Two theater festivals, both alike in dignity, in fair Los
Angeles, where we lay our scene “¦
Unlike the star-crossed lovers of Shakespeare’s tragic
play, the Edge of the World Theater Festival and UCLA Performing
Arts’ first International Theater Festival are not explicit
rivals, but rather are working together to bring a cutting-edge
collection of local and international theatrical arts to Los
Angeles.
Both festivals aim to promote artists and theater, though they
have different regional concentrations. While EdgeFest focuses on
local Los Angeles artists, UCLA Live’s international festival
promotes artists from outside the United States ““ especially
Europe.
UCLA’s international theater festival is the first major
international theater festival this century in the United States.
The festival started with the punk theater experience
“Lipstick Traces,” and has continued with
“Hashirigaki,” “Junebug Symphony,”
“Genesi: From the Museum of Sleep” and will conclude
with four other performances including a rare engagement of Tom
Waits’ “Woyzeck.” UCLA’s festival is
undoubtedly rare and groundbreaking, garnering a great deal of hype
from theater lovers and publications everywhere, and would seem to
rain on EdgeFest’s cutting-edge parade.
EdgeFest has reigned for four years as L.A.’s torchbearer
of new and exciting theater so when UCLA announced that it too
would be opening its curtains to vanguardist theater, rumors of
rivalry began to fly.
Steven Leigh Morris of LA Weekly reported, “There was a
small commotion this summer when someone burst into a planning
meeting for EdgeFest 2002 with the news that UCLA was hosting a
major international festival at the same time. On hearing this, one
of the EdgeFest reps turned pale, as though UCLA’s festival
was about to shove EdgeFest off the map,” (“The Oldest
Living Most-Promising Theater City in the World,” Oct.
4-10).
But Ray Simmons, the co-executive officer of EdgeFest and David
Sefton, director of UCLA Live and the mastermind behind the
festival, both deny insinuations of rivalry.
“There’s definitely a camaraderie between the
international festival and EdgeFest,” Simmons said. “In
fact, we even helped each other out. During performances, the
international festival helped put out flyers for our events and we
did the same for them.”
It is true that EdgeFest took place in over 40 venues across
L.A., while UCLA’s fest has stayed in two venues on campus,
which detracted from a direct geographical competition. And
EdgeFest only went on for two weekends Oct. 10-20, while
UCLA’s will last into December. The competition would seem to
be in the bragging rights to which is exactly the edgiest, most
experimental in the world.
But Sefton says it’s a symbiotic relationship, not one of
opposition.
“Both these festivals work off of each other,” said
Sefton. “In EdgeFest, it’s more new-age and
local-based, while the international festival is more avant-garde
and focuses on artists relatively unknown in the United
States.”
As they continued their exhibitions, neither Sefton nor Simmons
noticed a drop or decline in their respective festivals due to the
other one. Simmons even commented that the attendance at EdgeFest
had risen from previous years.
“Los Angeles has a huge market for theater-goers,”
Simmons said. “We have every archetypal theater watcher from
the avid to the spontaneous and the occasional ““ these two
festivals, even though they happened at the same time, had enough
people to attend and enjoy both.”
“It is vital for us to work together to make sure the
public has a view of all art ““ international and
local,” Sefton said.