LOS ANGELES FESTIVAL : Home Is Where the Art Is : ‘Home, Place and Memory’ is the theme of this year’s event, and its ‘Memory Projects’ explore all three. ‘In a way, the entire festival has been in response to the riots, the full circle of events,’ says its program director

They call him Lemon Man.

Video artist Susan Mogul caught him in the act of stealing a lemon off a tree near Armando’s Mexican restaurant in Highland Park. Mogul asked to interview him, but he saw her video camera and thought she was a police officer, presumably out to bust him for grand theft, citrus. The combination of cops and video cameras--both powerful symbols in post-riot Los Angeles--proved too much for Lemon Man. He fled.

No one knows whether Lemon Man will attend the 1993 Los Angeles Festival, or whether he will ever come back to Armando’s. But his story has become part of the lore of Armando’s--and as such part of the legacy of the Los Angeles Festival’s “Memory Projects.”

Five Los Angeles artists or arts groups were drafted by the Los Angeles Festival, which begins a monthlong run on Friday. Each will explore one area neighborhood--its history, its traditions and its contemporary folklore. Called “Memory Projects,” they are just one of several special performance and visual art series that are part of the festival.

The triennial Los Angeles Festival is an offshoot of the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival, which Robert Fitzpatrick directed, as well as the subsequent 1987 version of the event that celebrated European artists. In 1990, producer-writer-director Peter Sellars took over as artistic director of the 1990 Los Angeles Festival, a $5.6-million extravaganza of Pacific Rim arts that brought in performers from all over the world.

This year’s festival concentrates on African, African-American and Middle Eastern arts and culture, but also includes a wide range of cultural events that do not fit neatly under that heading. The “Memory Projects,” for example, include such disparate groups as Salvadoran immigrants, homeless gay and lesbian youth and the blend of ethnic groups in the Highland Park area along with two projects on aspects of African-American traditions in Los Angeles.

The 1993 festival began with a $5.2-million budget, but because of fund-raising difficulties, that budget has been slashed to $4 million, so the festival is focusing primarily on L.A. art and will not foot the bill to import artists from other states and countries this year. Some artists from elsewhere will appear in events that are not fully funded by the festival, however. The festival has become a sort of cultural sponge, absorbing all kinds of already-scheduled events and exhibits by other arts organizations into its program, so the local definition remains loose.

The festival will involve numerous projects that attempt to begin dialogues between groups, bringing Latino poets to the Vision Complex in predominantly black Leimert Park, African and Middle Eastern musicians to the very European Getty Museum, or Harmonica Fats and the Jalapenos (both of which the festival describes as performing “a vibrant fusion of rap, hip-hop and doo-wop”) to St. Anne Melkite Church in North Hollywood, a place of worship for the Arab community. The “Memory Projects” take the concept of exposing hidden culture even deeper into the city’s unknown networks.

“Who is the dominant culture, who gets to speak, and what do they speak about?” says Ernie Lafky, who with Norma Bowles is one of the directors of “Friendly Fire,” a stage production written by a group without a neighborhood: homeless gay, lesbian, transsexual and bisexual young adults. The play is currently in rehearsal at the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center in Los Angeles. “Here is a group that doesn’t even get spoken about. Homeless gay youth? And homeless gay youth of color? Forget it!”

The festival’s over-arching theme is “Home, Place and Memory,” and the “Memory Projects” delve into all three. The concept of what constitutes a “home” or a “neighborhood” is different for each of the five projects.

For Mogul, who came to Los Angeles from New York 20 years ago, the neighborhood is the surrogate family she has developed in Highland Park, including the Sanchez family, which owns Armando’s; the gas station attendant; the sales clerk at the local mini-mart and the people she talks to while leaning out her window overlooking the courtyard of her apartment building. Mogul’s very personal video portrait of this predominantly Latino neighborhood in the hills between downtown and South Pasadena is called “Everyday Echo Street.”

She calls herself “both an insider and an outsider.” “I’m not only Anglo, I’m Jewish, and this is not a Jewish neighborhood,” Mogul said. “It’s not the kind of neighborhood I grew up in on the East Coast.”

