Reaching Out--New Audiences, New Artists : Arts: CalArts builds a bridge to reach the inner city, nurturing talent in a community outreach program. Both sides say they benefit.

Sporting a gray fedora and a smile that speaks love’s labor, Mark Shelby rocks back and forth with his bass--fingers deftly traveling along its frets and strings, drawing out the instrument’s sonorous notes. Playing at the Watts Towers Arts Center in a jazz quartet, Shelby is about to get the opportunity to turn his labor of love into a full-time passion.

The concert ends and the 25-year-old bassist is awarded a one-year scholarship named after Charles Mingus to study jazz at the California Institute of the Arts. The jazz faculty believe that Shelby--who is completing a degree in electrical engineering at Cal Poly--is so talented that he will bring as much to the idiom of jazz at CalArts as he will take away.

The award, presented last month, is related to a new program initiated by CalArts, whose aims are the mutual enhancement of art, music, and theater through partnerships that will join CalArts faculty and students to community-based art centers and inner-city secondary schools.

The ongoing three-year program, Community Arts Partnership, is supported by more than $1 million in grants, the majority of which was provided by the Lila-Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund. (The Mingus scholarship is funded separately by the Irvine Co.)

CalArts currently nurtures relationships with three community art centers in Los Angeles--Watts Towers Arts Center, Plaza de la Raza and the Social and Public Art Resource Center. (The resource center’s program begins this summer.)

CalArts president Steven Lavine says of the partnership: “In the concrete, it is a set of programs in which CalArts students work with younger students under the guidance of our faculty and with the staff of the community arts centers. We wanted to make new links with artists and community-based arts organizations in L.A. around the issue of how are we educating the next generation of artists.

“What we are trying to do is help pre-college students in Los Angeles get the training in the arts that might lead them to pursue professional (arts) careers, give our students a chance to work in community settings against the cultural and social background of this real city, and make (arts education) resources go further to reach people more effectively.”

Gemma Sandoval, executive director of Plaza de la Raza, adds: “In another way, I think that the young people from CalArts are getting a much more rounded picture of what the Los Angeles community looks like in terms of our diversity. I guess we couldn’t have done it without CalArts and they couldn’t have done it without the Plaza.”

As part of the jazz program, CalArts music students and faculty performed twice at local high schools and community arts centers last fall, then invited students and local musicians to participate in intensive musical workshops. Later, young musicians and CalArts musicians played together in concerts at community centers, schools and at CalArts.

James Newton, jazz flutist, composer and member of the jazz faculty at CalArts, said: “It’s phenomenal that an institution like this is reaching out so far. What CalArts has done is build a bridge to keep the (jazz) culture alive. There is nothing more promising than our youth and we want to save them and give them opportunities to get into an environment where they can be supported and have a future as an artist. I came from a poorer part of town and I had a music teacher tell me that I would never make it because I couldn’t read music when I left high school. I’ve toured Europe now about 50 times. Maybe we can help some of these youth get the chance to make it.”

Watts Towers Arts Center is bolstering its video library--the product of a basic video production and advanced documentary workshop taught to Markham Junior High School students by CalArts faculty and students. While recording community history, the neophyte technicians have made their own history as the center’s youngest documentarians.

“What we are trying to do is document things that go on in the community and put it in the library, so we will be able to go back to it,” explained Diane Hall, community coordinator for the arts center video program. “I think that it gives them the chance to see that they might have a future in film or art. We let the kids pick what they want to do. They filmed some break dancers at Markham Junior High, they filmed an art exhibit in one of the (Watts Towers) galleries, they interviewed an oral historian who is also a collector of all different types of woodwind, string and drum instruments, and they interviewed (Watts residents) Harmonica Fats and his wife, Johnnie Tillmon Blackston.”

Meeting weekly for two hours of training by CalArts students and faculty, 13 Markham Junior High School students have been learning the craft by creating a final comprehensive film, “Watts Through the Eyes of Markham Junior High School.” The youngsters observed the editing process at CalArts facilities, where CalArts students made essential cuts and splices, Hall said.

Part of the Watts video project includes the compilation of about 10 hours of archival footage--from Compton Cable and previous arts center video projects--that has never been seen before. Included in the footage are interviews with Papa Jo Jones--who played with Count Basie’s Band--just before he died, Bo Diddley and Shelly Manne--just a few of the famed musicians from the community. Ben Caldwell, media consultant for Watts Towers, is editing the footage at CalArts facilities for the Watts library.

Yet another aspect of the partnership is a theater workshop at Plaza de la Raza, where six CalArts faculty and students recently rehearsed about 15 young actors and actresses in an adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s play, “Our Town.” Rewritten by Venice artist Amparo Garcia from an 1870s Mexican, Spanish and Indian perspective and retitled “Nuestro Barrio,” the play is set in a California town in English with a smattering of Spanish. (Performances will be Thursday-Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at the Plaza.)

Despite some mythical overtones and some agitprop, the play maintains most of Thornton’s original dialogue and theme with some additional characters emphasizing Indian and Mexican culture.

Added to the cast of characters along with the Shaman--who replaces the Stage Manager--and the Remembering Tree, is Death. And Angelica Jimenez, 15, makes a wistful image of the grim reaper dressed in a sheer shift of fuchsia roses with black dance wear framing her lithe body. Accessorized for the part with pounded silver skeleton earrings dangling capriciously to her shoulders, black mask of death in hand, she talks about her character and the value of acting in a play about her heritage.

“I play Death,” she said happily at rehearsal a couple of weeks ago. “I see Death as rebirth. Death has no boundaries and it was my duty to bring life to the character. At first when I started reading the play, I thought this is what I am (historically), this is where I came from. I never had the full history. You learned about the missions, but in this play we live those people. We become them. We understand why they did what they did.”

Sandoval said CalArts offers the Plaza’s young dramatists consistency. “One of the reasons we decided to enter into this partnership with CalArts is because we usually get good actresses and actors as teachers but as soon as they get a job they leave. The CalArts program has given us the luxury of continuity--of having the same teacher for a year now, and of course, the children are showing the fruits of that relationship. In a sense, we have begun a formalized curriculum in the theater and the product I think will show that right away.”

B. J. Dodge, a CalArts teacher of acting and mask who is directing the theater project, agreed. “It’s just a wonderful way to introduce our students to a community so that they can see there is a vocation and an avocation waiting for them in the community and to experience creative dramatics in an outreach situation. This gives our actors a place to go to do more theater, a place to go and teach, a place to go and do a gig.

“What we are saying is we want to compete for those kids who are dancers and actors who are working there.”