Here and There, The 1990 L. A. Festival

Abstract

Featuring the work of artists from 22 different countries and of more than 900 artists from Southern California, the 1990 Los Angeles Festival went long way toward enacting the promise and problems ofcultural diversity in the United States. With budget of $5.2 million and schedule of 290 performances over 16 days, the thesis of the Festival was that the city of Los Angeles is home the world, and particularly cultures of the Pacific Rim. Halfway between scholarly reverence and Western avant-garde assemblage, the L.A. Festival's attitude toward art, spirituality, and cultural difference was at once respectful and unabashedly confident. Absolutely no hand-wringing Western guilt was entertained. Nor, more troubling, was there any sense that any or culture was fundamentally inaccessible the citizens of the new world city of Los Angeles. By now many reports of the Festival have appeared in the academic and popular press.1 These almost all glowing accounts have stressed the curatorial feats, the unreadable program, the murky L.A. city maps, the heroic collaborative labor of Peter Sellars, Judith Mitoma, and Norman Frisch, the Festival director, curator, and associate director, respectively. And many of the writers from the U.S. make much of the fact that the L.A. Festival was the first International Arts Festival to throw out its own presumed central culture, borrow the words of Elinor Fuchs (1990: oo) in order discover the works ofother cultures. By focusing on the Pacific Rim, the L.A. Festival did more than highlight underrepresented arts and cultures in the city of dreams. It also declared outright that the traditional distinctions which map Western high arts-music, dance, theatre-as separate genres are inadequate descriptive devices for contemporary in an international frame. More than geopolitical refocusing, the program for the L.A. Festival also emphasized work whose meaning and function is spiritual and/or historical and traditional. In this way the programming offered an implicit challenge U.S. work based largely on political opposition or rooted in the context of the art world. As Don Shewey argues, the L.A. Festival represents a challenge American [sic] artists: What is your morality? Where is your soul? How does God fit into your picture, and how do you expect others locate the divinity in your work? (1990:17). These questions for contemporary U.S. artists, as Shewey correctly points out, cannot be left the Right. But surely the neat distinction between political work and spirituality is false one; who can say if Bill T. Jones' most recent choreography, for example, is more inspired by spiritual quest or new concept of political agency? The real achievement of contemporary U.S.