Cultural Adventurer

At a recent Wednesday-morning staff meeting for the 2002 World Festival of Sacred Music, the main topic is how to get the world of Southern California to come to the world of sacred music.

The woman in charge, intercultural guru Judy Mitoma, asks for the latest developments from the communications front. She speaks softly but firmly, her bright eyes and incipient smile inviting all contributions. One publicist proudly reports that a newspaper has decided to feature two specific concerts in small “pick” items, maybe with photographs.

This ostensibly good news is met with a crushed look from Mitoma. “But we want to be inclusive,” she says. “What about the other 53 events?”

Herein lies just a small indication of the optimism, ambition and demanding nature of the relentlessly inclusive Mitoma, director of the World Festival of Sacred Music, which began Saturday. Around the table in a basement conference room at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, where the festival shares space with Mitoma’s Center for Intercultural Performance, there is a moment of silence.

Perhaps more than one person is thinking about the way things work in the publicizing business--mainly that star power sells. Or else they’re already converted to Mitoma’s belief that if you promise musical adventure and communal togetherness, they will come, even if they’ve never heard of Lifou Island and its dancers or can’t define the word “gamelan.” In Mitoma’s words, people should come because “it will be good.”

Everything will be good?

“Everything,” Mitoma insists after the meeting. “It’s not about celebrity concerts, it’s about stepping into territory where you’ll encounter something different, something about our city and about yourself.”

In 1999, the first World Festival of Sacred Music got a public relations boost from no less a star than the Dalai Lama.

In Dharamsala, India, his holiness publicly called sacred music--music that expresses inner yearnings for peace in all cultures--an appropriate way to usher in the new millennium. In Westwood, Mitoma heard the call and, bingo, a few organizational nightmares later, a whole festival came together in October.

Word of mouth was good, even ecstatic. The Dalai Lama brought his glow to several events, and there were reports of musically magical moments and supremely optimistic connectedness--some of them from critics.

After a few precarious financial moments in 1999, the festival not only broke even, but also realized a small profit. Still, the size of the thing--84 events in nine days--and the budget perils took their toll on organizers’ nerves. Mitoma took a year or so afterward to think about whether to tackle a second edition.

Ultimately, she says it was audience enthusiasm at a showing of a festival video in 2001 that persuaded her to do it all again. Just over a year ago, staffers were hired, and Mitoma and her fellow founding board members--environmental activist Andrew Beath of the Earthways Foundation, and fund-raiser Jodie Evans--started planning in earnest.

A few lessons had been learned along the way. For all the goodwill engendered in 1999, people complained that there were too many competing events. With the budget set at slightly under the $1 million it took last time, it was decided that in 2002 there would be more time to take in fewer events.

To create the program, local artists and presenters were invited to orientation meetings and asked to submit proposals, as they had been in 1999. Mitoma and others also sent out feelers to performers from around the world. When videos and applications rolled in, they were screened by Mitoma and her staff, then a selection went to a curatorial panel for the final cut. They kept three things in mind as they considered how well different candidates fit with their criteria for sacred music: Did it come from a particular spiritual tradition? Were there sacred words used? Did it give those in the room a feeling of the spiritual or sacred?

The process didn’t avoid stars, but it didn’t emphasize them either. There are some famous names, like the Whirling Dervishes of Damascus and the L.A. Philharmonic, which will play the Mozart Requiem at the new cathedral, and qawwali singer Rahat Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. But then there is also that gamelan--which is a Balinese “orchestra” of bells, gongs and xylophones. In this case, it’s called Cudamani and directed by Mitoma’s son-in-law, I Dewa Putu Berata.

The festival seems to specialize in a mix of seemingly disparate groups performing side by side. In 1999, there was a gospel choir jamming with cantors at a synagogue. This time, programs bring together African, Japanese, jazz and Native American drummers at the Watts Towers, and, in San Pedro, a joyful noise from Jewish, Christian, African and Bolivian traditions at the Warner Theater.

In all there are 55 events, over 16 days, in 43 venues all over greater Los Angeles.

Since the countdown to the festival began, Mitoma’s schedule has consisted of wall-to-wall meetings, negotiations and problem-solving. The early mornings have recently been devoted to making room in her own Mar Vista garage to store the gamelan instruments. It’s not unusual for her workday to stretch until nearly midnight.

No one, least of all Mitoma, shows panic at the morning meeting just a few weeks before the festival begins. She calmly sails through details, many of which reveal the festival’s grass-roots sensibility. Mitoma asks everyone to contribute list-servs from friends and colleagues, so that the Internet’s power can spread the word.

