Festival of Masks Offers Cultural Bond : Pageant: The internationally flavored event comes to Hancock Park with art, performances, food and a Sunday parade.

A banner celebrating Europeans’ first landing on this continent was still hanging at the Van Nuys Multipurpose Center this week as an Iranian dance troop composed of Americans rehearsed in front of black and Latino observers.

What?

The troop was getting ready for the Craft & Folk Art Museum’s International Festival of Masks--at Hancock Park, Saturday and Sunday, 11 a.m. to dusk--and the polychromatic scene was fitting practice for this multicultural madness.

Back from an every-other-year journey through the 1980s, the festival has returned to an annual schedule. This year’s 13th festival will showcase several dance troupes--including the Iranian-inspired Pars National Ballet--its largest parade ever and, of course, authentic masks from many of the world’s cultures.

“Almost every culture uses the mask in some way, whether it’s for rituals or ceremonies,” said Teri Knoll, festival director. “The festival is where different cultures can come together--where they have a symbol to relate to.”

It started as a parade in 1976 organized by the museum to promote its galleries, but has since blossomed to become one of the city’s largest and longest-running cultural events.

Last year, budget constraints reduced the Parade of Masks to a park procession, but Sunday’s event has more participants than ever. (The parade will start at Wilshire Boulevard and Cloverdale Avenue at 11 a.m., proceed down Wilshire’s Miracle Mile and end at Hancock Park.)

A highlight of the parade will be a huge mural of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, created by the Venice-based Social and Public Arts Resource Center along with Fairfax High School.

The weekend festival also will satisfy polyglot taste buds with Ethiopian, Indian, Native American and Nigerian food, among others. Other booths will sell masks for Mexico’s Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) observance, as well as masks representing the cultures of Africa, Guatemala, Nepal and Puerto Rico. A percentage of booth sales will go to charity.

More than 20 stage performances will include dances indigenous to Bulgaria, Hawaii, the Philippines and West Java, among many other regions.

The Pars National Ballet, a rekindled version of a ballet that was outlawed in Iran in the early 1980s, will perform dances that were deemed taboo by the Muslim government of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Abdollah Nazemi, an Iranian choreographer who headed the original Pars National Ballet in Iran before it was outlawed, re-formed the troupe in Los Angeles with local dancers. At the Van Nuys Multipurpose Center Monday night, Nazemi guided five of his dancers through a southern Iranian dance that saw them tiptoeing in sync as they held their veils overhead.

Beverly Robinson, UCLA professor of theater arts who will be an emcee at the festival, looked on in amazement. She observed that with people like Nazemi around the city should benefit from its ethnic diversity.

“I think Los Angeles is getting a lot more culturally tolerant because it’s beginning to realize that multiculturalism is a reality,” Robinson said.

All that’s left for Los Angeles, festival director Knoll said, is some communication.

“Our festival is very useful and positive in a sense that it provides a forum for these different communities to share their cultures,” Knoll said. “It’s much more beneficial to have a positive reason to come together rather than a disastrous situation where people have to come together.

“There are masks in African culture and masks in Korean culture. There are definitely similarities between the two. If they can see those similarities they can realize that we’re not so different from each other.”