For Lula Washington, director of the L.A. Contemporary Dance Theater based in South-Central Los Angeles, the neighborhood is the “dance elders” who recount the history of black dance for her project, “Circle of Dance.” Washington, who studied dance as a child in the same building that is now her studio, discovered that her early teachers, R’Wanda Lewis and Thelma Robinson, studied under Katherine Dunham--whose work inspired the late Alvin Ailey. “It’s a circle of dance that began right in this building, and it all began with Dunham,” Washington says.

For Keith Antar Mason and his performance troupe the Hittite Empire, the neighborhood is black men. For a theater piece titled “Sexual Illegals,” Mason has begun taping conversations in six barbershops, which he considers “sacred sites” because they exist as one of a few private places where black male culture and self-expression is maintained. The tapes will be incorporated into a larger “performance ritual,” Mason says.

And Salvadoran artist Dagoberto Reyes, now a Huntington Park resident, bridges two neighborhoods--war-torn El Salvador and the community of Salvadoran refugees in Los Angeles--with a project called “Why We Immigrate,” a 15-foot sculptural frieze tracing the painful history of the largest wave of Salvadoran immigration to Los Angeles, during the 1980s. The relief will be displayed permanently on a wall in MacArthur Park, a hub of the Salvadoran community. The project also involves creating a time capsule of memorabilia to be opened in 100 years.

“As the years go by, as the Salvadoran population becomes part of L.A., the cultural parts of the community, the poets, the writers, the painters, the sculptors, become better known, and become part of the artistic process of the United States,” Reyes said recently in his garden, as he shaped red clay into human figures for the wall. “Values that we identify as Central American will slowly be incorporated into the city. Different values. Family values.”

As the artists turn their eyes, tape recorders and video cameras on Los Angeles neighborhoods, they are also shaping those communities by their participation. In the course of their work, they have become both objective observers and participants in the history of Los Angeles.

“What I recall from the last festival is that I didn’t get to spend enough time with the artists themselves--I felt there was something missing,” says Dolores Chavez, who is coordinating the “Memory Projects.” Chavez, who is project coordinator for the Mark Taper Forum’s Improvisational Theater Project and the Latino Theater Initiative, served as a volunteer during the 1990 festival.

“I had wished that the communities could break bread together, teach each other’s native dances to each other. There were times when that did happen, but it was in small areas, it didn’t get the big focus. . . . It’s another step that I think is very important for the Los Angeles Festival to take, making changes .”

On the flip side, the recent history of Los Angeles--beatings, verdicts, riots, lawsuits, more verdicts, sentencings, more verdicts--have changed the “Memory Projects,” and the festival as a whole, in an equally compelling way.

“Of course, artists are people who have a conscience professionally,” says Sellars. “And so the discussion in our groups following the uprising were very potent and charged. . . . How do you respond to this open crisis, this giant wound? There was a feeling that the uprising represented a whole range of issues that never did get aired in this city and have not been aired to this day.

“The festival was designed to take those issues and give them a real voice,” Sellars continues. “(‘Memory Projects’) will be about finding that voice, an eloquent voice for so much that doesn’t get said. . . . How can we attach values to these neighborhoods and what has happened here, so they are not destroyed or tear themselves apart? How do you take that hidden history and put it in circulation? The ‘Memory Projects’ deal with that head-on.”

Sellars acknowledges that riots--plus world events--have heightened the festival’s need to calm public fears about the festival’s focus on Africa, African-Americans and the volatile Middle East. “You can’t walk into this subject matter and not know that there are all these tensions swirling around it,” he says.

“Israel (recently) started shelling Lebanon--it doesn’t help matters. We are in very, very deep waters--but swimming! And we didn’t just jump in not knowing. That is where art belongs--in the deepest waters, not in the wading pool.”

Sellars notes that a decision to form a “youth council” of teen-age festival advisers along with the usual groups of adult community leaders and board members was a direct response to the riots. “There was a broad recognition that the insurrection itself was a generational struggle; it was a message sent to the city by a generation,” Sellars says. “It is essential that the festival involve and engage young people.”

Sellars adds that while the work is informed by the riots, the festival is for the most part not about the riots. Unlike Anna Deavere Smith’s “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” recently presented at the Mark Taper Forum, in which the actress portrayed real-life figures such as former police chief Daryl Gates and trucker Reginald O. Denny, most of the work in the festival opts to defuse tensions between communities by illuminating their culture.

“Always in this festival, we have tried to be less anecdotal and more forward-looking. It’s about projects that have a longer life and are about creating the next step in this city’s journey. They are not so much backward-looking as preparing the ground for what we can do next,” Sellars says.

