Los Angeles Downtown News, Interview - SummerStage >>
A Quarter-Century Grand Slam: Cal Plaza Gets Ready for its 25th Season of Eclectic, Dynamic Concerts and Events
By: Ryan Vaillancourt
DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES - Last Tuesday, Leigh Ann Hahn rushed into a cluttered office just off the Cal Plaza Watercourt, five minutes late for a meeting. The normally effusive director of programming for Grand Performances wasn’t quite herself, she acknowledged. Her head was still groggy from 23 hours of flying.
Hahn, who for 20 years has overseen the ceaseless talent search for the popular summer series of free Bunker Hill arts programs, had been delayed leaving Buenos Aires. She was attending an invite-only arts conference. The Argentine mission was devoted in part to finding some talent beyond the well-established tango world that she could bring to her Downtown Los Angeles stage.
“Everything is tango, tango, tango, which, don’t get me wrong, is great, but I wanted to see what’s new that’s emerging from their folk tradition?” said Hahn, whose office at Cal Plaza is a messy library of compact discs that have outgrown the shelves, spilling into two-foot piles on a desk.
It’s no mistake that Grand Performances, which begins its 25th season with three concerts this weekend, leans heavily on world music. This summer, it features afrobeat star Seun Kuti and Egypt 80, the band formerly led by his father, the legend Fela Kuti. A week after that, there’s a performance by Baloji, a Congolese-Belgian rapper, followed later by renowned Iranian songstrees Sussan Deyhim. Another night is devoted to the New York Latin music label Fania Records.
It’s a far cry from what city planners and redevelopment officials must have been thinking more than two decades ago when they planted the seeds for what has become the city’s most diverse free music series. In the early 1980s, as part of Mayor Tom Bradley’s vision to create a very corporate Bunker Hill, they saw a need to sprinkle the burgeoning white-collar capital with some culture.
Part of that vision was a performing arts series to be held in a new public space built in 1986 along with the dual skyscraper complex California Plaza. In its fledgling years, the series programmed twice weekly mid-day concerts for office workers at lunch. There were also occasional evening and weekend shows.
It didn’t happen quickly, but over the last quarter century, and in particular during the last decade of Downtown residential development, the series has exploded in reputation and crowd size.
“What started as a very grassroots, small-scale project has blossomed into an international, widely funded organization,” said Susan Gray, cultural planner for the Community Redevelopment Agency. “There’s all sorts of stuff that’s well above and beyond what we ever imagined of that space and we’re very happy for that.”
As the series that exposed many to acts like Ozomatli and the Diavolo Dance Theatre gets set to embark on a season with 27 performances through Sept. 25, the challenge is not getting people to come. It’s finding them seats once they get there.
Weekend nights at the Watercourt take on a festive mood even before Grand Performances events, when wine-laden picnics pepper the surrounding plaza. By the encore, most of the audience, which can grow to more than 5,000 on world music nights, is dancing.
While the series has changed markedly over the years, earning a national reputation and growing the local audience, its mission hasn’t really shifted. When the CRA mandated that the Cal Plaza developers pay for regular artistic programming, the agency also directed the organizers to try to attract a diverse audience. Michael Alexander, Grand Performances’ executive director for 23 years, credits the focus on diversity for the group’s success.
“The program from the very beginning demonstrated an all-come-down and enjoy yourselves kind of image and that has lasted,” Alexander said. “It’s in this corporate environment, but people of all the different neighborhoods and socioeconomic classes of L.A. who come here realize that they are as welcome as anyone else. That has been critical to the civic-ization of Grand Performances.”
The World, Locally
Hahn finds the talent for Grand Performances the old-fashioned way. She talks to people, mostly to artists, and asks what they’re listening to. She doesn’t read blogs, she said. Instead, she travels.
The series has earned a reputation in the city’s cultural scene for being ahead of the curve, said Raul Campos, who DJs weeknights on local NPR affiliate KCRW 89.9 FM, which is hosting two Grand Performances concerts this summer. One of those events features New York DJ Joe Claussell, who will spin selections from Fania Records’ salsa-heavy vaults while a six-piece band plays along with the recorded vinyl.
“They have their finger on the pulse,” Campos said. “I didn’t even know about the Joe Clausell thing until Grand Performances called me. I’m like, ‘How did you find out about this? I didn’t even know about it.’ They’re on it.”
Some artists that make it to the Grand Performances stage are well-known. Others are under the radar, at least in Los Angeles. When the daKAH Hip Hop orchestra first played Grand Performances in 2001, it was the group’s biggest stage to date. Laura Connelly, director of presentations for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, was there. The show helped convince her that daKAH would work at Walt Disney Concert Hall, which booked the L.A. group for the Grand Avenue venue’s first season.
