It may not be so obvious from his appearance now, but UCLA Live
Director David Sefton was once a punk rocker in Liverpool, England.
Although after considering the avant-garde nature of his work, the
idea is a lot more conceivable.
Sefton has garnered much success and critical acclaim during his
four years at UCLA by transforming Royce Hall into one of the
leading performing arts venues on the West Coast. UCLA Live
continually features convention-shattering artists from all over
the world.
“I definitely am (risk-taking), but not
arbitrarily,” Sefton said. “I don’t just want to
do stuff which is weird and gratuitous. I see what we do as
physics: actually developing new languages and seeing how things
are done.”
By featuring an abundant amount of these avant-garde acts,
Sefton has chosen to deviate UCLA Live from the traditional
American performing arts landscape.
“We tend to live in a pretty conservative and conventional
arts environment right now in America,” Los Angeles Times
classical music critic Mark Swed said. “And the rest of the
world is not really like that. (Sefton) is willing to show why the
arts are dealing with our times in a way that a lot of other arts
groups aren’t willing to do.”
The road to his current position as director of one of the most
prestigious performing arts programs in the nation began when
Sefton worked as a paid music journalist while attending Liverpool
College. There, he reviewed “˜80s bands in the Manchester
scene like The Smiths, New Order, Echo and the Bunnymen, and the
Stone Roses.
After journalism, Sefton worked various jobs at local theaters,
and eventually came to UCLA in October 2000 from London’s
South Bank Centre/Royal Festival Hall where he was the head of
contemporary culture. There, the avant-garde work he was presenting
was the norm. UCLA’s performing arts program, on the other
hand, under the direction of Sefton’s predecessor Michael
Blachly, had a much more traditional scope, which Sefton would
later completely restructure.
One of his first moves was simply to rename the existing program
UCLA Live, something that he thought sounded more modern and
snappier.
Sefton credits much of his knowledge of the arts to his
extensive travelling, as well as his affinity for reading. He
estimates that by the age of 12 he had read the complete works of
Beat authors Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. This itself,
Sefton explains, was a form of rebellion.
“If my parents had any idea of what I was reading, they
probably would have burned the library down,” Sefton said.
“This stuff was really radical. It’s no wonder I turned
out the way I did.”
Sefton has brought Willie Nelson, Michael Moore, Elvis Costello,
rock band Sonic Youth, hip-hop pioneers The Watts Prophets, author
Tobias Wolff and Saturday Night Live cartoonist Art Spiegelman to
UCLA. But those are just the popular acts.
Instead, Sefton has received most of the program’s
critical acclaim for the esoteric, avant-garde theatrical work
presented by UCLA Live’s International Theatre Festival. The
acts have been widely referred to as thought-provoking and
disturbing.
“üBung” featured child actors mimicking a group
of pretentious adults at a dinner party, which was projected onto a
huge screen behind the children. The innocence associated with
children was juxtaposed with the boozing, deceit, and bickering
among the adults. And everyone spoke in Flemish.
Another controversial work, and the first theatrical work of the
’03-’04 season, “Jewess Tattooess,” fused
in a one-woman show burlesque cabaret, early Yiddish theater and
silent movie visuals to explore the culture and religious
implications of being a heavily tattooed Jewish woman.
One of Sefton’s greatest successes has been the
performance by Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre of “Twelfth
Night.” It featured an authentic all-male cast along with the
audience placed on stage for an added intimacy in the already
compact Freud Playhouse.
And while intimacy and theater might not be for everyone, Sefton
says he can appreciate a good up-close-and-personal encounter. A
personal favorite of Sefton’s is the Italian theatrical
group, Societas Raffaello Sanzio, which performs with deformed
actors and copulating sheep.
“There’s stuff that offends people,” Swed
said. “People get concerned. Popular music upsets classical
fans. It’s what the arts are. The arts are not the arts
without some of that controversy. Any less and (Sefton)
wouldn’t really be doing his job.”
In offending masses of people, Sefton has embodied the punk
spirit.
“He’s got a lot of guts,” Swed said.
“There’s a fear about what you can present on stage and
what you can’t. (Sefton) understands that the stage is a
place where you can take chances, where you can look at things that
are going on in the world, things that are going on maybe inside
yourself that you don’t want to face up to. In that sense, he
has my total support.”