A Smorgasbord of L.A. for the European Community

What would you do if someone told you to put together two hours of performance art to represent the city of Los Angeles to Europeans?

When it happened to artistic director Laura Fox, she spent six months seeing every show she could. When she was done, she said, “I can’t do this much programming.”

Nevertheless, Fox weaved together a show of previously performed dance, drama and music, and today through Sunday it plays in Antwerp, Belgium, as part of ANTWERP 93, a yearlong cultural festival.

Each year since 1985 the European Community has named a Cultural Capital to sponsor art and historical exhibitions, music performances and lectures throughout the year. Previous capitals have included Florence, Athens and Madrid, and this year, Antwerp.

Los Angeles is one of 15 cities from around the world--and the only American city--that ANTWERP 93 invited to the festival. Others include St. Petersburg, Montreal, Berlin and Johannesburg. Each city’s group will give a performance at a 200-seat theater called the Ark.

The Ark is a creation in itself, designed for the festival but made to last another 10 years. Built on top of an old barge, it floats between three ports in Antwerp on the river Schelde and houses the theater, living space for 20 people and a restaurant. Architect bOb Van Reeth called it “not a gateway, nor a building, nor a boat. It’s a monster. It’s a place in the water. A place for adventure, for floating initiatives.”

Among the first shows to be floated this summer is “Los Angeles,” an informal anthology of local performance art. It joins hip-hop dance with interpretive performances from Mehmet Sander, Lori DuPeron and Madres, the dance troupe of formerly homeless women.

The show begins in front of an L.A. skyline created from newspapers, including all the copies of the Los Angeles Times that Fox could pack. Tying together the pieces on AIDS, homelessness and police brutality is a text by John Fleck--some of which comes from his “Snowball’s Chance in Hell” and “Blessed Are All the Little Fishes”--performed by Shannon Holt and Biff Yeager. (Fleck had another commitment and could not perform his text in Antwerp, as he had previously in Los Angeles stagings.) The two-hour show ends on a hopeful note: gospel music by the First AME Church choir.

“I found artists that I thought were incredibly talented and passionate,” Fox said. “I always knew I wanted to take hip-hop and gospel, because they’re so American, so L.A. The pieces all kind of deal with issues. They’re kind of abstract, but they’re all about L.A.”

The picture they present isn’t necessarily a pretty one.

“There are, I guess, a lot of negative things in the show. But I see the show as really positive, because all of these people came together and put together this show,” she said. “You see all these people standing onstage holding hands . . . it’s like our own little tiny community.”

Madres, the dance troupe based at the Sunshine Mission, will be performing “Abundance.” The piece was created by director and founder Sarah Elgart and contrasts the idea of a “dream house” with the issues of being homeless. Five members of Madres, none of whom had been out of the United States before, will perform along with six local people who will do walk-on parts.

“What I feel is most important about Madres’ presence, and the structure of the program as a whole, is it brings the issue of multiculturalism to the forefront of an international dialogue,” Elgart said.

Her husband, artist Stephen Glassman, agreed and said the installation he is creating to accompany the show deals with similar issues of opening borders. He is building a bamboo bridge on a foundation of about 60 blocks of ice. As the ice melts, it will release bottles to float down the Schelde containing missing children postcards sent to homes in Los Angeles. The installation will also include a waterfall down the side of the Ark and three helium balloons connected by a huge black tarp.

The bridge was inspired by an article Glassman read about the number of voters in Antwerp who are Nazis. “We have five years’ experience building on the issues of multiculturalism,” he said. “People in Europe are very interested in our agenda in Los Angeles.”

Mehmet Sander, a Turkish-born dancer and choreographer who has been working in Los Angeles for the last five years, will perform two of his pieces. The first is done within an iron and wood box, six-foot-square and two-foot-deep. The second is performed to a collage of sound from pornographic movies with an audio text of a police officer talking to a gay man he has just raped. Though Sander designed the second piece before the beating of Rodney G. King by four LAPD officers, he said, it has become linked with the beating, and therefore the city.

What will make the Los Angeles performance unique to the Europeans, Sander said, is the diversity of the cast. “There’s a queer choreographer--that’s me--and the choir from the First AME Church. . . . Europe thinks that L.A. is like ‘Falcon Crest’ or ‘Dynasty.’ That’s why the riots really shocked them.”

Ethnic diversity was not something Fox considered when pulling together her cast of 20. “The whole idea for the show was to get a whole group of wild people and get them to work together,” she said. But, “it would be really hard to avoid an ethnically diverse cast if it’s about L.A.”

The “L.A. Twerps,” as the cast called themselves, tested the show at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions April 23-24 to iron out the rough spots.

“It seemed pretty scattered,” Sander said. “But that’s how it worked. . . . At the end, at the LACE concert, it all came together, like L.A.”