What We Need Is a Good Fest

Bicycling along the coast one recent morning, I did just about everything wrong. Having predicted that the sun wouldn’t break through the gloom, I overdressed. I didn’t eat or drink enough. And I miscalculated the crowds, not expecting to have to dodge so many distracted drivers, Roller-bladers, joggers and skateboarders that early. Overheated, lightheaded and irritated, I groaned past the one snack bar that doesn’t blast commercial rock radio, and picked up a few bars of a Bach “Brandenberg” Concerto wafting in the wind.

Instantly refreshed, I knew at that moment we need a new Los Angeles Festival.

As the summer heats up, the Southland’s cultural landscape can begin to look like one big beach town. A numbing backbeat encourages us to leave our brains at home no matter where we are.

There are a few exceptions. SummerFest La Jolla, in its second year under violinist Cho-Liang Lin, is turning into a wide-ranging chamber music festival of note. The venturesome arts hound should be able to sniff out something interesting now and then in an out-of-the-way venue, such as the MAK Center series at the Schindler House in West Hollywood, the two Southwest Chamber Music concerts at the Huntington Library in San Marino, or the occasional ambitious offerings at the downtown branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, the California Plaza and Hollywood’s John Anson Ford Amphitheatre. But generally the musical summer in the Southland is depressingly predictable.

Want something new, for instance, at the Hollywood Bowl? Well, this year’s innovation is a market where you can put together your own dinner. As the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Hollywood Bowl Orchestra prepare for their concert series, which begin this week, picnickers no longer need to plan. But it is also typical that thinking outside the box at the Bowl these days is directed at the box seats and picnic baskets rather than at the shell.

Hence the need for that rejuvenating jolt of surprise and substance that a summer festival can bring to, say, the dog days and smog days of August. Los Angeles, of course, has a history of summer festivals. Eighteen years ago, the arts festival that was produced to accompany the Summer Olympic Games was a groundbreaking success that lasted from the beginning of June to the middle of August. It began by introducing Pina Bausch’s Wuppertal Dance Theater to America. It brought London’s Royal Opera to the Music Center. It offered a distinguished sampling of Asian dance, music and theater that included the U.S. debut of Sankaijuku’s butoh-style dance and Tadashi Suzuki’s reworking of “The Trojan Women.”

We heard or saw Mozart, Michael Tilson Thomas, Merce Cunningham, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Derek Jacobi (as Cyrano). Giorgio Strehler’s unforgettable Piccolo Teatro di Milano was on hand, as were the Canadians who staged Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” with 48 rod puppets, and Cricot 2, a politically charged theater company from Poland. In its American debut, Ariane Mnouchkine’s Parisian troupe Le Theatre du Soleil performed astonishing Shakespeare on a television sound stage.

In fact, the modern history of performing arts in Los Angeles could be divided into before and after the Olympic Arts Festival. An example of the festival’s impact was the degree to which the Royal Opera’s performances of “Turandot,” “The Magic Flute” and “Peter Grimes” kick-started the latent Los Angeles Opera, which began as Music Center Opera two years later.

Organized by Robert Fitzpatrick the massive Olympic Arts Festival (which involved 1,500 artists from 18 countries) led to what was hoped would becoming a permanent Los Angeles Festival. Although Fitzpatrick could no longer count on an Olympic-sized budget for his smaller second festival in 1987, he nevertheless introduced Peter Brook’s monumental “Mahabarata” and Cirque du Soleil to the U.S. that September.

Following the 1987 festival, Fitzpatrick, who was then president of CalArts, exchanged Los Angeles for Paris, where he was hired to run EuroDisney, and the Los Angeles Festival was handed over to theater and opera director Peter Sellars. In his two festivals, Sellars broadened the international scope of presentations, at the same time making them far more grass-roots. The arts elite expressed disappointment in the lack of stellar imports. Sellars, however, looked deeply into the Southland’s multicultural potential and amplified it with a large contingent of indigenous arts from Africa and Asia.