Mason’s “Sexual Illegals” project doesn’t take on the riots as subject matter--but he is dedicating the piece to the “L.A. 4,” the four black men who will be tried for allegedly beating Denny, who is white. Jury selection for their trials is under way, and proceedings are likely to continue through the festival’s run.

Mason stresses that he speaks for himself, not the 33 members of the Hittite Empire or the denizens of the six barbershops where he is collecting material, when he states his belief that the “L.A. 4” should go free. “I’m not giving up on them,” he said. “On April 29, 1992, I have been saying that justice was on a vacation in the Fiji Islands, so why would you expect anything to have a sense of justice on that day?

” . . . We know the name of Reginald Denny, but we don’t know the name of Louis Watson (a black 18-year-old who was among the first to die in the riots). Arsenio Hall went to Denny’s bedside, and black people raised money for his medical bills, but none of us went to the funeral of Louis Watson. . . . It’s not just the ‘L.A. 4,’ it’s (dedicated) to the number of the black male population that are (always) on trial in Los Angeles.”

When told of Mason’s likely-to-be-controversial decision, festival program director Claire Peeps said the festival has no plans to interfere. “Keith’s piece from the outset has been designed to question the identity of African-American males in Los Angeles,” Peeps said. “It’s a very important symbol now for African-American identity, and it doesn’t surprise me that his work reflects that. There are not (festival) artists who have responded the same way as Keith, but in a way, the entire festival has been in response to the riots, the full circle of events.”

Although it was money that led this festival to stay close to home, Sellars says the choice to restrict the festival to Los Angeles artists was a choice they should have made from the outset.

“In art, as in life, you are sometimes forced to make the decision that you should have made in the first place,” he says. “Right after the uprising, our steering committee said that we should only focus on L.A. artists. Then, several months later, people felt that it might be too limiting, and felt that we should open it up a little. Where we ended up is, ironically, where we started. It wasn’t a kind of last-minute triage or a desperate improvisation.”

Washington of the L.A. Contemporary Dance Theater and her husband, Erwin, who serves as the company’s executive director, agree that it’s time to return to L.A. They said that right after the riots the Contemporary Dance Theater got telephone calls from other black dance companies from as far away as the East Coast saying they had been asked by the festival to create dance pieces based on the riots for the festival.

Washington’s company had done a riot-inspired piece called “Check This Out” as part of an October, 1992, Mark Taper Forum arts festival, but did not get tapped by the Los Angeles Festival until Neil Barclay, an attorney and local impresario of black dance who is on the festival’s steering committee, brought Washington’s work to the attention of festival officials. “It’s kind of too bad that it ended up as: ‘We ran out of money, we had no choice’--there is that stigma,” Washington says.

Asked if the next Los Angeles festival would also confine itself to L.A. artists, Sellars says he doesn’t know (his contract is to direct three festivals, and this is his second). “We’re finding such rich terrain, and we are only presenting a fraction of what we could be presenting, and already it’s overwhelming,” Sellars muses. “I don’t like to say either/or, so my answer is both. Certainly, you will see Los Angeles artists as a central focus as long as I am here.”

“Memory” coordinator Chavez believes that the goal of discovering Los Angeles is a matter of simply highlighting the obvious. “In someone’s neighborhood, they may always see the local grocer--but when you highlight him, and say you couldn’t do without him in your daily life, he takes on a different importance,” she says.

“Maybe (people) meet at the city dump, maybe they meet at the library. There is this infrastructure of communication that we don’t know about. It can be so private. What we are doing is like coming into someone else’s house and saying: ‘Wow, this is a really pretty room.’ And they might say: ‘Hey, yeah. It is .’ It’s nothing they didn’t know already, it’s just helping them find something they may have misplaced.”

Rosie Sanchez gives out festival schedule brochures at Armando’s, and Mogul’s “Everyday Echo Street” video will have its premiere and opening reception on Sept. 18 in the same room where Armando’s legendary menudo always draws a Saturday crowd (“some people say it cures a hangover,” Sanchez notes). The video will also be shown the following day.

Down the street, at a Mexican seafood take-out restaurant called Senor Fish, festival brochures are stacked near the pick-up window between the plastic silverware and the hot sauce. Maybe someone there will notice what’s going on at Armando’s. And maybe someone will bring Lemon Man along.

