Wider O.C. Involvement in A Day Without Art

A record number of Orange County arts groups will take part in the fourth annual Day Without Art on Tuesday, joining organizations around the world to underscore the devastating toll that AIDS has taken on the arts community.

At least 18 local institutions--more than twice as many as last year--will participate in events designed to call attention to artists’ contributions and to suggest what life would be like if AIDS claimed all artists. A number of well-known dancers, musicians, actors and visual artists have died from AIDS-related illnesses; Day Without Art activities range from gallery closures to specially created programs and exhibits.

“You can’t help but be encouraged” by the increase in local participation, said Robert Whyte, a member of ACT-UP Orange County, an AIDS activist organization. Still, he said, “there’s no end to what needs to be done” to heighten awareness.

Some 4,500 institutions in the United States and abroad will play roles in the observance, which coincides with the World Health Organization’s World AIDS Day and is expected to include more enterprising offerings this year than ever.

Among the more ambitious local undertakings is a free outdoor concert in Costa Mesa involving seven county institutions, from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. at Pavilion Amphitheater at The Lakes, at Anton Boulevard and the Avenue of the Arts (see today’s OC Live! for a full Day Without Art schedule). At 12:15, nearby South Coast Repertory will present “Vital Readings” as part of this lunch-hour presentation, making it the first artistic project on which all eight groups ever have collaborated.

“All of us in our various groups have known people (in the arts) who are suffering from AIDS or who have died from AIDS,” said Opera Pacific spokesman Tim Dunn, who spearheaded efforts to organize the concert. “We wanted to give something back to the community as an acknowledgment” of those stricken.

Opera Pacific’s Overture Company will perform, as will the Pacific Symphony Brass Quintet, the Pacific Chorale Children’s Chorus, tenor John Nuzzo of the Master Chorale of Orange County, and Ballet Pacifica, staging an excerpt from “No Less Than Every” choreographed by Rick McCullough who dedicated the work to Edward Stierle, a Joffrey Ballet dancer who died of AIDS complications last year. The Orange County Philharmonic Society will present Too Many Bongos, a percussion group, and the Orange County Performing Arts Center will present dancers or musicians from the Kirov Ballet.

Another ambitious effort comes by way of the Laguna Playhouse, which will stage an original revue spoofing Laguna Beach, from its ubiquitous tourists to its self-styled image as an arts colony. “Lagunatics: A Musical Roast of Life in the Village” will be presented Monday (a previously scheduled production occupies the theater Tuesday, said Playhouse executive director Richard A. Stein).

The playhouse has not taken part in A Day Without Art at all in the past, even though Laguna Beach has Orange County’s highest per capita AIDS rates and one of the highest in the nation. The playhouse stayed on the sidelines last year, Stein said at the time, because it was busy breaking in a new artistic director, Andrew Barnicle.

“We wanted to (contribute) in a quality way and not just throw something together at the last minute,” Stein added recently. “We feel (this year’s contribution has been) better planned and will be better executed.”

Other events around the county will include a special exhibit at the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery and a concert at Fullerton Museum Center. The Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton will close for the day, and the Irvine Fine Arts Center will be posting AIDS information.

Many of the events are designed to help local AIDS organizations. Proceeds from “Lagunatics” (tickets are $35 and $55) will benefit Laguna Shanti; donations solicited at the Costa Mesa concert and SCR readings will benefit the AIDS Services Foundation of Orange County.

Last year, SCR raised about $2,000 and collected six large boxes of food for ASF with a reading of Anthony Clarvoe’s play “The Living.” The company hopes to raise consciousness as well as cash, according to its literary manager John Glore, who created “Vital Readings.”

The 45-minute work, a collection of readings by SCR members and guests, pieces together literary and dramatic excerpts, bits of news stories and songs, Glore said. The tone, he added, is “always sort of close to the inevitable fatality of the disease. But by and large it’s about how people with AIDS find solace in their friends and families and how they find it within themselves, often getting in touch with the spirituality they weren’t aware of prior to coming down with the syndrome.

“We just want (people in the audience) to be aware of what it means to be someone with AIDS, or have someone in your family or a close friend who has AIDS, and above all how those friends and family members and people with AIDS are not really different from us. I think we tend to isolate them in our minds, and there’s no need to. At bottom, they are human beings as we are, and their response to having this illness is much like ours would be if we had a similar illness.”