Postcards from the Rim

BE Im - --'~rl-'1| L E A| " Postcards From The Rim JohnJ.Flynn Issues, Questions, and a Serpent THE WOOMERA MORNINGTON ISLAND CULTURE TEAM originates from an island north of Queensland, Australia. They travel about Australia, giving performances in schools to illustrate aspects of Aboriginal culture. They perform in front of a huge backdrop on which is drawn a map of Australia and a number of important animals and natural features, the most prominent ofwhich is a huge snake. This snake is the Rainbow Serpent: on the backdrop it is wrapped around and bisects the entire continent. It is this creature, the story goes, which brought human culture to Australia. In the story, the serpent has traveled through Australia leaving many of the continent's famous natural features in its wake. And, according to legend, when it died, the parts of its body became the first human instruments: the woomera, the boomerang, the spear, and so on. So too with the Los Angeles Festival, 1990. That serpent wound itself through Los Angeles, surfacing here and there, invisible to some and unavoidable to others. It changed the landscape for a few, and yielded its gifts to a city that was hungry for them. Physically, this Serpent had great Balinese fertility poles for its spine: 1520 foot, brightly colored slashes of fabric with 1-2 foot streamers at the top. These poles announced Festival sights, places where the Serpent had surfaced. For scales, the festival posters were everywhere. Some bore Woomera dancers, some a Javanese dancer, others an actress from El Gran Circo Teatro de Chile and some a Bread and Puppet character. All shared the same graphic principals: dark lettering on a dark, saturated background. 96 Many people could neither read them nor the ticket program which bore a similar design scheme. Who was this festival for? What did the Serpent want with us? The festival was certainly not what it was publicized as, for it was not just a "Pacific Rim" Festival. Even for Los Angeles the notion of a large Pacific Rim Festival is daring-but what if it were a front for something more risky? It's exactly not that part of the mall where they have all the international restaurants around and you can get food from many nations in 25 seconds. It's not that. It's very specifically one artist's attempt to find certain points of resonance across a wide range of work, and a wide range of possibilities now in terms of vocabularies and cultural inheritances. Peter Sellars The agendas behind the festival were certainly far beyond simple aesthetic goals, for it sought to remap the city politically and socially for its inhabitants. Yet what impact did it have on the larger community? Before addressing these questions, and the performers, spaces and audiences that played them out, perhaps a little cultural geography is in order. Around what was the Serpent wound? Greetingsfrom Los Angeles . . . like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, I learned to drive to read Los Angeles in the original. Reyner Banham, Los Angeles, The Architecture of FourEcologies Los Angeles is a city which, according to conventional notions, has no center.Joan Didion declared that Los Angeles is the "intersection of nothing," and Los Angeles long ago appropriated (from Oakland) the Steinism, "there's no there there." There is no neighborhood gathering place, no cafe or bar where I can go and expect to see a few people whom I know. Assembling a group of friends for some activity is always a conscious act requiring a good deal of forethought. When such an assembly comes together, a main concern seems to be freeway logistics: how we got here, and how we're going to get back. It is a city built by and for automobiles, where most people are either at home, at work, or in transit. That's the price we pay for the sense of wealth, freedom, and the mobility that Angelenos savor. Nobody walks in L.A. Then again, all of this is nonsense. People do walk in L.A. Located between 97 the asphalt beltways, on...