*

Festival officials are fond of saying the Los Angeles Festival intends to change people’s lives. But did it? Does it? And will it? Several people whose lives have been touched by the “Memory Projects” offer their impressions.

Rosie Sanchez

Rosie Sanchez, 39, is a member of a large Mexican immigrant family who came to this country when Sanchez was only 5. She has 10 brothers and sisters. Of that group, only two have left the fold to move to San Francisco; the rest remain involved in some way with Armando’s restaurant on Avenue 50 in Highland Park, named after one of her brothers.

Sanchez lives in Glendale. “I really don’t consider myself to be from there , I consider myself to be from here, “ she said in a recent conversation at Armando’s. “I wouldn’t want to live there. Just to visit, but not to live . . . it’s kind of harder on the women (in Mexico), there are more of the macho men, the stereotype. There are more opportunities here.”

Sanchez said Susan Mogul, who sometimes used to bring her art students to Armando’s for lunch, interviewed her about what it’s like to run a family business. “I said: ‘It’s fun, but there are a lot of arguments!’ ” Sanchez said. “But you can say things that you can’t say to other people, it’s a little more relaxed. It’s unusual here, but it’s common in Mexico. Everyone there has a little family business.”

Sanchez said she hopes “Echo Street” will draw an audience from outside Highland Park as well as inside, and hopes it will help change the neighborhood’s image. “A lot of people seem to think Highland Park is very rowdy, a very bad area,” she said. “Yeah, there are bad things, but there are good things too.”

“When we started (Armando’s 14 years ago), it was a Mexican and white neighborhood. Now, there are more Koreans, more people from Central America. Who knows? Maybe there is tension because of that. Maybe there are more people who are naive about the way other people are. And it’s hard on the kids, because you want to be respected, and you are not.

“We just need more education on how people live in other countries. Maybe when you realize (that), you would say, gosh, they have a hard life. And they want a better life.”

Stacey Adair

Twenty-six-year-old Stacey Adair forsook an unhappy home in Kansas three years ago to come to Los Angeles with $100 in his pocket and the Hollywood dream. He ended up “hustling on Santa Monica Boulevard” and doing drugs. He was young enough not to take any of this very seriously. “It was kind of fun, it just wasn’t particularly productive,” he said.

By working with Norma Bowles, Ernie Lafky as well as other homeless gay youth, Adair decided to become productive; he has gone through a 12-step program and is working toward becoming a professional writer. He said hearing others’ stories created a bond between them that never existed on the streets.

“Some of the stuff hit so close to home, some of the stuff we talked about,” Adair said. “You talk about things, you see a particular piece that might bring up a memory or something. And then everybody starts talking, or crying, or laughing, just like out-of-control laughing. It’s therapeutic, it’s just all-around neat .”

While Adair began this work before he heard of the Los Angeles Festival, he likes the idea that the festival will bring those stories to people who haven’t heard them; he is particularly pleased that festival funds will allow Lafky and Bowles to take the show to area high schools. “(Family life) is not ‘Ozzie and Harriet,’ ” he said. “Even people who supposedly aren’t living the type of life that we are have been able to identify with it, they have had the same experiences at home. We are not so different after all.”

Adair said he was pleased to find out that the Los Angeles Festival was not going to be a traditional arts festival. “What I don’t want to go and see is middle- and upper-class white America and Los Angeles,” he said. “I want to really see something. Asian stuff and some black stuff and some Hispanic stuff, shows or musicians or anything. I don’t want to see Shakespeare-in-the-Park.”

Eugene Jackson

As part of her project, Lula Washington held several “story gathering sessions” that brought together black dance legends in Los Angeles and videotaped them. She has also collected dance memorabilia and photographs for an exhibit, and is creating a dance based on the research for presentation during the festival.

One of those legends is 76-year-old Eugene Jackson of Compton, a cast member of the original silent film “Our Gang” comedies. He portrayed Farina’s big brother, Pineapple. He left the show at age 9. “There wasn’t anyone there who goes back as far as I go,” Jackson said.

Jackson’s lengthy Hollywood career included roles in silent films such as “Her Reputation” starring May McAvoy and Mary Pickford’s “Little Annie Rooney.” His first talking film was the 1928 “Hearts in Dixie” for Fox, billed as the “first all-singing, all-dancing, all-Negro musical.”

