THE ARTS : The Gospel...

You know the dream. You are scheduled to take a final exam, and something has gone horribly wrong. You haven’t studied. You can’t remember which class you signed up for. When you get there, you find out the exam was yesterday. Or you are lost in a maze of hallways and can’t find the classroom at all.

If you could see your own facial expression during those dreams, you would know how the students in Peter Sellars’ UCLA class, “Art as Moral Action,” looked when they got their final assignment: to find “a moment of beauty.”

Hey . It didn’t say anything about this in the course description.

Sellars--artistic director of the Los Angeles Festival, an adviser to the Los Angeles Philharmonic and producer-writer-director of a range of theatrical, opera and film-video projects--launched into an impassioned description of what he wanted at a late February meeting of the class, an offering of UCLA’s World Arts and Cultures Program.

It was less a class assignment than a call for social revolution. He wanted, said the assignment sheet: “Something that improves the world by bringing some small moment of honesty to bear which supersedes the cliches, stereotypes and assumptions of the capitalist informational superstructure.”

“I need work that reflects that something is in motion ,” said Sellars, a smallish man with biggish ideas. A citizen of Earth for 35 years, something in Sellars and his amazed, amused manner makes him seem a recent immigrant to the planet. Even his Bart Simpson-esque hair appears perpetually surprised.

“It could break the stalemate of society and permit society to be in motion once again,” Sellars continued urgently. “It moves beyond the dead-end thinking of the ‘80s, and into a notion of the ‘90s, the current flux we are in, politically and in all areas of the world.”

The idea, he offered, is to find that “moment of beauty.” And, Sellars admonished: “If you don’t have that little moment, then take my advice and do what countless others have done before you: Go and get it. Live a little. Try life .”

Sellars was clearly delighted by the rustle of confusion, frustration and nervous laughter this command evoked. “Obviously the fact that nobody knows what to do with this assignment is what makes this assignment useful,” he said.

But here’s the part Sellars didn’t mention that day: He expects not only his students at UCLA to take on this heady assignment, but the entire city of Los Angeles.

By your very existence as a resident of Los Angeles or its environs, you are officially signed up for a Sellars-inspired, entry-level mega-course in art and culture called “The Los Angeles Festival.”

It begins this summer. You can’t drop the course, because you live here. You can’t skip class, because it will be everywhere. And depending on your perspective, this could be a dream, or a nightmare.

This summer will the mark the third incarnation of the Los Angeles Festival, which is an offshoot of the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival. Robert Fitzpatrick directed the Olympic arts fest, as well as a 1987 festival that focused on European arts. After that, the Los Angeles Festival turned the reins over to Sellars. Sellars, the 1983 recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, steered a celebration of Pacific Rim art and culture that took place in 1990.

For 1993, the festival plans to produce a $5.2-million celebration of African, African-American and Middle Eastern arts from Aug. 20 to mid-October. Although the schedule of events will not be announced until late May, the scope is ambitious: The budget, most of which comes from fund-raising, equals about one-third of what the city plans to spend to tear down buildings gutted by last spring’s riots.

According to Sellars, your assignment during the 1993 festival is much the same as the one he gave to his UCLA students: to take what you have always done and stop doing it; to assess what you have always thought and stop thinking it--as Sellars puts it, to just get over it . To open new lines of communication; to enter a wide-open state of mind in which a good enough reason for doing a thing is not having done it before.

Sellars fervently believes that the festival’s mandate to bridge the gaps between the city’s many ethnic groups through art and culture will create a fresh form of dialogue that could quite literally save the city. For Sellars, the process of creating such a festival is as important as the product . Although the festival does not begin until August, its most important phase has already begun: the planning stage, during which the communities represented in the festival begin to communicate, cogitate and disagree.

All the festivals have used a variety of locations citywide--the idea being to bring the arts directly to communities, rather than separate them behind the forbidding walls of established museums, performing arts complexes and other “irritating pieces of real estate,” as Sellars terms them.

Note: Sellars tends to divide the world--and art--not into “good” and “bad,” but into the “irritating” and the “interesting.” What he means can only be defined by a sampling from each category.

Irritating : The 1980s. Politicians and ideology. Money. Cultural superstructure (read: “Swan Lake,” Royal Shakespeare Company, Kennedy Center, Los Angeles Music Center). Freeways. Cars. The concept of success versus failure. Century City (“all you want to do there is end your life quickly”) and the many places that look exactly like it. And the mass media--a “type of reportage that treats the world as a frozen entity.”

