For Something Different, Let’s Bring Down the Roadblocks : Orange County Performing Arts Center needs to drop its elitist attitude and start offering more diverse entertainment.

“It’s something different.”

That’s the phrase used by Thomas Nielsen, the Orange County Performing Arts Center’s incoming board president, to explain why the center dragged its feet before allowing the Orange County Philharmonic Society to book an ethnic concert and dance series into the hall for next season.

“This particular series (finally approved, begrudgingly, by the center last week) is not one that is a ‘classical’ music series,” Nielsen said. “It’s something different.”

The Philharmonic Society has been responsible for Orange County appearances by virtually every major touring orchestra that has stopped here during the last 40 years. In the last year or two, the society decided to try to expand its offerings, partly because the economy has made touring unaffordable to many orchestras, and partly because the society has been looking for ways to bring in new supporters who might not attend symphonic music.

It’s something different.

The society’s idea has been to supplement its main diet of orchestras with a few jazz, ethnic dance and more folk-oriented artists. These have included the Chieftains, the Grammy-winning ensemble that is the world’s foremost proponent of traditional Irish music; the Ballet Folklorico de Mexico, and the Mazowsze Polish folk-dance troupe.

In an unusual jazz-meets-classical pairing--the kind of innovative programming that has been sadly absent from the center’s own use of the hall--the society also put the Juilliard String Quartet on a bill with the Billy Taylor Trio.

Something different.

Officials at the center, however, want no more of it.

In a frosty, seven-page statement issued by center officials last week, they said they “became concerned” when OCPS indicated that while it would present two series of symphonic music next season, it also “was considering an expanded ‘mixed-discipline’ series that would be solely jazz, popular music and dance attractions.”

“This proposed series represented a dramatic shift in OCPS’ traditional presenting role and a significant change in programming orientation. . . .”

Something different.

The statement asserted that the change raised “issues of internal competition with other presenters, including the center.” Hmmmmm. All those years before the Philharmonic Society brought in the Chieftains, Ballet Folklorico and Mazowsze, before it paired the Juilliard with the Billy Taylor Trio, the center never saw fit to book any of them.

In any case, after three weeks of public controversy, and after being criticized by the media--including this paper--for trying to dictate what the Philharmonic Society should present, the center offered the olive branch by allowing the society to proceed with its series.

But not before chopping down the olive tree.

“In addition to approving all dates requested by OCPS for the series . . . the executive committee set policy guidelines concerning future series that OCPS proposes to present at the center. These include a condition that all future OCPS series at the center shall reflect a primary focus on quality touring symphony orchestras and other classical music attractions.”

One has to wonder what standard of “classical music” is being applied here. Does not the music of the Chieftains reflect the “classical” culture of Ireland? Is Ballet Folklorico not a vital part of Mexico’s cultural heritage? Les Ballets Africans, part of the disputed 1993-94 series approved last week, is the national dance company of the Republic of Guinea--in effect, its country’s equivalent to the Bolshoi and the Kirov.

Still, they’re something different.

Orange County’s center is virtually alone among performing arts facilities around the country in that it will not present popular music of the post-World War II era. For that matter, it presents precious few programs of any kind that smack of being “contemporary.”

But throw together a bunch of aging TV stars in a 50-year-old musical and--voila!--you’re guaranteed at least one West Coast pit stop.

The center does deserve credit for its solid, if narrowly focused, ballet offerings. Yet even in this one area where the center has been ahead of the pack on the West Coast, the buck stops with companies rooted in 19th-Century Western European traditions. Don’t expect to see the center bringing in such truly cutting-edge companies as William Forsythe’s Frankfurt Ballet or this country’s own Dance Theatre of Harlem.

That’s something different. In the most recent issue of Revue, the center’s own magazine, outgoing board chairman William Lyon wrote: “There is a vital force underlying everything we do, without which nothing would work. This is the will of our community. (The italics are his.)

“Everyone knows that community initiative created the center,” Lyon wrote, “and it takes continued commitment to keep it strong.”

As Nielsen wrote in the same magazine, “The center has continued to develop a strong and wider base of support in our community, enabling it to achieve and sustain artistic programs of the highest quality for a broad audience.”

How wide and how broad is that support? Lyon points out that the center’s “donor base . . . surpassed 13,000 last year.”

That’s 0.5% of Orange County’s current population of 2.4 million.

Those are the percentages of a private club, not a facility that is appealing to “a broad audience.”

“To provide the additional resources necessary to bring dazzling performances here (and) to keep them coming,” Lyon states, “the community (italics mine) must find/give/raise more than $5 million a year to close the inevitable gap between the $18 million it costs for center performances, educational programs and building operations and the $13 million that can be earned at the box office.”

If that community is to be broadened beyond the tiny sliver it now represents, the center needs to drop its elitist, ignorant attitude, start offering arts and entertainment to include the rest of Orange County, and scrap the haughty, truly boneheaded notion that to do so would put its so-called commitment to “quality” at risk.

At the very least, the center should stop throwing roadblocks in the way of those who would do so.

Think about it.

It’d be something different.