From the Plaza, For the People: L.A.’s Grand Performances Turns Public Space into Gathering Place, Outsiders into Arts Lovers

Los Angeles’ premier free concert series Grand Performances has changed the city, and changed lives. This is no idle boast, as Grand Performances’ executive director Michael Alexander will tell you.

He’s heard from a man who lost his condo to medical expenses after a health crisis and who shared how the dance, theater, film, and music kept him from despair. Alexander has heard from skateboarders kicked off the series’ site for skateboarding but who came back for the free shows and became avid fans of avant-garde jazz and Japanese taiko drumming.

Held in an expansive outdoor plaza with 1.5 acres of fountains, the series has helped turn downtown L.A. from commercial ghost town into family-friendly neighborhood.  It has springboarded dozens of innovative L.A. artists to major concert halls and has raised a generation of Angelinos to expect high-quality, open-minded programming from opera to Afropop.

“In a Grand Performances audience, I’ve seen nearly every available human prototype currently in production. That is unique,” exclaims L.A. musician, composer, and leader of daKAH Hip Hop Orchestra, Double G, whose ongoing relationship to Grand Performances has transformed his career. “Add the ‘free’ and ‘all ages’ element to the equation and the city has a tremendous resource to draw from.”

“I’ve heard that  the Guatemalan and Salvadoran women who work hard to clean nearby office buildings catch the end of a rehearsal as they are getting off work and then bring their kids back the next day to see the performance,” Alexander recounts. “When we screened the premiere of the L.A. Opera’s Il Postino, Placido Domingo and the composer, Daniel Catán, were amazed at the number of people, including children from all walks of life in attendance.”

Its location in downtown L.A.’s financial district, a section of the city once deserted after work hours, has boosted this broad appeal. “Downtown is neutral,” says Alexander, himself a native Angeleno. “It doesn’t belong to any one community, so it can belong to all.” And many avid concertgoers have emerged to claim it: Attendance at Grand Performances shows have leaped from a few hundred when the series began 25 years ago to nearly six thousand at major events like a 2006 screening of An Inconvenient Truth, when Bon Jovi played an acoustic set as Al Gore looked on.

Grand Performances played a major role in “demystifying downtown,” as Alexander puts it. “The residential population of downtown has tripled since 2000. There’s been a lot of adaptive reuse, and abandoned office buildings have been turned into lofts. Now there are locals, including families, and they know that they can come to any show and have a great experience.”

Audience diversity—economic, ethnic, and generational—is to be expected, as Alexander notes, because “everyone wants quality art in their lives.” It’s also a natural response to the eclectic approach espoused by director of programming Leigh Ann Hahn. Hahn has honed an intuitive sense of how to draw audiences into novel art forms and sounds. 

She  requested the Sun Ra Arkestra to play their unique interpretations of Ellington and Disney classics so that audiences would have a musical reference and  in turn become more familiar with the group. She’s organized workshops featuring hip hop DJs, and turntablists, then watched with glee as grandparents who had never stepped inside a club learned how to scratch alongside their grandchildren.

Hahn has become an expert at finding the edgy yet appealing artists who help fulfill Grand Performances’ primary goal of reaching out to and inspiring L.A.’s many ethnic and cultural communities. “My idea of community is where people of all types blend together as one. We can all self identify in many ways at once: ethnicity and age, where we live and our socio-economic backgrounds, say,” Hahn explains. “My goal is to produce programs that will find connection points with many of our city's different communities, so artists whose cultural or artist descriptions contain slashes and hyphens frequently best fit that bill.”

When she finds these artists locally, Hahn and Grand Performances work to nurture performers with everything from commissions for new works to mentoring in arts administration and promotion. In this, Grand Performances is more than concert producer; it’s also an arts incubator, helping many new artists break out of the underground.

Ongoing friendly ties to local artists often pay off big for performers as well as audiences:  Well-received commissions for Grand Performances, Double G’s daKAH Hip Hop Orchestra   was tapped to play several major venues around the city. “It lifted the veil of fear of booking daKAH,” Double G reflects. “It is a symbiotic relationship; daKAH has a ‘for the people’ vibe, just like Grand Performances does.”

Supplementary travel pitch

Easy to access, Grand Performances lets visitors in on the real L.A., beyond the glitz, hype, and theme parks. Come for a spur-of-the-moment celebration that can fit any traveler’s budget—you’ll often see groups marking a birthday or anniversary on the upstairs level above the plaza. Bring along a picnic, a bottle of California wine, and settle in as many Angelinos do, to catch some of the best of the city’s vibrant multi-faceted culture. The come-as-you-are atmosphere means you can experience adventurous arts from Los Angeles and around the globe the way Angelenos have for two and a half decades.

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