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06/22/05
This program is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department.
Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --
Will it be competition or a complement to the regional art theme? We preview Orange County's new Segerstrom Concert Hall.
Paul Folino>> And I think it's not only good for Orange County, but it's good for all of Southern California. It's going to have a tremendous impact on how people view this part of the country.
Val>> And then, a new technique to explore bold new worlds where no man has gone before. It's a spacecraft powered by sunlight.
It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.
Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.
And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.
Val>> It's Orange County's answer to the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Segerstrom Hall. When it's finished, it will offer superb acoustics for classical music, but what will it mean to Orange County overall? As our Orange County reporter, Roger Cooper, tells us, it signals a cultural coming of age.
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Roger Cooper>> When the Pacific Symphony prepared to perform on this evening in 2003, there were clear signs that something unusual was afoot.
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Roger Cooper>> The Orange County Performing Arts Center was about to break ground on a major two hundred million dollar expansion, including a world-class concert hall and music theater. True to form, the groundbreaking was choreographed.
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Roger Cooper>> Now this construction dance is just about half complete. Next door to the Orange County Performing Arts Center, the new concert hall and music theater are rapidly taking shape, two hundred million dollars worth of space for the performing arts. But in these days of tight budgets, where do you get money like that for the arts? The performing arts in Orange County owe a great debt to this: an internationally known shopping center, a little place called South Coast Plaza.
South Coast Plaza was built on bean fields built by Henry Segerstrom and his family who also donated some prime bean field real estate eighteen years ago. It's the site for the Performing Arts Center and South Coast Repertory Theatre. How good a facility is that concert hall going to be?
Henry T. Segerstrom>> It's going to be the best (laughter). It's going to be the best. I say that, on the day it opens, it will be the finest concert hall in the world.
Roger Cooper>> Now Henry Segerstrom has kick-started the drive for the new concert hall with a cornerstone gift of forty million dollars, the largest single charitable cash gift in the history of Orange County. Why did you give that gift?
Henry T. Segerstrom>> Well, I felt that it was an opportunity of a lifetime. I just thought, Henry, you can do it now and forever enjoy it or you can just say no, I don't think I want to do it. Let somebody else do it. I'm so glad that I did.
Roger Cooper>> There's a virtual tour showing what it will be like.
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Roger Cooper>> The very first notes to be heard in the new hall will be conducted by Maestro Carl St. Clair who suited up in safety gear to take us inside.
Carl St. Clair>> I've been in here several times, but my favorite place was when I actually got to stand right over there which is right where the podium is going to be. As we look out, this is going to be the stage and we're in some of the great seats. Where we're standing is where the seats are going to be, but right there where that little cutout is is where the conductor is going to stand. When I stood there and I looked up and had my arms in the air and thinking about a full orchestra there and the chorus sitting above and the entire house filled with classical music lovers and people that are just, you know, wanting to come into this new building, I thought, wow.
Roger Cooper>> There's another major component to this expansion made possible by another major gift. Broadcom co-founder, Henry Samueli and his wife Susan, new owners of the Ducks hockey team, gave ten million dollars to build Samueli Theatre, a more intimate venue for smaller ensembles. The west coast will soon have two world-class concert halls. The new Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall sits just about forty miles away from Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, but Segerstrom says they won't be in competition.
Henry T. Segerstrom>> I am so pleased with that and I have informed my friends in Los Angeles that I think, now that we have four great halls in Southern California, it's time for us to start marketing our joint assets world-wide in cultural tourism much as New York does. Mayor Bloomberg of New York said that cultural tourism was the second largest industry in New York after finance and Southern California can reap the benefits of this as well as share our facilities with the world.
Roger Cooper>> Orange County's Pacific Symphony currently performs in this hall, which will continue as the venue for special events, ballet and touring Broadway shows.
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Paul Folino>> In the next week or two, they start laying sixty thousand square feet of glass on the front façade of this building.
Roger Cooper>> In his day job, Paul Folino is CEO of Emulex Corporation, but he's also CEO of the Performing Arts Center board.
Paul Folino>> In one location, they can see Broadway, they can see ballet, they can see the greatest opera in the world, they can see jazz, they can see pop. Once again, the whole goal here was to create one-stop-shopping where you can get the greatest, finest performers in the world in one location and I think it's not only good for Orange County, but it's good for all of Southern California. It's going to have a tremendous impact on how people view this part of the country.
Roger Cooper>> Fine arts makes you a better person?
