SPOTLIGHT : Carrying the Day : AIDS in the Arts and the Absence It Creates

Family and friends wept audibly at the memorial held earlier this year in Newport Beach for Orange County native Gregory Osborne.

Laughter broke through the tears, however, as some reminisced about the warm, witty world-renowned ballet dancer. Lois Osborne wished that her son would be remembered, above all, for his radiant smile, for the way “he lit up a room.”

That’s the way choreographer David Allen remembers Osborne, and it’s the upbeat quality he hoped to convey in his ballet inspired by the late dancer to be performed tonight at Irvine Barclay Theatre as 10 county arts groups join for one of many local observances of the sixth annual Day Without Art.

“The piece is really a celebration of life,” said Molly Lynch, whose troupe, Ballet Pacifica, will dance “Capriole Suite.” “It was inspired by Greg’s infectious enthusiasm and love of life.”

The 10-minute ballet is part of a free evening of live music, theater and dance organized for the international commemoration, which aims to remind the public that AIDS has cut disproportionately deep into the arts community, the figurative heart and soul of humanity.

The 8 p.m. performance, staged entirely by volunteers, is among the most ambitious Day Without Art undertakings ever staged here. Other events around the county include about a half-dozen activities at UC Irvine and a dance lecture-demonstration at Newport Harbor Art Museum, which will include information about AIDS. Collectively, the events amount to one of the county’s busiest Day Without Art observances.

For the Barclay performance, organizers are looking to fill the 750-seat Irvine theater. In past years, no more than 350 people attended similar collaborations, held at noon in smaller venues.

“We hope this event will be more accessible to a larger number of people,” said co-chairman Timothy B. Dunn, Opera Pacific spokesman. “At lunchtime, people had limited time to get to the performance and get back to work.”

Like “Capriole Suite,” the program will aim for a celebratory approach, despite its raison d’etre, Dunn said.

“It’s intended to celebrate artists, our colleagues,” Dunn said, “and the happiness and fulfillment they’ve brought to everyone’s lives with their creative output.”

To date, more than 3,500 Orange County residents have contracted the AIDS virus. More than 2,030 have died of the disease, which gave rise to the first Day Without Art in 1989. Visual AIDS, a New York coalition, organized the inaugural commemoration to coincide with the United Nations’ annual World AIDS Day.

This year, scores of artists worldwide and roughly 6,200 arts institutions--up about 1,000 from last year--are expected to take part.

Tonight’s Barclay program, hosted by KUSC-FM (91.5) deejay Bonnie Grice, includes performances by the 65-member Pacific Chorale Intermediate Children’s Chorus (four short songs), Pacific Symphony (two movements from Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor), Opera Pacific (works by Delibes and Verdi) and the Master Chorale of Orange County (providing taped works for background music).

South Coast Repertory actors will give “Shadow,” by SCR’s literary manager John Glore, its first reading. In the 10-minute play, a man dying of AIDS complications dreams about a reunion of his friends and family after his death.

Throughout the evening, voluntary contributions to 10 county AIDS services organizations will be accepted. The agencies’ representatives will distribute informational pamphlets.

Arts troupes that are not lending on-stage talent, such as the Orange County Philharmonic Society, the Orange County Performing Arts Center and Imagination Celebration of Orange County, are providing publicity or other technical support for the event.

Everyone involved has known or admired from afar a singer, actor, designer, musician or dancer claimed by the rapacious epidemic that has forever halted the creativity of budding choreographer and Joffrey Ballet star Edward Stierle, veteran rocker Freddie Mercury, Rock Hudson, Rudolf Nureyev and scores of others.

Day Without Art “is a very valid concern for all of us in the arts,” said co-chairman Christopher Burrill, operations manager of the Irvine theater. The Irvine Barclay Theatre Encore Circle support group is contributing $650 to cover the night’s rental fee, Burrill said. Ushers and other theater employees are working for free.

The other major local effort, “Artists & AIDS Project” at UC Irvine, will feature a dramatization of literary works by such writers as Tony Kushner, who won the 1993 Pulitzer prize for his AIDS-related play “Angels in America.” The school’s multidisciplinary remembrance, running today through Sunday, is the brainchild of Lilia Illes, the fine-arts department’s production manager.

