Belly dancers, rock bands and a dub reggae improvisational group will all be performing right next to the Pacific Ocean at this year’s Venice Beach Music Fest.
The festival takes place just off of the Venice Beach boardwalk this Saturday and will feature 10 visual artists, eight musical acts and three dance performance groups.
The event officially started eight years ago, but its producer, Milton Rosenberg, began unofficially hosting concerts on the Venice boardwalk a year before that. However, the police repeatedly shut down those concerts because of noise complaints. The festival was officially born after Rosenberg applied for a permit to avoid future police closure.
Rosenberg, who selects all of the artists and performers featured in the annual event, said he started the festival when he lived near the boardwalk as a neighborhood project to showcase local performers.
“(I) wanted to take in all the chaos that the boardwalk can be and do a professional presentation for local artists and local bands,” Rosenberg said.
Every year, Rosenberg said he picks about five performers from the hundreds of local acts who apply to be included in the festival and reaches out to more nationally recognized performers.
This year’s festival headliners are Willie Chambers of The Chambers Brothers, best known for creating the smash hit “Time Has Come Today” in 1968, and The Familyhood Nextperience, a dub reggae group featuring two of the original members of Fishbone and three of the current members.
The festival will also include local acts, like LOONER, an L.A.-based rock band led by Angel Roché, Jr. and Zoë Poledouris Roché, who are husband and wife and have performed at the event twice before.
Poledouris Roché, LOONER’s lead singer, said the festival has a groovy energy and she is looking forward to seeing the Venice audience members’ dance moves from the stage.
“There’s something about our sound – we’ve played all over the country and people really like to show us their interpretive dance moves while we play,” Poledouris Roché said. “I can’t explain it. Maybe it’s because I do a little bit of that, but people really get into it. It’s very fun.”
Some of the other musical acts include Champa 51, a band that fuses electronic dance music, soul and rock, and Jet West, a San Diego-based band that mixes hard rock and reggae.
The festival will start with a procession from samba dance group Samba Da Mudança from the boardwalk to the stage in Windward Plaza. Two other dance groups will also be performing: ATS Bellydance and Drums, which performs American Tribal Style Belly Dance, and Ya Harissa Bellydance Theater, which mixes more folkloric belly dance with theatrical elements.
Amaya Mattei, the founder of Ya Harissa Bellydance Theater, has performed in the Venice Beach Music Fest for the past five years and says she likes the community feel of the festival and the diverse performances featured in the event.
“Through the festival the community is introduced to an energy that’s very different from the everyday,” Mattei said. “There’s an opportunity to expose someone … to something unexpected like Middle Eastern dance, which they might enjoy.”
The festival also features a mix of artists Rosenberg said he personally reaches out to or finds straight from the Venice boardwalk, the downtown L.A. ArtWalk and Venice Art Crawl.
Some of the artists featured are ART by SKY, a Venice boardwalk artist who makes psychedelic nature-inspired paintings, and Ukeim Ortiz, a Puerto Rican photographer who specializes in journalistic style portraits.
Three food trucks, a hula-hoop booth and a local clothing company will also be present at this year’s Venice Beach Music Fest.
In order to keep the event free to the public, Rosenberg funds the festival through sponsorships from over thirty local and a few national businesses.
This way, Rosenberg said, in a time when many festivals and concerts cost over $100 per ticket and thus exclude many people, everyone can participate in the occasion.
Five thousand attendees are expected to participate in this year’s Venice Beach Music Fest, and Roché, LOONER’s drummer, said he is excited to see each one at what he called a celebration of individuality.
“I’m looking forward to seeing the mix of eclectic characters that pass by and how they unleash their beautiful madness when we perform,” Roché said.