Officials Are Already Gearing Up for the ’93 Program : Festival: Organizers have set a January conference to critique this year’s event and get artists’ input on what to do next.

With the curtain barely lowered on the 1990 Los Angeles Festival, organizers are already looking ahead to the next L.A. Festival in 1993. The first step in that long-range planning is “New Geographies of Performance,” a conference and debriefing of sorts scheduled for Jan. 10-13.

“The idea is to examine the festival from some point of perspective a few months down the road and examine the direction that future festivals might go,” said Norman Frisch, the festival’s associate director. “But we won’t just focus on the L.A. Festival, we’ll also examine other festivals and attempt to link this festival with other events in other nations around the world.”

About 75 arts figures--from local artists and producers to scholars and organizers of such programs as the Smithsonian Institution’s annual Folk Life Festival, London’s International Festival of Theatre and Montreal’s Festival Des Ameriques--have been invited to the conference, which is being organized by the L.A. Festival, the Getty Center and UCLA’s World Arts and Culture Program.

About 50 invitees were in Los Angeles during the festival to attend, observe and critique events, Frisch said. Another 50 or so local artists and co-presenters who were directly involved in the festival will also be invited to the conference, which organizers hope will be attended by 50 to 100 people who can “help shape the identity of the festival down the road.”

While the agenda has not been set, Frisch said conference sessions will focus on curatorial and cultural issues as well as problems encountered by the festival, previously unrecognized programming areas explored by the festival and critiques of the festival’s presenting structure.

Some of the event’s meetings will be open to the public, he said.

“These discussions will be taken into context with other conversations we’ll be having with people over the next two years in formulating the next festival,” Frisch said. “These people haven’t been given any authority . . . but the conference is really a planning tool toward ’93.”