“I’ve honestly gotten a little tired of going through my Rolodex and seeing names of people who are no longer with us,” Illes said. “We’ve always done something at the art gallery. Now we’re expanding that to the entire school (of fine arts).”

UC Irvine’s Fine Arts Gallery has for the past two years staged its non-juried “AIDS: Community Responses” exhibit of work by artists and amateurs. But Illes said she wanted to expand the school’s Day Without Art effort after encountering “a lot of people who said they would never be affected by AIDS.”

“That to me is appalling,” Illes said. “How can anyone say it’s just a gay white man’s disease? It’s not. . . . You don’t have to believe in the gay life style or support it, but that does not invalidate the disease. . . . The way the disease is spreading, ultimately it will be very difficult not to know someone who is in some way affected.”

Drama alumnus James Calleri conceived and will direct “JACK/of all trade: New Voices on the AIDS Crisis”--a theatrical quilt of literary work, including a Kushner poem--today through Sunday.

“The AIDS-related plays out there now only touch on AIDS metaphorically,” Calleri, who lives in New York, said in a phone interview from UCI. “I feel like if we’re going to talk about AIDS, this devastating thing, then we should really go for the jugular. I found writers whom I think are really speaking truthfully about it without pulling any punches.”

A one-act play by David Greenspan, another UC Irvine alumnus, is part of the dramatization, as is video footage of ACT-UP/New York, an AIDS activist group.

“People who have died from AIDS donate their bodies to ACT-UP to use for political purposes,” Calleri said. “We’ve carried one man’s body, in an open casket, through downtown New York, and taken people’s ashes to Washington, D.C., and dumped them over the White House fence.”

The school’s dance department and Women’s Choral Ensemble will stage separate events for its “Artists & AIDS Project.”

Several UCI activities are free, but $1 from each admission to ticketed events (such as “JACK/of all trade”) will be donated to the AIDS Clinical Research Program of the school’s Department of Medicine.

At the Newport Harbor Art Museum today, AIDS prevention will be the focus of a dance program for about 120 Rancho Alamitos High School students. San Clemente’s Coast Ballet Theatre will perform classical and modern ballet excerpts for its previously scheduled lecture-demo that is part of the museum’s ongoing Art & Music project.

“Part of the great tragedy for us personally,” said Lawrence Rosenberg, the troupe’s co-artistic director, “is that people in the international arts community have contracted HIV when it could have been avoided.”

A representative from the county’s AIDS Response Program will offer information at the museum, which will also display the painting “Elysian” (1980) by Jay Phillips, who died of AIDS in 1987, and waive admission for all visitors today.

First-time Day Without Art participants include the Southern California Arts Institution in Laguna Beach. Three computer design students will create an AIDS-related installation to be placed today in Laguna Art Museum’s lobby windows along Pacific Coast Highway.

Just down the road, the Laguna Playhouse will present a staged reading of Troy Tradup’s play “The Time at the End of This Time” on Monday, the only night that the theater is not presenting its season subscription play “Inspecting Carol.”

“It’s an accessible piece that I think people are going to find entertaining, heartwarming and uplifting,” said playhouse executive director Richard A. Stein. “It also clearly depicts the tragedy of AIDS and how families deal with it when it affects them.”

All proceeds from the $10 ticket sales will benefit Laguna Shanti, an AIDS support service agency, Stein said. (The playhouse’s usual Day Without Art contribution, “Lagunatix,” an original musical lampooning the city, will be staged Feb. 24 and 25, Stein said, giving the theater more time to prepare the popular show, which typically sells out.)

Meanwhile, the Orange Coast College Art Gallery, which is closed today in recognition of the event, recently completed an exhibit in which seven California artists portrayed personal reflections on AIDS. A related panel on AIDS education was held two months ago.

Why wasn’t all that scheduled to coincide with Day Without Art?

“I purposely wanted to do our AIDS show in November,” said gallery director Irini Valleri-Rickerson, “and next year we’ll do it in the spring, to really remind people that this is an issue we should be thinking about throughout the year.”