Henry T. Segerstrom>> I think so because I think you appreciate the accomplishments of generations of talented human beings and the marvelous contributions that the geniuses of the past give to us today.
Roger Cooper>> What do you think of the music in here right now?
Carl St. Clair>> Oh, it's music to my ears. Every time I hear a clanking or a hammer or a drill or see these sparkling lights over here, that's just one notch closer to opening night.
Roger Cooper>> There's lots of work still to be done, but the day is coming in September 2006 when the expanded Orange County Performing Arts Center can take its bow. In Orange County, I'm Roger Cooper for Life and Times.
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Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org and click on "Life and Times".
Val>> We all know that solar power can heat our water and run engines, but did you know that it could fuel space exploration? The so-called solar sail was scheduled for a test this week, but the spacecraft is believed to be lost after the rocket carrying it failed just after launch. The Planetary Society's Louis Friedman explains how it should have worked.
Saul Gonzalez>> What is a solar sail?
Louis Friedman>> A solar sail is a large reflective mirror. It reflects sunlight and the force of the photons of sunlight that hit the sail and bounce off. They transfer momentum to the sail and the sail then gains velocity or subtracts velocity, depending on which way the sail is pointing, from your orbital speed around the sun. So it's using solar pressure. The common misconception is that it's using solar wind, but it's not. It's using solar pressure. Sunlight, pure energy of photons.
Saul Gonzalez>> To propel the sail.
Louis Friedman>> To propel the sail and to bounce off the sail. If this was the sail and I hit it at an angle like this and then bounce off this way, I'd get a force in this direction. If I'm going this way, that slows me down and I will go in toward the sun. If I turn the sail the other way so that I'm adding velocity, then I will go outward from the sun. So I can either go outward or inward and that way I can tack around the solar system.
Saul Gonzalez>> Is it generally the same principle as a sailboat out on the open water here on earth?
Louis Friedman>> Well, yes. I like to make sailboat analogies because, one, I like sailing, and the other is that, instead of the wind and the water, it's the sunlight pressure and the orbital velocity, the two media that you're modifying or using as you do these things. So it is analogous and you can make up a lot of analogies about it. The caution I add, though, is that it's not solar wind which is electrons and protons, three orders of magnitude smaller than the force you get out of the solar energy, the pure sunlight.
Saul Gonzalez>> Now tell me about Cosmos 1, this spacecraft that you have engineered, and what it is supposed to do.
Louis Friedman>> Well, Cosmos 1 is attempting to be the first solar sail flight. If you imagine the analogy with the Wright Brothers who flew twelve seconds and went nowhere, but they demonstrated the technology of controlled powered flight, we want to demonstrate the technology of controlled flight with sunlight pressure. That's never been done. There have been large reflective surfaces in space. There have been the effect of sunlight pressure noted on spacecraft, but it's never been used for propulsion, so that's what we want to do first.
This is a privately-funded mission by Cosmos Studios, a venture started by the widow of Carl Sagan. As a result, we are at complete freedom to make the contracts and make the arrangements that are necessary to do this. We contracted with a Russian launch vehicle and a Russian company that will manufacture the spacecraft and a combined American-Russian team will operate it.
Saul Gonzalez>> Walk me through the launch and the mission of Cosmos 1.
Louis Friedman>> Well, the launch is a rather exciting and novel idea. It's going to be launched from under the ocean in a nuclear submarine, a Soviet era nuclear submarine. This is a very low-cost launch from a submarine using basically a ballistic missile from the Soviet ICBM inventory. It's a very low-cost way to launch. It will launch from the Barents Sea north of Murmansk above the artic circle. It will fly over Northern Russia, inject into orbit in the North Pacific. We will begin to track it right away from a portable station that we will have in the Marshall Islands. Then it proceeds into orbit, an eight hundred kilometer circular orbit around the earth.
Saul Gonzalez>> And the solar sails will, what, unfold slowly in orbit?
Louis Friedman>> Not yet. For the first week or so of the mission, we'll check out the spacecraft. It will fly just like any other satellite. After about a week, if everything's going well, we'll be ready to deploy the sail. Now the spacecraft itself is a rather small spacecraft. It would fit on this table actually. But it has inflatable tubes. Hydrogen gas will inflate tubes and thirty meters, ten stories out, we'll develop these eight blades that will form a large circular area to reflect sunlight pressure.
