The curtain has lifted on Southern California’s Fall cultural scene, with an engagin array of theater, dance, music, and museum offerings, and an ubiquitous film festival, too.
If you are a culture vulture, or just curious, you have to love the seasonal calendar, as I comment on public radio 99.1 KBUU and select websites everywhere.
But all fade this Sunday, the 30th, for what is being billed as L.A.’s biggest block party ever, with a host of sponsors headed by the L.A. Philharmonic, to mark its 100th birthday, and organized by the CICla VIA as a premier pedestrian event.
Headlined Celebrate LA, it is an eight mile street festival featuring an estimated 1.800 local-based artists, musicians and performers, doing their thing, at six site specific hubs from downtown, through Koreatown, to Hollywood and the bowl.
And it is all free and open, to an audience encouraged to walk, bicycle, ride the Metro while being constantly surprised by strolling and pop up performances everywhere. Good shoes, comfortable clothes, and sun block are recommended, and also scoring a map and program of events.
Try culturela. org or ciclavia on the web or your luck at any of the hubs. Or just winging it, and let the sights, sounds and smells be your guide. They work for me.
Festivities begin at about 9 AM at all the venues, but some of the performers move around during the day, so if you miss them one place, there is another.
If there is a mother hub, it is Grand Avenue and two outdoor stages in front of Disney Hall, where the Philharmonic ‘s brass section and the Youth Orchestra are featured. And as the day progresses, there will be dance, and jazz and pop, and funk and punk performances.
The next nearby hub of note will be at MacArthur Park, where at the Levitt Pavilion performing, among others, will be an assemblage of 130 Oaxacan dancers and musicians, and later in the day, one of my favorite bands, Ozomatli.
And so it goes, at several more hubs, classical and contemporary sounds, and sights, and also along the streets connecting them,: small ensembles of Armenian and Thai dancers, Klezmer music, gameleans from Indonesia, and, of course, the USC Trojan marching band.
For me, it all adds up to a tasty L.A. gazpacho.