Interesting : The 1990s. Culture. Movement. Plasticity. Ambiguity. Courage. Grass roots. The people you see when you travel through Koreatown or South-Central or almost any community you can think of except maybe Century City. Riding the bus. Shared activities, communities and the breakdown of boundaries--any kind. “The breakdown of morals in America is a pretty exciting thing,” he said cheerfully.

And under “interesting” falls the Los Angeles Festival. During this period of planning and fund-raising, Sellars is taking his message to classrooms, entertainment industry breakfast meetings, private homes, mosques, synagogues, community centers and anywhere he can get people to listen to the Gospel According to Peter.

This year, scrutiny of the festival will be intense: Its post-riot, post-Gulf War focus on African, African-American and Middle Eastern cultures is drawing attention not just from the media, but also from scholars, including a UCLA anthropologist, eager to study the experiment. Sellars is convinced it will work. But can he persuade Los Angeles?

What follows are a few highlights of an intense seven days, or maybe 10 or 12 (let’s not buy into that irritating concept known as a week ), during the festival’s planning stages as Sellars tries to do just that--as told by a casual visitor from the capitalist informational superstructure.

A Moving Interview

It is about 3 p.m., and every car in Los Angeles wants to turn right off 6th Street onto Western. Sellars needs to get from the Los Angeles Festival’s downtown headquarters to a meeting on Melrose. Sellars, a Pasadena resident, doesn’t drive, so one way to get him to sit still long enough to be interviewed is to put him in your car and take him somewhere.

His decision not to drive is political: “Public transportation is the key to making a democracy work,” he argues. One could argue that riding in other people’s cars kind of muddies the message. Sellars also frequently takes the bus.

He is hard to pin down. Formerly director of the American National Theater at Washington’s Kennedy Center and before that the Boston Shakespeare Company, Sellars augments his unpaid position as Los Angeles Festival director with multiple outside projects, including jetting to Salzburg, Austria, for the March opening there of his opera “Nixon in China,” which was performed at the Music Center during the 1990 festival. Sellars slides into the endless round of luncheons, community group meetings and performances like a baseball player into home plate--barely on time. He is often gone again before it’s over.

At night, this Prince of Constant Revision is almost always editing something: his video version of Kurt Weill’s “Seven Deadly Sins,” shot in France just after Christmas; a music video for the Third Symphony of avant-garde Polish composer Henryk Gorecki, the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, which recently astonished the record industry by climbing to No. 1 on the British classical charts and at the same time to No. 6 on the British pop charts. And Sellars is still at work cutting the footage of the last Los Angeles Festival for a documentary. “I can never leave anything alone,” he said.

Sellars’ moving-target style, at least where interviews are concerned, may have as much to do with media distrust as time constraints. “I don’t know if you have friends who have been written about in the newspaper, but they become the article. . . . People who see themselves on TV see themselves as more real (on TV) than in the room,” Sellars has said. “It’s this weird thing. And, of course, it’s not the reality. That’s what I said that afternoon--but the next afternoon, I was a different person.”

Here’s who Peter was at approximately 3 p.m. Friday, Feb. 26:

“I think a lot of it is about creating a cultural space that isn’t judgmental or normative, but is a place where we can actually see what’s going on and listen to it before we judge it,” Sellars said of the festival. “It’s not about e -valuation, it’s about valuation. How do you value something in life? We are surrounded by so many things in this city--how can they be correctly valued? . . . I think you just have to put something out there and give people a chance to respond. And I would like to think that the range of responses will help propel the next batch of thinking about what kind of city this could be.”

Peter’s theory will be officially tested by UCLA anthropologist Karen Ito, who will study the fest under a Ford Foundation grant. Her research seeks to answer this “meta-question”: “Can cultural organizations and activities serve as a common ground for different groups of people (cultural, racial, gender, age, class, local, international, et al.) to interact and to rethink interactions?” She has been involved in studies of a variety of sites, which throw new immigrants together with an established population, including a meat packing plant in Garden City, Kan., a tenement house in Chicago and the neighborhood of Monterey Park.

Not-so- meta -question: Does a festival that provokes “meta-questions” sound like any fun whatsoever?

Sellars believes the festival should transcend mere fun and take participants to a higher realm called pleasure . Do not expect a trip to Disneyland, he cautions. “The trouble with Disneyland is that you don’t learn a whole lot from it,” he mused. “It doesn’t actually take you inside a new world. . . . Art is about the deep questions of life.”

Talking Turkey in Redondo Beach

“There are 104 languages spoken at Hollywood High,” Sellars said exultantly. “That is either a complete catastrophe--or a beautiful opportunity. I think L.A. is the test tube.”