These are five-micron Mylar, very thin, like the plastic that you use for wrapping sandwiches, aluminized for reflecting the sunlight. That will deploy over this thirty-meter diameter and so you'll have a six hundred square meter area that will reflect the sunlight pressure. As you then go into orbit around earth, slowly that will add energy to the orbit and it will begin to go outward and outward from the earth. As I said, we're only trying to demonstrate the technology.
Saul Gonzalez>> You're sure it's a viable technology.
Louis Friedman>> Yes. If it happens to work a week, we'll be lucky and happy.
Saul Gonzalez>> Now what might be -- if research continues and if future spacecraft are built this way, what are the advantages of solar sail technology and this manner of propulsion over conventional rockets?
Louis Friedman>> Solar sailing technology is the only known technology that can someday take us to the stars. The reason for that is that it doesn't carry fuel. Every other form of technology, even nuclear, nuclear fusion, nuclear electric, even --
Saul Gonzalez>> -- you've got to take it with you.
Louis Friedman>> You've got to take it with you. Solar sail, you just use the light. Now if you get away from the sun, there's no sunlight, you're then going to a different form of light propulsion. You're going to go to laser sailing and you're going to have a laser somewhere in the solar system with a very focused beam, a very high-powered laser that would focus a beam over interstellar distances --
Saul Gonzalez>> -- striking the sail and accelerating it forward.
Louis Friedman>> Striking the sail in the same way and accelerating forward.
Saul Gonzalez>> What kind of speed can you get with a solar sail?
Louis Friedman>> Well, it's a very low thrust. You're operating at something like about 1/1000th or even 1/10,000th of the force of gravity. Very, very low-thrust acceleration, but continuously acting so that after a few hundred days of flight and after a year of flight and then two years of flight as you go out toward the outer solar system and then beyond, you can achieve speeds of hundreds of thousands of miles per hour.
Saul Gonzalez>> Cosmos 1, of course, is just an experiment just to show that it can work. What might be the practical applications of this for future space exploration, say, within our solar system?
Louis Friedman>> Well, the novel idea, again, of us trying to do a privately funded mission, is to seed interest at the space agencies. NASA has a solar sailing program. The European Space Agency, the Russian Space Agency and the Japanese all have active solar sailing programs, but they never had a flight. They've never taken the big step of trying a flight. The advantages will be for hovering at distances between the earth and the sun and do solar weather monitoring. You can do round trip trajectories to the planets with enormous payloads or maybe even supporting future human missions. Not that humans would fly on a solar sailing necessarily --
Saul Gonzalez>> -- cargo.
Louis Friedman>> Cargo would fly back and forth. So you can move large payloads around the solar system, you can rendezvous with small bodies like comets and asteroids or you can hover in particular areas for, say, halfway between the earth and the sun to get distant early warning of a solar storm that might affect the earth's weather and things like that.
Saul Gonzalez>> It strikes me that it's a particularly elegant way to travel through the cosmos, no? There's a beauty to it that you don't necessarily -- that you see in the heaviness of other ways of moving through space than using conventional rockets.
Louis Friedman>> Yeah, my usual answer to the question of what solar sailing is good for is I start out with the romantic idea of unfurling your sail and just going out there. I hope someday it will feel like that, just the way we feel when we take a sailboat out on the ocean. The only thing that makes this mission complicated is having to get it up from the earth and deploy in space. If we could build the sail in space out of the space station or even automatically with some kind of devices in orbit, then you'd really have an elegant way of flying.
Saul Gonzalez>> Well, Louis Friedman, thank you for joining us here on Life and Times.
Louis Friedman>> Thanks. Thanks very much. Appreciate it.
Saul Gonzalez>> Thanks very much.
To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:
Life and Times
4401 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90027
You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.
Val>> Southern California is home to world-class art museums, theater, architecture and, of course, concert halls, but what about dance? Why does dance seem to be out of step with our cultural renaissance? Well, Vicki Curry tells us there is in fact a thriving dance scene. The challenge is being seen.
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Vicki Curry>> Los Angeles may not be known for dance, but those who know it say it should be. Los Angeles has been home to some of the most influential pioneers of twentieth century modern dance.
John Pennington>> We've been one of the richest histories. We have importance. Alvin Ailey started here. Martha Graham was from Santa Barbara, Isadora Duncan, Ted Shawn Dancers. The history goes on and on.
Vicki Curry>> Two of the earliest modern dancers were Ruth St. Denis and her husband, Ted Shawn. They opened the Denis-Shawn School here in 1915. A year later, Martha Graham moved from Santa Barbara to study with them. In 1928, Lester Horton moved to Los Angeles to start his company and, in 1946, he and Bella Lewitzky founded the Dance Theatre on Melrose Avenue. It was the first American performance space devoted exclusively to dance and one of the first places to house both a company and a school. One of its first students? Alvin Ailey.
