visions, this can sound like the Installation/Performance That Ate L.A. But Martinez, in conversation, is always referring to what he feels are the foundation blocks of “Ignore the Dents”: Harry Gamboa’s text, Kara’s score, and Martinez’s own aesthetic passion for Dadaism, Futurism and Situationism.

“This is an intellectual spectacle, not an entertainment. But Harry’s writing keeps it funny.”

The work, though, wasn’t so funny when “we met for a month, but couldn’t settle on any ideas.”

Gamboa recalled that when they did settle on the title, “things came together.” Martinez, noting how their favorite pastime is regaling each other with stories, set his old pal free to come up with stories, rather than the libretti opera normally requires.

Harry delivered: a solo piece about a dying man in an electric chair (played by Manazar Gamboa, spiritual godfather to Martinez’s Latino artist peers); a tale about a scam; “The Atlas Aria,” about the Earth spinning out of orbit; “The Asphalt Aria,” to be sung by opera singers Charles Lane, Luz Maria Garcia and Andrew Koch; a story of a photographer facing censorship, and one about a young homeless man who goes over the edge.

And more. “My deal with Harry was simple,” Martinez revealed. “I trusted him to write whatever he wanted, and he trusted me to direct them however I wanted.”

Kara, who crafts a personal music/sound style called “Popkret” ( musique concrete and pop), read Harry’s pieces and researched opera history. Kara and Martinez eventually structured a 13-part form--each part both a story and a variation on an opera composer, from Monteverdi, through Bach, Verdi, Wagner and Philip Glass.

“This is performance art,” explained Martinez, “since the show won’t come together until Friday night. I see it as one big show, with a break between nights.” The live element will be spiced by Kara’s own music samplings, a live ensemble, and Martinez acting as stage manager, moving scenes on and off as he sees fit.

“Friends ask me if I’m afraid of doing this. But if I have an idea, I just do it.” Another recently completed Martinez idea was a design for a future Metro Rail station. “I have my father in me,” he said. “He helped design the first lunar satellite. He wasn’t a math wiz, but he had the right instincts.

“I know the street. It’s a place of human drama. People try to forget about it, so we’re gonna bring it to them.”