Sellars was talking to a group of about 30 people gathered on a recent Saturday night at the Redondo Beach home of Bulent Basol, president of the Assembly of Turkish-American Assns., a national group based in Washington. Basol’s wife, Sema, is part of a festival advisory committee.

Guests represented not only Turkey, but Bosnia-Herzegovina, Azerbaijan and other areas included in the festival’s program. Sellars has described the festival’s turf as “Turkey over to Pakistan, Armenia and Azerbaijan, down through the Sudan and down into Africa. We refuse to draw a line between the Middle East and Africa; for us they are contiguous cultural entities.”

Sellars--who tends to greet friends and new acquaintances alike with a Clinton-style hug--was selling the festival hard. “The economists have been devalued; the politicians have been discredited. Nobody wants to see them anymore. . . . I propose culture ,” he exhorted.

Although the Olympic Festival and the 1987 festival were called “international,” they were “mostly about England and France,” Sellars said disparagingly. Someone pointed out that there was a French guest in the crowd. “ Je regrette ,” Sellars apologized, laughing.

But he pressed his point--that the 1990 Pacific Rim festival and the 1993 festival, with its focus on the Middle East and Africa, better explore the cultural diversity of more recent waves of immigration to Los Angeles. He is fond of calling Los Angeles the “new Ellis Island.” “This is who’s here now ,” he said.

After the riots last spring, Sellars added, he expects media scrutiny to be intense. Never mind his stated aversion to the capitalist informational superstructure--that’s not who he is this day. Today, Sellars wants the New York Times and the Washington Post; he wants NBC’s “Today” show to turn hot lights on the festival. He is even planning to approach superstructure king Ted Turner about eventually presenting a documentary of the festival.

“During the last festival, of the 1,500 artists we presented, 900 of them lived in L.A. We have living treasures, these little communities all around us,” Sellars said. “A lot of eyes are on us, and our message will be heard all over the world.”

After Sellars left, Musid Sokolovich, 37, a Bosnian immigrant who is president of the American Bosnia-Herzegovina Assn., pulled a visitor away from the party chitchat. He has been in this country for 10 years, but his mother, Munira, and brother Sekib, a physician, left Sarajevo for California in October, 1991--only six months before their homeland was thrown into conflict.

Like Sellars, he wants his message heard around the world. His words about the conflict in his homeland were eloquent and brief. “We view this as an aggression against the whole of humanity,” Sokolovich said. “Not only us, but you , have been attacked.”

How Festive Was It?

In 1990, the Los Angeles Festival focused on the Pacific Rim in order to shed light on art forms rarely explored in the United States--as Sellars says, “We decided to get rid of Europe.” To further distance itself from elitism and Brie cheese, the 1990 fest offered free admission to 70% of its performances--up from just 2% in 1987. The festival also upped the number of performers represented, increased the number of different venues and included a larger number of Los Angeles-based artists than in previous years.

It was a grand experiment--and one that almost cost this exotic festival its brightly colored shirt.

Those who attended that summer’s festival could not help but marvel at the range and scope of the program, which brought the Cambodian Classical Dance Troupe and the Kun Opera of China to downtown Los Angeles, the Children of Bali to UCLA, Korean shamans to Pasadena, the Australian Aborigine dancers of the Woomera Mornington Island Culture Team to Griffith Park to party with yuppies and their kids. It introduced the city to such local phenomena as the Wat Thai Temple, an ornate wonder that sits near a gas station in North Hollywood.

But global consciousness is expensive. It took until last July for the festival to finally pay off the deficit for the $5.7-million 1990 fest, which ended $500,000 in the red. Previous festivals with a smaller scope and more ticketed events had managed to end just barely in the black.

Some festival watchers wondered afterward whether the attendance, much lower than predicted for many events, justified the price tag. Some in the arts said afterward that the whole festival was just too anthropological for a mainstream audience; one festival observer called it a “party for the cultural elite.” And much of Los Angeles never knew there was a 1990 Los Angeles Festival. It was kind of like an earthquake: Those at the epicenter were shaken by it; the rest of the city slept through it.

The busy program brochure--which resembled the inside of a Pier 1 store--was unreadable and off-putting. After the fact, even the buoyant Sellars acknowledged that the 1990 festival had “botched” a lot of the technical and organizational aspects, including publicity. It was too hard for the prospective audience to figure it out, he said.

This time, Sellars pledged, it won’t be hard. “Printing a brochure that people can read is not hard; it’s going to be fine,” he said patiently. “In the scope of things, that is truly solvable. There are plenty of other things that we are doing that are genuinely hard. Our task right now is the elaborate transformation of all this information coming in from all of these various committees, from all of these meetings all over the city, into a single, lucid program. That is quite a task.”