“In those days, I did the shimmy dance. Clara Bow was a red-hot-mama star in the movies, you know? And I would copy her from the movies, before I learned how to tap. I was very active as a kid in the movies in those days, I took good directions. I was so popular I was working at two studios a day. I was so popular, they would pick me up in a limousine at one studio and take me right to the other.”

Jackson also danced on the vaudeville circuit, touring the West with brother Freddie as the Jackson Brothers, as well as appearing at the Garfield Theater in Alhambra (on the same bill as the Gumm Sisters, one of whom was later known as Judy Garland), as well as the Savoy Theater on Central Avenue and other Los Angeles area theaters.

He got his start as a dancer when he entered a dance contest at the Rosebud Theater at 20th and Central. The prize was a bag of groceries, and he won. “I kept on winning those groceries for three weeks straight, and then they named me the Shimmy King!” Jackson said. “Mother said, ‘Keep going!’ Those groceries kept us eating for weeks. I was hustling them groceries.”

Jackson said he is unfamiliar with the Los Angeles Festival as a whole, but believes “Circle of Dance” to be of paramount importance. “It’s history. History , you know what I mean? You have to keep it going,” he said.

“I was out to this park over there on Rodeo Road (for a free dance performance), and the black kids of today, they are all on this hip-hop bit. Rap . And that is terrible! It’s not educational at all, and that’s all they did out there. We need to do dance like we used to do.”

Jackson now runs two dance studios, one in Compton and one in Pasadena. He still dances, but not like he used to. “I can still do a time-step, though,” he says proudly.

Sara Martinez

Dagoberto Reyes’ work will be unveiled at El Rescate, an advocacy and community services organization for Latinos in the Pico-Union district, founded by Salvadorans in 1981. Sara Martinez, coordinator of community economic development for the center, said that the process of collecting items for the time capsule and a monthlong display at the center has been painful but necessary. “It will be really important for the people who are here in 2093,” she said.

“It is very emotional for a lot of people in the community to look back at what those first years were like, when they first came here,” Martinez said.

“We have been distributing flyers asking people to bring in letters and photographs, things that are of value to them, things that bring back memories for them. . . . A lot of people who came here in the 1980s had been exposed to the war situation, and whether we like it or not, some of us have been victims of that war, and that has stayed with us. It is a way to tell a new generation about that . . . why we had to move to this country.

“A lot of people react: ‘Why are you asking about that? I don’t want to talk about that.’ But (Reyes) tells them: ‘It is important for us, it is healing for our wounds.’

“The reality that we are facing is that we have to learn about other cultures. (The festival) has opened it up a little bit, and that is something that needs to happen. . . . The bottom line is, we are all facing the same situation in terms of lack of opportunity in finding jobs, language barriers. Through the festival, people have a different way to perceive communities and to join with them.”

Vernon S. Williamson

Keith Antar Mason has asked that the names and locations of the six barbershops he has chosen for his taping sessions remain anonymous so the patrons don’t begin altering their conversations. So all we will say about Vernon S. Williamson is that his shop is in Santa Monica and he cuts Mason’s hair.

Mason has not yet begun taping at the shop, but Williamson gave his OK because he has seen Mason’s other stage works and liked them. He puts flyers up on his bulletin board when the Hittite Empire has a performance in town.

Actually, Williamson said he didn’t think too hard about the request, and hasn’t thought much about the Los Angeles Festival either. “When Keith is in here, I’m usually pretty busy,” he said. “Customers want you to pay attention to what you are doing. If I’ve got a customer in the chair, I don’t do a lot of talking.”

Plus, he added: “In my line of work we have people say everything . They say it all, from A to Z. It goes in one ear and out the other. You hear everything, from politics to religion to sports. Sometimes, you hear a lot. Sometimes, you don’t hear nothing.”

While Mason’s project focuses on black men, Williamson said his shop is a barber and beauty shop for both men and women, and caters to all types of clientele. He added he does not want to endorse any personal political statements of Mason’s, such as his support for the “L.A. 4.” “Our barber ethics are, we are not supposed to talk about politics and religion,” he said.

“I do all kinds of hair,” Williamson said. “Straight and curly, Spanish hair, black people’s hair, white people’s hair. I don’t want to show any favoritism. You have to be real careful. You say something, the next thing you know, the window is being shot out. You walk a very careful line.”