Fitzpatrick’s festivals were literally all over the map, but Sellars’ festivals were even more boldly decentralized, with the director avoiding European work altogether. Festival-goers found themselves hunting for, say, a park in San Gabriel to see a late-night Balinese puppet show, and would-be festival-goers simply refused to visit neighborhoods they considered scary. Sellars’ organization was not tidy; last-minute flights of creative fancy were more common than careful planning. The lack of slickness alienated the mainstream media, and poor publicity kept away some of the audience. After the fourth festival in 1993, the Los Angeles Festival was quietly put on hold, left to wither away.

Recently, Sellars has been raked over the coals in Australia, where he was installed as director of the 2002 Adelaide Festival and where he tried to follow much the same approach as in L.A. He was ousted late last year amid dissatisfaction over his decision to focus on Aboriginal arts and other aspects of Australian culture that are usually overlooked, instead of shipping in glitzy European entertainment.

One Australian newspaper called it the “worst-run, worst-financed and worst-publicized festival of all time.” Budget shortfalls discovered at the last minute led to scaled-down programming and political intervention that forced Sellars’ resignation in November, just 3 1/2 months before the festival. After an initial flirtation with the charismatic director, some of the critics turned ugly. “We are glad that he and his infernal hugs have gone,” concluded one editorial that described Sellars’ programming as “idealistic folly.” It was commonplace for the Australian press to equate the Adelaide situation with the “disaster” of the Los Angeles Festival.

Yet now that the controversy has died down, there are proposals in Adelaide to make permanent certain Sellars innovations that brought indigenous arts to the city streets and hospitals.

Likewise, the Los Angeles Festival was no disaster. It was, no doubt, poorly administered. But it was also ahead of its time. It validated the artistic diversity of Southern California to a degree that had never before been attempted.

The world-music movement was still nascent when Sellars mounted his festivals, and Los Angeles was just waking up to the kind of revolutionary multicultural society that the city was creating. Sellars fearlessly jumped into the deep end of these multiculti waters, and the masses weren’t always ready to follow. Ultimately, though, it was the economic downturn in Los Angeles during the early ‘90s, more than the programming or disorganization, that did in the Los Angeles Festival.

Yet take a look at this summer’s Lincoln Center Festival in New York City, with its emphasis on Chinese opera, Iranian theater and Merce Cunningham. That’s L.A. a decade ago. The legacy of the Los Angeles Festival also resonates in other ways. Alumni from the Sellars years, for instance, went on to produce the worthy World Festival of Sacred Music three years ago, and it will be revived again later this summer.

There are any number of arguments why Los Angeles should not attempt another festival. In a Sunday Calendar story last month about the obstacles of mounting a local film festival, many of the old difficulties were once again aired. L.A. is too sprawling and chaotic. There’s the traffic. It’s no mountain resort, no too-charming-for-words Salzburg or walkable Edinburgh, sites of major, long-running European summer festivals. “It’s really hard to have something for everybody,” a former Angeleno film festival director complained.

But sprawl and a certain amount of chaos are the whole point of an ambitious festival. And the positive side of all that sprawl is a wealth of resources, everything from dark concert halls to the widest imaginable range of possibilities for unconventional venues. As one of the world’s largest and most ethnically diverse cities, Los Angeles has equally vast culture resources.

What it doesn’t have, you might think, is the money to pay for a world-class summer festival. To squeeze it out of the city or county is not likely. City Hall grumbled about providing even simple services for the previous festivals. With all the local arts institutions that are building or dreaming of building new facilities, fund-raising these days is no simple matter.

Even so, a venturesome festival is exactly the kind of thing that could help stimulate all these projects by focusing attention on the town and its arts, by attracting tourists and burnishing L.A.’s image as the city of the future. Such a festival is good for the local economy and good for the community. What with all the secessionist movements, we have never been more in need of an event that could help bring us together again. Simply think of a festival not as an expense but an investment.

The exhilaration of a Los Angeles Festival would do more than diminish summer cultural doldrums; it would make this a greater city. It already has.

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Mark Swed is The Times’ music critic.