FESTIVAL

JULY

ARTS FAIR

The pseudo-sylphs of Charles Ludlam. New couch-potato classics. New dealers downtown. New life in Cocoon. Art is all. All is fair.

California Dreamin'

Irene Borger

The power of imagining is now recognized by athletes in training, by cancer patients, and by at least one top-ofthe-Forbes Four Hundred-list mogul who swears he built his empire by envisioning it all. Now the organizers of a weeklong arts festival are asking a city to entertain the unruly notion that life on this planet will prevail.

The festival, "August, 1945/August, 1985: Imagine There's a Future,'' takes place in Los Angeles from July 28 through August 4. Like many other events across the country, it commemorates the fortieth anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet this festival is a forward-looking affair; it will also be "a celebration of life." And, as if to make the point in true L.A. style, the whole thing was kicked off in April with a celebrity fund-raiser fashion show.

L.A. has long taken a bad rap on the activist front. One assumes that Angelenos, choosing hedonism over Hegel, prefer, in all aspects of their lives, to drive alone. In truth, much of the Zeitgeist and power in the city is invisible only until one's eyes adjust to a different sort of light. "Imagine" is no pious pageant, but, rather, a weave of enlivening events.

The fashion show, with dresses by Holly Harp, was sponsored by the yearold Hollywood Women's Coalition—a group of powerful movie-industry women who have joined to address key social issues—in conjunction with the Interfaith Center to Reverse the Arms Race and Hollywood for SANE. Anjelica Huston glided. Jo Anne Worley attempted a debutante slouch. The Divine Miss M, in basic black, camped it up all the way down the aisle. Surely, radical Emma ("If there's no dancing at the revolution, I'm not coming") Goldman would have understood when Bette Midler, asked if she wanted to talk about the issue of nuclear war, cracked, "No, I want to talk about sequins." Collective action was brewing in the Beverly Hills Hotel Crystal Room among the silver /aMje-bamboo chairs.

If one of the goals of the festival is to bring together communities that rarely coalesce in sprawling L.A., one of the behind-the-scenes facts is the strength of the networks that already exist. There are some first-rate Rolodexes in service to the cause. One member of the Women's Coalition recalls "watching the Oscars at the home of a woman who promised to call Carl Sagan's wife; in the meantime, I was on the phone trying to find someone who'd dated Bruce Springsteen in the past six months." It's like that down the line.

Although the film community has the most high-profile participants— Hollywood for SANE'S members include Debra Winger, Norman Lear, Jack Lemmon, and John Forsythe— there are at least forty other groups collaborating on the events of the week, from psychologists and scientists to Atomic Bomb Survivors Living in the U.S.A. On the first day of the celebratory week, they will be occupied with creative problem solving at ten "town meetings" held throughout the city ("How does the nuclear issue affect the environment, sexuality, the arts...''). That program will culminate in a symposium, box supper, and all-star panel that night.

Hollywood for SANE will coproduce the festival's theatrical component; Richard Dreyfuss, Michael York, Julie Harris,

Jean Stapleton, and Gena Rowlands are some of the actors who plan to perform in a dozen theaters scattered around L.A.

Writers for the potpourri evening of twoto twenty-twominute pieces include David Mamet, Larry Gelbart, Arthur Kopit, Garry Trudeau and Elizabeth Swados, Jules Feiffer,

John Hersey, and Shel Silverstein. At each of the venues, one member of Local 1845 of the steelworkers' union (which has long been involved in a theater project) will perform with a cast of professional actors.

The festival programming reflects the blue-collar as well as the blue-chip, since the basic issues behind it scale all social walls. Therefore, the organizers are seeing to it that the week is not a series of purely upscale affairs. The multiplecommunity focus extends to the visualarts events as well.

An exhibition of contemporary fine arts at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center will include works by Ed Ruscha, Ed Kienholz, and Jonathan Borofsky. A group of local artists will show more directly political work at various galleries. The photography component of the festival will reach a broad audience: the municipal bus authority has been persuaded to donate the advertising space on up to two hundred buses for at least one month. Approximately twenty photographs have been selected to fill that space, with one condition: no mushroom-cloud imagery or its equivalent. The original works, including those of Leland Rice and Jake Seniuk, will be mounted in the U.S.C. Atelier Gallery in Santa Monica, and the buses will carry reproductions.

The week will end with a huge march and rally, and the "energy'' (as they really do say in L.A.) surrounding the event is so good that Bill Graham has agreed to produce a rock concert for free.

The performing arts have always maintained that conjured images are real. Dorothy makes it back to Kansas by thinking "there's no place like home." Even Woody Allen, in Manhattan, connects by simply imagining some of the things that make his life worthwhile: Groucho Marx, Willie Mays, Louis Armstrong's recording of "Potato Head Blues." If the festival is successful, imagining that there's a future just may ensure one.