ARTS FESTIVALS : It’s San Francisco’s Turn : Festival 2000 celebrates cultural diversity and is seen as a “bookend” to L.A.’s recently completed arts fest

As Los Angeles winds down from its arts festival, San Francisco is gearing up to launch a 23-day extravaganza of its own.

Grandly billed as “one of the most ambitious celebrations of the arts ever held in an American city,” Festival 2000 kicks off Saturday with a gala “Sole Night” dance concert at the War Memorial Opera House, hosted by legendary choreographer Katherine Dunham and featuring the American Indian Dance Theatre, the Muntu Dance Theater of Chicago and Jelon Viera’s DanceBrazil.

Budgeted at $2.5 million, with $500,000 from the City of San Francisco, the Festival 2000 tab amounts to half what the 1990 Los Angeles Festival cost. But in its own fashion, the San Francisco event is as logistically complex and controversial as Peter Sellars’ elaborate undertaking.

Both festivals were planned around the guiding principle of “multiculturalism”--that ubiquitous buzzword for the ethnic diversity that is already a demographic fact of life in California, if not yet a social reality. But, while the Los Angeles event presented traditional art forms from “root” cultures of the Pacific Rim, Festival 2000 is commissioning new works by American artists of many backgrounds. Half the offerings are original, cross-ethnic “fusion” pieces; the remainder are imported existing works in a similar vein.

Lenwood Sloan, the ebullient director of the festival and its chief architect, views the L.A. and San Francisco events as “bookends.”

“There have always been festivals of looking back, and they’re important,” says Sloan. “But they also tend to freeze-dry cultures into dashikis and kimonos and mariachis and drums.

“We’re not doing an ethnic festival, but a presentation of futuristic pieces by artists of color,” he emphasizes. “You won’t find any exotic food booths at Festival 2000, or any exotic crafts on sale. And we’re not talking about Africa or Asia or South America--we’re talking about Chicago and Oakland and San Antonio. We’re dealing with living, kinetic expressions, and trying to create a body of exciting collaborative work that will be infused into the national culture.”

Other key players in the festival echo Sloan’s commitment to work that is contemporary and culturally eclectic. They stress that such collaborations by white, black, Asian American, Native American and Latino artists may help ameliorate the ethnic divisiveness some social critics disparage as a “New Tribalism.”

“Festival 2000 is either ahead of its time for going beyond the ‘New Tribalism,’ or it’s hopelessly out of step,” comments Kary Shulman, the director of the city’s Grants for the Arts funding agency and an instigator of the event. “I think we’re onto something important here, because I do believe the arts speak to our common humanity. At its very best that’s what this festival will demonstrate.”

“We’re looking toward the future, to remaking the ways traditions can encounter each other and result in innovation,” observes artist and educator Amalia Mesa-Bains, who sits on the festival’s board of directors. “Ethnic specificity may be a point along the way to cultural identity. But most people in this country live in a bicultural world by now. We grow up next door to each other, eat each other’s food and listen to each others’ music, and there are bound to be more and more cross-overs and partnerships.”

Few in San Francisco’s large, diverse arts community are quarreling with Festival 2000’s multicultural theme. After all, the city has been a prime example of ethnic multiplicity since 1849, when waves of Chinese, European and Hispanic immigrants converged here to join in the Gold Rush. In more recent times, San Franciscans have honored their heritage in such popular annual events as the Ethnic Dance Festival, the city’s Carnaval parade, and the Native American Film Festival.

But a lot more is riding on the aggressively pluralistic Festival 2000. For one thing, the city pumped a large sum of money into it before the recent economic dip; the event will probably not be repeated again unless it can generate substantial support elsewhere. The festival has also raised expectations among local artists that it will bring them more exposure and, perhaps, national bookings.

The festival may also forge a fruitful new partnership between San Francisco’s low-budget, multicultural arts sector and the city’s well-heeled, classical and European-oriented ballet, symphony and opera. In recent years, arts activists have criticized the city for giving these prominent companies too large a share of local arts funding. The institutions have also been attacked for inadequate ethnic representation on their boards and staffs.

“One of the hot agenda items on the table when I started organizing the festival was, ‘What is the relationship between the major institutions and multicultural arts groups?’ ” Sloan says. “I found there was a desire to talk and a mandate to engage on both sides.”

That engagement has resulted mostly in practical, behind-the-scenes help from the larger institutions. San Francisco Opera chief Lofti Mansouri and San Francisco Ballet general manager Joyce Moffatt served on the festival’s steering committee. The War Memorial Board, which governs the city’s larger arts facilities, donated use of the Opera House and Davies Symphony Hall for two events. The San Francisco Symphony gave proceeds of a pops concert with Cab Calloway to the festival effort, and the ballet and opera have, according to Sloan, “been instrumental in the design and production of the opening night concert.”

Direct artistic involvement was not feasible, says Sloan, because season calendars had already been set two years ago. But he contends that groundwork has been laid for the future.

