Beyond Baroque Sponsors Innovative Citywide Performances, June 7-11

Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center has announced the World Beyond Poetry Festival, a sweeping celebration of voices and communities from across Los Angeles that will unite leading arts venues and their ethnic communities. The festival runs June 7 through 11 across the city.

The free festival--subtitled"Crisscrossing Worlds and Words"--is sponsored by Venice-based Beyond Baroque, with participating organizations World Stage (Leimert Park), Self-Help Graphics (Boyle Heights), and AISAREMA and Dis-orient Magazine (Temple/Beverly Corridor and Downtown).

Funded by the Los Angeles City Cultural Affairs Department and the National Endowment for the Arts, the World Beyond Poetry Festival will disperse $15,000 in honoraria to a broad range of poets and writers during five days. Among the nearly 100 performers scheduled, including many prominent locals, are some of America’s most recognized poets, including Amiri Baraka, Wanda Coleman, Kamau Daaood, Ruben Martinez and Eileen Myles. The Festival will also include such cultural icons as Dennis Hopper and Sonny Barger.

"By turning their community stories into art, poets have historically been on the forefront of culture," said Beyond Baroque Executive/Artistic Director Fred Dewey and Co-Curator and World Stage Literary Program Director Michael Datcher."In the diverse city of Los Angeles the lack of communication between communities has proven to be divisive. This important festival will open a real dialogue through the idiom of poetry."

The festival provides a groundbreaking, national model for such dialogue. It will be staged at leading urban and community sites, with poets at each event chosen by the four participating arts organizations. The poets will perform in the new"World Style" format, with each person reading a poem, followed by the next poet, until the cycle is repeated several times. This dynamic approach brings dialogue directly onto the stage, as writers build on each other’s energy, ideas and words.

This is innovative arts programming as a tool for building public space," said Dewey."It’s important that Beyond Baroque is bringing Los Angeles into the lead in enabling grass-roots community groups to knit the city together artistically."

A significant element of the Festival will be the debut of the World Beyond Poetry Award. Four nationally recognized Los Angeles poets will be honored with the award on Saturday, June 10, at L.A. River Amphitheater: They are Gloria Alvarez, Wanda Coleman, Kamau Daaood and Russell Leong.

A recorded schedule of the World Beyond Poetry Festival will be available at the Beyond Baroque switchboard, (310) 822-3006, starting June 4.

The World Beyond Festival is supported and made possible in part by grants from the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, Grant Division, the National Endowment for the Arts, and by Poets & Writers through a grant it has received from the James Irvine Foundation.