Peter in Hollywood

It was Feb. 24, the morning of the Grammys, and the music industry was in town. Power-breakfasting was rampant. New York-based David Bither, general manager of Elektra Records, surveyed the scene at Beverly Hills’ Four Seasons Hotel. “Everybody I saw here for lunch yesterday is here for breakfast,” he observed.

We don’t know whom Bither ate lunch with--but today he was breakfasting with Sellars, Los Angeles Festival music curator Bob Wisdom and two other record execs: Bob Hurwitz, senior vice president general manager of Elektra’s classical division, Nonesuch Records, also in from New York, and Steve Baker, vice president of product management for Warner/Reprise Records.

Sellars was trying to get the record honchos involved in the festival in a bigger way than just donating money. He noted that the best way to introduce an audience to new forms of music is to put them on a program with pop music acts with which the audience is already familiar.

“I think on each one of these programs there should be one mainstream act that makes everyone sit up and listen,” Sellars said.

The executives seemed intrigued and offered to help. “Nobody west of La Cienega knew the festival existed,” Hurwitz said of the 1990 event. “The L.A. Festival is not reaching a huge constituency that it needed to reach in order to be successful.”

Baker liked the focus of the festival on the Arab, African and Jewish communities. “That’s very Westside,” he said.

“Are the radio stations involved?” Bither asked. “How about connecting with Howard Stern?”

But it was Hurwitz who asked the ultimate Hollywood question: “How much does Mike Ovitz know about this stuff?”

Youth Culture

Sellars likes the generation coming of age in the ‘90s. He suggests that those who were swept up in the materialism of the ‘80s should be ashamed of themselves.

The festival has a board of directors, a 20-member steering committee of artists and arts administrators and SMART--a Social Marketing and Research Team of community advisers from outside the arts. It also has a Youth Council, made up of 30 high school students from the Greater Los Angeles area, who have been hashing out issues of race, class, sexuality and diversity.

One of their meetings took place in the board room of downtown’s Museum of Contemporary Art, usually the stamping ground of bankers and corporate CEOs.

“We wanted to really let the kids know they are making an impact,” Sellars said as he sat in the audience during a recent visit to Hollywood High, awaiting his appearance onstage as an award presenter at a Grammy in the Schools presentation.

“What kids are doing in Los Angeles is affecting what a kid is buying in a mall in Kansas. L.A. youth culture has gone all over the world,” Sellars said. “That, and big Hollywood. So let us plug into the most interesting of those two. You know--the one that has a future.” He laughed.

“This generation is buzzing,” he added, basking in the palpable energy of the young crowd, representatives of a wide range of Los Angeles area schools, both public and private. “During the uprising, it wasn’t just black people who were involved--it was a whole generation this city hasn’t made an investment in.”

Onstage, Peter couldn’t be ignored in his electric-blue suit and string of African beads. “It’s time to turn this country completely around,” he shouted to his amiably rowdy audience. “Just find something that needs doing and do it .”

Festival 1993

Although the Los Angeles Festival organization may drop its usual geographic focus next time around, festival officials agreed that 1993 was not the time to do it.

During the 1990 festival, Sellars announced that the 1993 fest would explore Africa and the Middle East. That was before the Gulf War, before the riots, before the World Trade Center bombing in New York. In the meantime, Sellars and other festival officials have begun to question whether the festival should set up geographical boundaries at all.

But festival planners agree that suddenly dropping an African or African-American theme so soon after the riots, or rejecting the Middle East as a focus during that region’s ongoing turmoil, would, quite simply, appear to be wimping out. As much as the festival is trying to move beyond politics, festival officials acknowledge that the politics of this city, and the world, cannot be ignored.

“Announcing a geographic focus was useful in at least calling attention to a whole range of issues and peoples who are not customarily represented on the larger stages of this community,” Sellars said. “I think we will carry that forward, but once that is said and done, we will move on. We will move on because we have a larger mission than that.

“I hope one of the points we are proving is that the world can no longer be defined geographically. During the last festival, more than half the artists lived in Los Angeles. You were seeing Filipino hill tribes giving performances of enormous sophistication and complexity, and they didn’t get on an airplane to come here. What’s interesting is that you can’t define hill tribes of the northern Philippines by the hills of the northern Philippines. They have to be defined by Reseda now.

“All these old definitions are breaking down. That’s the elation of being alive in this period, where all these old identities are crumbling. In this generation, we have to come up with new ones that move across other lines. That’s a great relief--that old identities are genuinely, truly obsolete.”

Sellars stopped talking because here was Melrose and it was time to get out of the car. Time to move on to the next meeting, the next identity, the next communication, maybe a moment of beauty.