O.C.’s Artists Join in Marking AIDS Toll : Observance: A Day Without Art focuses on disease that has taken local actors, dancers and others.

AIDS has claimed four artists--a director, an actor, a set designer and a costumer--who once worked regularly at South Coast Repertory. It has killed at least a dozen of the preeminent dancers and choreographers whose work once graced the stage of the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

And it has crept into the content of the art made and shown in Orange County. AIDS is the pair of crutches in a sculptural homage exhibited by a Laguna Beach artist; it is the thunder of a symphony written for the dead and played in Costa Mesa.

The AIDS epidemic in Orange County--where more than 3,000 people have contracted the disease and 1,760 have died of it--has changed the face of the arts here much as it has affected the arts worldwide, spawning new works and claiming the likes of Rudolf Nureyev, Rock Hudson and Freddie Mercury.

“It’s something that’s always on our minds,” says Martin Benson, SCR artistic director.

To keep AIDS in the public mind, 11 major arts groups in the county, including SCR, are uniting to help mark today as the fifth annual Day Without Art, an international observance meant to draw attention to the toll the disease has taken.

After some arts groups found themselves staging competing events last year, today’s event will be an unprecedented joint effort. Its centerpiece will be “Vital Readings,” a lunch-hour presentation of poetry, prose and music at SCR. Though admission will be free, donations will be sought to benefit AIDS Walk Orange County and AIDS Services Foundation of Orange County. (For a rundown of other Orange County events, see the Calendar section, Page F2.)

Gary M. Mattison, development director for the Orange County Philharmonic Society, one of the participating groups, said: “We thought we could do a better job in terms of enlightening the public about the disease by uniting our resources and energies.”

“We need to raise community consciousness,” Mattison said, “in the hope that greater support locally, nationally and worldwide will help speed the discovery of a cure. We may not actually realize the ultimate effect of AIDS. As artists die now, how will that impact the future of art? What great works of art have we lost because people’s lives were snuffed out too soon?”

Award-winning director John Allison died of AIDS in the mid-1980s after staging “St. Joan” and three other plays at SCR. The others with SCR credentials, who died around the same time, were Dean Santoro, who acted principal roles in such plays as “Da”; Keith Hein, who designed sets for such dramas as Athol Fugard’s “Blood Knot,” and Tom Rasmussen who created costumes for Shakespeare’s “Henry IV” and other productions.

Administrative staff members at the Performing Arts Center have been “directly or indirectly affected by the disease,” according to center spokesman Greg Patterson. As a presenter of major dance companies, the center has been acutely aware of the profound devastation AIDS has had in the dance world, where the casualties have included Robert Joffrey, founder of the troupe that bears his name.

These and other losses have prompted artists here and elsewhere to address AIDS directly with their work. Last year, Pat Sparkuhl, a veteran of the Laguna Beach Festival of Arts, exhibited a sculptural piece supported by a pair of crutches and dealing with socioeconomic issues related to disease. Molly Hardy of Laguna Niguel wrote “Encore (Dance on a Star),” a performance piece, as a tribute to a musician friend who died of AIDS (it will be presented at the Laguna Art Museum at 7 tonight).

Two years ago, the Pacific Symphony presented the Southern California premiere of New Yorker John Corigliano’s AIDS-themed First Symphony. Currently, a gallery at the Newport Harbor Art Museum is devoted to “Self-Portrait,” a large AIDS-related installation by Lilla LoCurto and William Outcault of Los Angeles.

Such works haven’t always been embraced by the community at large. Just two weeks ago, Newport Beach City Councilman John W. Hedges lashed out at city funding for the Newport Harbor museum because he found “Self-Portrait” to be “obscene” and “garbage.”

“There’s a certain amount of homophobia out there,” Cal State Fullerton assistant professor of art Mike McGee said earlier this year, “and the misconception that AIDS is related to a gay lifestyle.”

New county statistics released this week show that about 40 people are diagnosed with AIDS each month, said Ron Taylor, the county Health Care Agency’s HIV program manager. About 8,800 people in the county have been infected with HIV, the virus thought to cause AIDS. County health officials estimate 10,000 to 11,000 people will be infected with HIV by the end of 1993.

Worldwide, participation in today’s Day Without Art observance is expected to include about 5,300 artists, arts institutions and AIDS service organizations. Initially, the day was observed by galleries, museums and theaters closing down to indicate symbolically what the world would be like if the epidemic were to bring about a world without art.

Local participation has built slowly ever since Visual AIDS, a coalition based in New York, initiated the observance in 1989 to coincide with the United Nations’ World AIDS Day. In 1990, only four arts groups in Orange County took part; the following year, only half a dozen.

But last year, as more artists fell victim to AIDS, about 20 cultural organizations joined in, including seven large institutions that jointly staged an outdoor concert in Costa Mesa. At the same time, just down the street, SCR premiered “Vital Readings.”

Though AIDS activists were excited by the boom in participation, there was an unforeseen downside: The programs ended up competing for audiences--without much success. Only about 200 people attended the outdoor concert, and only 150 showed up at SCR.

The idea this year is to get even more groups working together--on stage or behind the scenes--on a single presentation, not only to eliminate the competition but also to create an artistically “stronger” product and to more effectively raise AIDS awareness, according to Mattison, who is coordinating the effort.

Today’s “Vital Readings” not only will reprise the AIDS-related poetry and prose read last year by SCR actors but also will include music by about 40 singers from Opera Pacific, the Pacific Chorale and the Master Chorale of Orange County and a brass quintet from the Pacific Symphony.

To promote the event and further generate AIDS awareness, all 11 groups (the Laguna and Newport Harbor Art Museums, which will also present separate on-site activities, Ballet Pacifica, the Orange County Performing Arts Center and the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art also are involved to varying degrees) have been asked to encourage their major donors and volunteers to support “Vital Readings,” Mattison said.

Additionally, organizers of the event got the Orange County Board of Supervisors and the cities of Newport Beach, Laguna Beach and Irvine to officially proclaim today A Day Without Art to encourage citizens to participate.

Among other Day Without Art events is “Son of Lagunatics,” a musical spoof of Laguna Beach life at Laguna Playhouse. It is a sequel to last year’s “Lagunatics.”

Actress Bree Burgess Rosen, who lives in Laguna Beach and co-wrote the show, says she has lost a total of 136 friends to AIDS, six of whom were actors or musicians in Orange County. But while some groups continue to observe the Day Without Art by shutting their doors or removing art from exhibit cases, she prefers an upbeat approach.

“I use A Day Without Art as a fund-raising answer to the problem,” she said, “and a celebration of the artists who are gone. Their lives were anything but grim. They were wonderfully creative, jubilant people and I remember the joy they were all about.”