Shifting Demographics Are Challenging the Arts : Report: American society is changing dramatically and explosively, causing problems at box offices but offering opportunities for the future, as a new definition of audience is in the making.

Red ink doesn’t always mean failure. It might point to opportunities.

The spectator sports covered on these pages have had their share of red ink lately. The most recent case as detailed by The Times’ Shauna Show is the finally revealed deficit of the Los Angeles Arts Festival. And there have been other deficit sightings: the city’s Band-Aid remedy for the Los Angeles Theatre Center, the problems of San Francisco’s Festival 2000, the fiscal toe-stretching of the Joffrey Ballet.

Certainly, there are many causes for alarm wherever Americans buy tickets or drink up their culture. The recession has yet to recede. The National Endowment for the Arts and its dependents are still in cautious embrace. Corporate givers still wait for the walk signal.

Yet red ink, especially in a society that seems to equate liquidity with solidity, stirs the conventional knee-jerk wisdom that says that something has failed.

The fact that the Los Angeles Festival and the Festival 2000 did happen was a plus. The people behind these attempts dared to be non-traditional, to present authentically what most of us rarely experience.

But there’s a far more important message lurking somewhere in the recent spillage of red ink throughout the arts: American society is changing dramatically and explosively. Our failure to recognize that may very well be causing some of the problems at the box offices. And portend changes for the future.

A new definition of audience is in the making.

David Hayes-Bautista, a UCLA professor in the school of medicine and director of the university’s Chicano Studies Research Center, has been analyzing and projecting population and census figures and sees significant changes coming in audiences.

Hayes-Bautista sees American society moving toward a stratification.

On one stratum is the Anglo population, the Anglo audience. It is older than others (34 is the median age). It is getting smaller (down to 51% in Los Angeles County).

On another stratum is the Latino population, the Latino audience. It is younger (21 is the median). It is growing (half the babies born in Los Angeles County now are Latino).

* The 1970 census showed that 80% of Californians were Anglos. The 1990 census: 53%.

* Hayes-Bautista’s projection for 1995: Anglos will drop below the 50% mark statewide.

* Asian population statewide grew 125% between 1980 and 1990, while Latino population in the state rose almost 80%.

According to Hayes-Bautista, what happens demographically in California is happening throughout the Western world: significant population shifts; zero growth for majority groups versus explosive minority birth rates and immigration patterns.

“1955 will never return,” he says.

He sees a new society emerging. The performing arts in their appeal to new audiences will have to recast the perception of minorities. “Multicultural tourism,” where someone brings in mariachis to represent an entire complex civilization, is about to end.

Hayes-Bautista plans on presenting his demography to a gathering Tuesday through Friday of the International Society of Performing Arts Administrators who will unfold their well-traveled tents at the Bel Age Hotel. In its 42 years, the society has met only in Western Europe.

The society’s reason for traveling to West Hollywood is summed up in the convention’s theme: “New Connections: Finding Tomorrow’s Audience Today.” Pretty much what everyone in arts and entertainment is hoping to do.

Like Hayes-Bautista, August Coppola, dean of San Francisco State’s school of creative arts and another speaker at the conference, does see new audiences out there, even through the red ink. Festivals like the financially troubled ones in Los Angeles, San Francisco and elsewhere have been “Burma Shave” experiences: you travel from point to point to get the entire message. Stay with it and you do get the message.

“People seem unaccustomed to these events,” he says. “Anything different, anything multicultural is being looked at suspiciously these days. These events may seem unfamiliar. They seem so incredibly dangerous because so many of us have been ghettoized. We stay with our own.” Possibly when we overcome these mind-sets more of us will feel more comfortable with such multicultural events as the Los Angeles Festival.

Coppola talks of the arts as “creative think tanks,” a place where minds can merge, where people “can see possibilities in each other.” What artists and audiences need are time to learn more about each other. “The new fractions,” Coppola’s term for the changing American population, may yet be recognized by all of us--the audiences, the business community, the grants givers, the arts planners.

All this will take time.

One labor pain doesn’t define delivery.

So while the messages tell us something about the fiscal conditions of our time (if only the recession would end . . . if only the government would spend more . . . if only the corporations would be more giving) something more important is coming through. It’s about who is inside the halls now and who will be there in the future.

And it is telling us something about the people who might be lining up in the future, waiting now to get in.