“They have a built-in audience, but really anybody can go down and check it out on a Friday or Saturday night, so it’s a really good benchmark for us,” Connelly said.
In addition to music, the season features dance, theater and film — screenings this year include the documentary Crime After Crime and the 1917 classic Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. There are lectures too. This year, historian and kitsch king Charles Phoenix will debut a new L.A. slideshow, and David Ornette Cherry and Terry Wolverton will present a work-in-progress jazz opera.
Beyond the focus on international sounds and sights, Grand Performances’ programmatic anchor is with local artists. This summer, there’s a six-event series about Boyle Heights. One night will recreate the Phillips Music Company, a once stalwart music store in the melting pot neighborhood. Another night will present slam poetry and spoken word from Boyle Heights artists representing its Jewish, Mexican and Japanese heritage.
“The Boyle Heights Project is perfect,” said David Kipen, founder of the Boyle Heights lending library Libros Schmibros. “They’re sort of trying to recapture a Los Angeles diaspora that migrated out from the city many years ago, and lately is sort of centripetally trying to in-gather.”
Full-Time Fundraising
Grand Performances may not be a commercial enterprise, but its funding stems directly from the array of mostly white-collar firms that keep offices in Cal Plaza.
When Maguire Properties built the project in the mid-1980s and early ’90s it inked a 100-year ground lease with the city. That deal required the developer to build the Watercourt, with its mini-amphitheater, and to funnel a portion of tenant rents to support operations of the series.
When those funds kicked in, in 1992, the budget for Grand Performances, which was then known as California Plaza Presents, was $643,498. This year, the tenant contribution portion is about $864,000. Grand Performances raises nearly $1 million in additional funds every year from private donors, foundations and grants.
Organizers also pass a bucket at every event — Alexander is the guy in the Panama hat with the microphone, soliciting donations — and attendees are generous, Alexander said.
Among his duties as executive director, Alexander has the annual responsibility of enforcing one of Grand Performances’ only hard-and-fast rules that attendees, at least once a year, try to break: No dancing in the fountain.
It’s not always easy. Last year, the French gypsy jazz band Caravan Palace whipped a near-capacity crowd into a gyrating frenzy and enticed them to take their happy feet into the pool. Alexander, concerned about damage to the fountain and the possibility of injury, took to the stage between songs and admonished the audience to get out. He stayed there until everyone did.
To some attendees, the prohibition is a buzz-kill. But against Alexander’s wishes, it may be the best endorsement of the series that he’s steered for more than two decades.
“The fact that both artists and audience members want to get in the water is a beautiful thing because that means they’re doing their job,” said Josh Kun, director of the Popular Music Project at USC. “They’re giving people a stage to express community and a communion with the artists. The artists want the crowd to want to come closer and that’s a real testament to what Grand Performances does.”
Grandest of the Grand
Some of the Standouts From the 27-Show Series
Friday, June 17, 8:30 p.m.: The 25th season begins with the city Department of Cultural Affairs presenting two new theater pieces. Ian Ruskin’s one-man play To Begin the World Over Again: the Life of Thomas Paine delves into one of the nation’s most radical and misunderstood figures, the man who started the American Revolution. It’s paired with Sheethal Gandhi’s Human Nature, a work-in-progress dance theater piece inspired by Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree.
Saturday, June 18, 8 p.m.: The first installment of the Boyle Heights Project, “Tongue and Groove” is an offering of short fiction, essays, poetry, spoken word and music. Each of the program’s 10 artists will represent part of Boyle Heights’ multiethnic (Latino, Jewish and Japanese) past and present.
Sunday June 19, 8 p.m.: Librettist Terry Wolverton teams up with composer David Ornette Cherry for a jazz opera that fuses world music, hip-hop grooves, song and spoken word. Directed by Michael John Garces, Embers spins a tale of forgiveness and redemption.
July 7-8, 8 p.m.: L.A.’s celebrated modern dance company Diavolo Dance Theater is a unique collection of gymnasts, acrobats, athletes and actors. Also on the bill is Colombia’s Noruz. The piece Suite para Barrotes y Presos (Suite for Bars and Prisoners) features two dancers and an actress in a work that looks at women in that country’s prison system.
July 15, 8 p.m.: Seun Kuti and Egypt 80 bring afrobeat dance funk. Just try not to dance.
July 29, noon: Grace and passion mark the Shoghaken Ensemble’s music of Armenia, both modern and traditional.
06/10/11 >> go there
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