Amid the high hopes, though, serious questions have been raised about Sloan’s grandiose festival design, the effectiveness of his 18-member administrative and production staff, and the organization’s handling of a serious budget crisis last spring.

One frequently heard concern is that the festival’s marketing campaign is too little, too late. A key participant (who asked not to be identified) complained, “The vision is great, but I wonder if the staff is capable of bringing the whole thing off. The promotion has been really mismanaged.” And recently the music critic of the San Francisco Examiner groused in print about the event’s “tardy publicity campaign” and its “cluttered and complicated” calendar of events--a charge also leveled at the L.A. Festival for its confusing program.

Sloan bristles when these criticisms are raised. He insists the festival will sell the 60,000 tickets it must to break even. And he points to the television public service announcements, the several million Safeway shopping bags emblazoned with the Festival 2000 logo, and the posters on city buses as proof that word is getting out.

But Sloan does not deny that over 18 months of planning he has endured some tough stretches and a few run-ins with the city’s highly politicized arts community. That, he contends, was inevitable in a project of this scope.

“I’ve learned from Peter Sellars in L.A., and from Michelle Smith, who directs the National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta, about the tightrope you walk when you try to do something that’s grounded in your community but also of national significance,” Sloan remarks. “It’s a tightrope made tighter by lack of funds.”

The financial outlook for Festival 2000 seemed rosy in 1988, when Grants for the Arts catalyzed the event with a $500,000 infusion. The money came out of the 12.5% portion of the city’s Hotel Tax Fund that is distributed each year to local cultural institutions, parades and festivals.

The notion of presenting a major multicultural showcase, says Shulman, “bubbled up simultaneously from several sources. It just seemed to all of us that it was the right concept at the right time for this city.”

Sloan came aboard in January of 1989 to head the newly formed, nonprofit festival organization. Though based at the time in New York, he was no stranger to Northern California. While Jerry Brown was governor, Sloan served as deputy director of the California Arts Council and helped organize CAC’s State/Local Partnership program. He headed East to work as a consultant for the National Endowment for the Arts and to produce a festival of black dance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

“We felt Leni had the kind of background and experience we needed to bring this thing off,” Shulman recalls. “We left the shaping of the artistic concept up to him. When you hire an impresario, you need to trust that person and their vision.”

Sloan’s vision of new, hybrid works, initiated by local and out-of-town artists of color and produced with future touring in mind, didn’t please everyone.

“Jewish and Irish arts groups in the city got mad at me, saying ‘We’re ethnic too,’ ” Sloan reports. “Some black and Chicano artists were angry because we didn’t just automatically fund them. My answer was always that this is not an ethnic event, but a contemporary festival of fusion work. I don’t see ‘multicultural’ as a term of entitlement, but as a term of inclusion.”

Sloan’s national call for commission ideas generated 300 proposals. A jury of artists then selected 23 to receive awards of up to $40,000. Some of the more expensive productions--Urban Bush Woman’s “Praise House,” the Balinese-American piece “Body Tjak”--were planned as joint ventures with presenters from outside the area, including the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Festival of Indonesia. Many of the other events are co-productions with Bay Area venues.

Last September, Festival 2000 unveiled its plans to the public at a Union Square rally with Mayor Art Agnos on hand. A few weeks later came the severe earthquake that rocked the Bay Area. The festival had already received major gifts from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trust, San Francisco Foundation and other sources. But $600,000 in promised corporate contributions dried up in the aftermath of the quake.

“The last quivers hit us,” Sloan says, “because economically the Bay Area didn’t have a fourth quarter last year. Every arts organization in the city had to cut back, and so did we.”

But it wasn’t until May that the festival’s board of directors decided to trim $500,000 from the budget by eliminating 14 commissioned projects.

“This was not something we did lightly,” says Fran Streets, the board president. “We spent a great deal of time soul-searching.”

That was no comfort to the nine local arts groups who suddenly received letters rescinding their commissions; many had begun working and incurring expenses. Angered by the lack of warning and other communication problems, they swiftly demanded a meeting with Sloan and festival staffers. That encounter, recalls an observer, “was very tense but ultimately productive.” In the end all but three of the canceled commissions were restored, though at much-reduced levels.

“Controversies over empowerment and turf are ongoing issues, and that’s nothing new,” comments Cowell Theatre director Bob Martin, the presenter of several festival events. “What excites me is the quality of artists involved. I think there’s going to be some really outstanding work.”

As the festival appraoches, Sloan prefers to take a more philosophical overview. “A lot of people use your turnstile as the yardstick of success,” he suggests. “But one of the reasons I respect Peter Sellers so much is because he knew that a festival is a dividend project--and the dividends may come six months or even a year later. A festival is a catalytic agent. It creates new ways to talk, new schools of expression. You can’t weigh it in pound for pound. For me, the real dividend will come after the festival, when the art work goes out there to the rest of America and has an impact on the body culture.”