17-DAY ARTS FETE SLATED AT COLLEGE

Arts festivals of all sorts and sizes are becoming an increasingly familiar part of the Orange County cultural scene.

Consider last year’s assortment. They ranged from the summerlong Art Connections ’84 at several museums and private galleries to the daylong Arts on the Green in a park next to the South Coast Repertory Theatre.

Now, Santa Ana College will offer a 17-day campus celebration, starting April 26, that will present the work of students in the performing, visual and media arts, as well as talks by guest professionals and three rather unusual film marathons.

As far as Burt Peachy, dean of the fine and performing arts division, is concerned, such a festival couldn’t come at a better time for Santa Ana College. “Our (arts) program has grown and flourished in the past few years, despite all the (fiscal and enrollment) problems that are affecting all colleges,� Peachy said in a recent interview. “But I don’t think enough people are aware of how much this college is doing in the arts, both on campus and in terms of reaching the whole community.�

Although overall enrollment at SAC has declined in recent years (as is the case at most other community colleges), SAC’s programs have more than held their own, Peachy said. “Our (division’s) students have gone up from 7% to 11% (of overall enrollment) in three years,� he said. The division’s full-time faculty has increased from 36 to 39 instructors, the part-time staff from 35 to 109.

The SAC division of fine and performing arts teaches journalism, telecommunications and photography, as well as art, dance, music and theater. The college is administered by the Rancho Santiago Community College District (which also operates an educational center in Garden Grove and is to open its Orange Canyon campus in Orange this fall).

Peachy calls SAC’s telecommunications program one of the fastest growing in the county. Current projects include a film documentary on Bowers Museum operations. The film, “The Anatomy of an Exhibit,� will focus on how the museum received and mounted the current show on prehistoric art objects from Thailand’s Ban Chiang region. Other students are completing a documentary on Chicano murals in Orange County, also to be aired on the local cable station, KYOU (Channel 26).

The college expects to continue as a trailblazer in the use of computer technology in arts instruction. “We’re using a computerized method in choreography which is downright revolutionary if you’re at all familiar with the old, laborious notation methods,� Peachy said. A student dance ensemble is being formed that will perform dances created by guest professionals, who will be using the new computer method.

Many of the college’s arts presentations have a strong ethnic-minority connection because of Santa Ana College’s student body--the most ethnically diverse of any community college in the county. Nearly 39% of SAC’s 22,656 students are nonwhite--mostly Asians, Latinos and blacks. (At Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, the largest community-college campus in the county, about 17% of OCC’s 24,104 students are nonwhite.)

For example, the Arte Chicano show last fall, which exhibited the works of six Southern California artists, also presented poetry readings and lectures on the Chicano experience. Last Feb. 10, chorales from the Second Baptist Church and the Johnson Chapel in Santa Ana, plus an art exhibit on black families, were presented as a Black History Month event.

A year ago, the Inter-Cultural Committee for the Performing Arts and the college’s Black Student Union produced the premiere of “Evergreen,� Richard Gordon’s play on the image conflicts of black women. And last year’s Art Week program, using numerous artworks, films and lectures, focused on human rights controversies in Southeast Asia and Central America.

Off-campus, Santa Ana College has been involved in joint ventures that are especially far-ranging for a community college, Peachy said. This summer’s Grove Shakespeare Festival in Garden Grove will be the fourth time that the college has co-produced the event (and provided student interns for the productions at the city’s Grove Amphitheatre/Gem Theatre complex).

In what may prove to be the most ambitious move yet, the college has expressed interest in joining a venture to convert the historic Yost Theatre in Santa Ana into a major showplace for plays, dance and other performing arts. This project, being coordinated by the city’s Downtown Development Commission, would be part of a downtown-wide cultural revival that would also involve the Orange County Pacific Symphony (which is considering use of another renovated facility in downtown Santa Ana as an administrative and chamber-performance site) and other large arts organizations.

For now, attention is on the here-and-now, namely the college’s first Fine Arts Festival.

(As a warm-up for the festival, this year’s Art Week program will highlight “The Art of Craft.� Showing March 21-29, the program will feature woodworks by Sam Maloof, plus ceramic, glass, textile and metal works of several other artists.)

The lineup for the April 26 to May 12 festival is dramatically eclectic: concerts in classical and jazz music and in dance; scenes from Shakespeare and the musical theater; exhibits of paintings, photography and other works. “Tintypes,� the theater department’s spring production, will also be staged, as well as “Movin’ On,� the Inter-Cultural Committee for the Performing Arts’ revue about black stars.

There also will be a wide array of guest speakers. These will include artists George Herms and Robin Mitchell; photographers Neil Chapman and Alan Ross (who had been associates of Ansel Adams); performance-artist Jo Harvey Allen, and Los Angeles Times television columnist Howard Rosenberg. An event billed as “The Great Debate� will pit Wally George, host of KDOC-TV’s “Hot Seat� show, against a still-to-be-announced opponent.

For screen buffs, the “Science Fiction Film Marathon� will offer some of the famous--and infamous--movies of that genre, including vintage shorts from the silent era. The “Dance on the Screen Marathon� will feature the important music videos of today, as well as the Hollywood classic musicals of the 1930s-1950s. The “Student Video Marathon,� following a tribute to “M.A.S.H.� creator Larry Gelbart, will spotlight outstanding shorts by college and high school students.

Peachy has nothing but high hopes for the festival. “We want it to become bigger and--of course, better--each year. We want it to be a cultural point of reference for the entire county, a forum for both artistic creativity and social issues.�

And the festival should reflect the Santa Ana College community itself--an area that ranges from the inner-city enclaves to the suburban-hill developments. “We have the greatest community mix of any college in this county, a true diversity of backgrounds and cultures,� said Peachy. “That is both our strength and our challenge.