Art Festival

To many arts lovers, France wouldn't be France without its summer festivals of theater, dance, music and other diversions. But it wouldn't be France without its strikes either. For the last several months, striking workers have paralyzed public transport, administrative services and mail delivery in this country, and now culture is the target. In recent days, some of France's best-known summer arts festivals have been disrupted, suspended or simply canceled.

Santa Ana expects more than 250,000 people to attend its fiesta to commemorate independence for Latin American nations. Organizers hope the crowd drawn downtown to the weekend-long event will be even more diverse than last year's.

My favorite memory of the first Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival two years ago was standing in the middle of the Empire Polo Field in Indio and being overwhelmed by music coming from five distant stages. I could hear the roars of the separate crowds as rival bands and DJs took the stages and I tried to decide which one to check out.

Wearing layers of black except for immaculate white sneakers, Judith Jamison climbs out of a van in front of the Capitol Theatre and dances a few fast, playful steps on the icy street. A former star of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre and now the company's artistic director, she is one of the dance world's most articulate advocates. But dance isn't the first thing she wants to talk about when she meets a visitor inside a theater conference room.

Sunday night at CalArts, a barefoot, quietly bustling team of performers-workers were busily realizing a piece called "Rain." In the school's main gallery space, a layer of white dust was slowly laid in a circle, akin to the sand mandalas made by Tibetan monks. Next, a vast number of white helium balloons were anchored to form a surreal, rubbery cloud formation overhead. All was eerily quiet, except for the occasional "pop!" of an escapee from the balloon population.

Wyatt Mills likes to surf, play hockey and strum his electric guitar, but his heroes are not athletes or rock stars. "I like Monet," says the 10-year-old Malibu resident, adding with conviction that he has no desire to surf or play music for a living. "I think I might want to be a painter," he says.

As the sky sets pink over curling blue roofs, green pagodas and a giant papier-mache Buddha, a procession of elaborately costumed Chinese royalty snakes through a lantern-strung street in Chinatown. One empress for the evening is pulled in on her rickshaw. Draped in pink silk, she wears ornamental blue fingernails sharp as claws and blue-tassled silk slippers with a gently curved, centered platform heel. Another empress wears a towering headdress like a phoenix--adorned with pearls and feathers.

A concert oasis or a fleeting mirage? That was the question in October 1999, when a group of maverick promoters from Los Angeles headed to the desert to launch the Coachella Music and Arts Festival, a sprawling, European-style event that aspired to become a Southern California tradition. Fans of cutting-edge music were enthused by the lineup--Beck and Rage Against the Machine led the list, and the deep roster was dense with electronic dance stars--but there was also good reason for skepticism.

Artists who want to exhibit work at the Festival of Arts 2001 summer show may submit slides of their best pieces and an application to the festival committee by Feb. 28. The festival is a regional exhibit open to artists who have lived in one of the following areas for the past 12 months: Aliso Viejo, Costa Mesa, Dana Point, Irvine, Laguna Beach, Laguna Hills, Laguna Niguel, Laguna Woods, Newport Beach, San Clemente and San Juan Capistrano.