Los Angeles Festival

Karole Armitage, a thoughtful modernist who can boast Merce Cunningham training and secondhand-Balanchine indoctrination, used to be celebrated as the princess of punk. Or reviled as such. Now, after a fashionable fashion, she has gone straight. Relatively pure ballet is her thing. The unblushing Los Angeles Festival brochure hails her as "one of the most influential dance artists in the world." It also describes her rise to prominence as "dizzying."

For some choreographers, the essence of dance is metaphor. Take metaphor away from dance, they say, and you take away its poetry. Other choreographers disagree. In this crowd, metaphor is the culprit that has led to dance being taken hostage by traditional theater. These choreographers proclaim their loyalty to movement taken on its own terms. Unabashed physicality is the name of their game.

Trivia question: Who played the trumpet in the 1955 movie "Pete Kelly's Blues?" The answer is not Jack Webb, who played the central character; it was Dick Cathcart of Woodland Hills who made the sounds that emerged from Webb's horn. Cathcart and other original members of the movie band, Pete Kelly's Big 7, will perform Friday at the Embassy Theatre, co-presented by the Los Angeles Festival and the L. A. Classic Jazz Festival. Cathcart and Webb go back a long way.

"The Mahabharata" figured to be the big news of the first week of the Los Angeles Festival, and it was. But not the only news. The festival's opening act, for example, Le Cirque du Soleil, turned out to be not just another circus. Here were the traditional skills in the traditional tent, but seen from a different angle, a somewhat dreamlike one, as if we were watching the show through the eyes of a child.

When he left here 10 years ago, eight seasons after launching the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and--before that--having made an international name with the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Neville Marriner set out bravely to conquer the symphonic world. No more Baroque scholarship. No more Classical miniatures. No more da camera settings.

The Los Angeles Festival ends Sunday after nearly a month of performances by more than 30 dance, theater and music groups from countries around the world. Which events made the greatest impression? Calendar put that question to several festivalgoers. " 'La Boheme' was one of the greatest operas I've ever seen. Beautifully done. Placido Domingo and Angelique Burzynski were magnificent. They stole the show.

I try to tell my kids, if they can see only one play for the rest of their lives, go see "The Mahabharata . " . . . We're having the Ganges River flow through a sound stage in Hollywood! --Robert J.

After a delay caused partly by a greater demand for tickets than predicted, organizers of the Los Angeles Festival plan to start sending out tickets for the September arts event today. "We had many more ticket orders than we had even hoped for," said Leigh Drolet, festival associate director and general manager Thursday. About $1.1 million in ticket orders had been received by the festival box office as of Wednesday, Drolet said.

It seems fitting that the penultimate concert of the Los Angeles Festival's Cage Celebration was devoted to percussion music. Cage, after all, has always marched to the beat of a different drummer. Actually, somewhere around 1950, his march turned into more of a mosey. The changes in pace and direction of Cage's musical journey were quite apparent in "Percussion: That Unexpected Touch," at the Tom Bradley Theatre Friday evening.

In many ways, John Cage is the Mister Rogers of contemporary music. Soft-spoken and gentle, he loves all sounds with a wide-eared, impartial wonder. He also makes word constructs with the same eager simplicity as he builds music, and Wednesday evening both were on display in the Tom Bradley Theatre of the Los Angeles Theatre Center. (The compleat Cage aficionado could view some of Cage's graphic art in an adjacent room.