Then people report where brochures will be handed out, at community gatherings over Labor Day, at farmers markets during the week, at hotels and record stores. Mitoma reports that invitations for a VIP reception before the Royce concert are being mailed as soon as they come out of the color printer next to her desk--a cost-cutting measure she’s proud of.

The atmosphere is cautiously cheerful, but before the 90-minute meeting is over and people scatter to their after-meeting meetings, a negative cloud threatens. Two prominent public radio stations have rejected coverage of the festival. This calls for another of Mitoma’s many shifts into inspirational-speaker mode. “Make a case for coverage, don’t hold back,” she advises. “Only good things will come from your efforts. I can’t understand why they wouldn’t want to cover it.” She looks genuinely perplexed.

In the dance community and around the UCLA department of world arts and cultures, which Mitoma founded and where she now teaches and runs a variety of projects, Mitoma is known as a person who walks softly and carries a big grant. The soft part describes her philosophy of human interconnectedness and her ability to articulate it in melodious and dedicated tones. The grant part is simple, she explains. “It’s hard work, just very hard work--there’s no smoke and mirrors.”

She discovered she liked hard work early in life when she helped her father, a wholesale produce man, load bushels of tomatoes in South Los Angeles. But she admits that it takes more than long hours and hefting to make things happen as an adult.

“It’s being practical, it’s being grounded,” she says, “but it’s also being engaged with a higher level of ideas, and not being discouraged by the obstacles you encounter. You need to be alert and seize an opportunity and know how to bring out the best in people.”

An idea whose time has come doesn’t hurt either, and most of Mitoma’s projects have arisen from her interest in inclusion, which put her on the leading edge of an evolving multicultural era.

Mitoma got her first small grant and a taste for organizing events when she was a UCLA undergrad. She produced a world dance concert that was a contrast to the steady diet of ballet and modern performances common then.

She researched festivals for her academic work, and developed a sense of how they functioned. “I was very critical all the time,” she remembers, “learning about the operations, but maybe not liking the way the audience was treated or the way the artists were presented.”

In 1984, she worked with Peter Sellars on the Olympic Arts Festival and the now-defunct L.A. Festival, his all-over-town, multicultural event. She has tried to keep the grass-roots flavor of that festival, which ran in 1987, 1990 and 1993, without repeating the budget problems and internecine warfare that often accompanied it.

But a few festival crises seem inevitable. Mitoma’s afternoon is marred by news of a travel visa denied to a performer in one of the troupes (many visas are in limbo). Then, she hears that one staffer is overwhelmed with ticket distribution dilemmas, so she pulls her in and makes a list of ways to spread the work among more people. She reads copy for program notes and decides there should be more about the artists’ lives.

By 7 p.m., she is at home, but the day isn’t finished. Mitoma lives alone, long divorced, with both her children grown. Her house has traditionally been open to whomever she’s working with. This evening, Beath is bringing over two eager filmmakers to sit amid the masks, puppets and Asian artwork in her living room and discuss a possible festival documentary.

It’s nearly 10 p.m. when this last official meeting breaks up. Mitoma takes a moment to water her lawn; when she returns, the festival director and her fellow board member will keep working, confabbing over a late dinner.

Everyone involved in the World Festival of Sacred Music knows its goals can sound impossibly idealistic. That doesn’t bother the organizers at all.

“Unless you’ve got an overarching theme and ethic, you’ve just got performances and entertainment,” Beath says. “What we’re trying to do is provide a festival for particular purposes--community building, getting over racial barriers, learning about other people. If idealism turns people off, I think they should come to the festival and maybe it will affect them a little bit, too.”

Mitoma has given some thought to what it means to lead a festival that engages the concept of the sacred. She often reads Buddhist teachings at bedtime, but says, “I’m not a flag-waving Buddhist. It’s about attitude and philosophy, how to be kind to people, about how to hear and see what they’re going through rather than be focused on what I want them to do.”

Doesn’t she run into a clash between that attitude and the one that says “This is due at 5 o’clock”?

“Yes,” she says, laughing and nodding. “It’s not easy. But if we cannot treat each other in a way that’s like our goal in the festival, then it’s all insincere.”

After all, she says, “we’re all together in this enterprise,” and it’s not clear for a moment if she means the enterprise of life or the festival. For her, the two are intimately intertwined. “We’re sitting alongside each other, accepting and feeling part of something bigger. I think that’s a huge accomplishment.”

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World Festival of Sacred Music, through Sept. 29, (310) 825-0507; www.festivalofsacredmusic.org

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Jennifer Fisher writes regularly about dance for The Times and other publications.