Loretta Livingston>> There's definitely a lineage here in Los Angeles of artists in dance and that profile, that lineage, has to do with individuality. People who prioritize freedom and autonomy, that's a profile of an artist who enjoys being in a city that's not like other cities.
Vicki Curry>> Despite its distinguished history, most people don't think of Los Angeles as a major dance center. Yet there is a vital theme here. Artists are still attracted to the freedom and experimentation associated with California's wide open spaces.
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Lynn Daly>> It's like a big space where a lot of different people can come together and make something new happen.
Loretta Livingston>> What I like about living here is that it's an interesting place. It's a global mix. I feel happy being in the west and I have a lot of room.
Vicki Curry>> But that room which inspired innovators of the past may be hindering them today.
Loretta Livingston>> Some cities have a more definable center, a more definable and visible community of dance. Los Angeles doesn't have that.
John Pennington>> The same reason that people come to Los Angeles because it's diverse, it's geographically spread. People can come here to recreate themselves. I think that's the same reason that you don't have a cohered dance community.
Vicki Curry>> There have been notable attempts to start a major ballet company in Los Angeles. The New York City Ballet sent dancers here in 1979 to create a Los Angeles Ballet and, four years later, New York's Joffrey Ballet made Los Angeles its second home, but left after eight years.
Loretta Livingston>> The super imposition of a model that works in other places on this community here isn't a good fit.
Vicki Curry>> But in the meantime, the modern dance scene continues to grow. There are more than one hundred nonprofit dance companies in Los Angeles County, plus numerous informal groups, reflecting a range of forms and cultures.
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Donna Sternberg>> I think there is some really good stuff going on here and I think that there are actually more companies now than there have been for quite some time. People are leaving other big cities like New York to come here.
Vicki Curry>> Choreographer Donna Sternberg started her company in 1985. She says one of her biggest obstacles is finding places to perform.
Donna Sternberg>> There are so few affordable theaters for dance where you have a sprung floor and where the stage is big enough and the audience isn't huge.
Vicki Curry>> Loretta Livingston has also had her own company since 1985. She thinks there are several great dance venues in Los Angeles, but admits they aren't always available to smaller local companies.
Loretta Livingston>> There are many presenters who support dance comfortably. They want it on their scene. They may not have a spot every season for dance or for a local artist to be there, but I sense there's a lot of support.
Vicki Curry>> John Pennington spent fourteen years dancing with Bella Lewitzky, the last of the early pioneers. She spent years trying to build a permanent dance theater in downtown.
John Pennington>> We need a dance space that is specifically for dance. We have places that are kind of service for dance communities, but we don't have a place that elevates it. The idea of nurturing local artists and giving them a place to do what they do in a place to fail and a place to succeed is not available.
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Vicki Curry>> Hollywood also exerts a strong influence on the Los Angeles dance scene.
John Pennington>> I would say that a majority of dancers come to Los Angeles to be in video and film.
Lynn Daly>> If they're really skilled, they can often make a lot of money doing commercial work which is much more lucrative.
Vicki Curry>> You would think these paying jobs would bring dancers with strong training and talent to Los Angeles, but there's little cross-over between the concert dance world and the commercial world.
Debbie Allen>> Every time I've had to choreograph the Oscars or any movie or anything that I've ever had to do with professionals, I've had to stop to teach dance because they don't know. They don't know the source of the language.
Vicki Curry>> Debbie Allen is one of the rare dancers who was classically trained, but found commercial success. She's been frustrated with Los Angeles's dance scene.
Debbie Allen>> So I decided, after I had to send my daughter away to the Kirov Academy to study dance to get the tools that I wanted her to have, that we needed to have it here. So I'm looking to develop that next generation of dancers and choreographers.
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Vicki Curry>> Moving the next generation of arts audiences is a common theme for Los Angeles choreographers.
Donna Sternberg>> There hasn't been arts education in the schools for decades and I think that is showing in the arts audience, which is shrinking and shrinking.
John Pennington>> It's training people to see and to value. You know, we only value what we're trained to value and, if that isn't going on in our schools, if art is not being valued, then we're lost for the future.
Vicki Curry>> But those same people say audiences are still interested in dance. Sometimes they just need to be lured in.
Heidi Duckler>> Instead of doing our work on a stage, we decided to go out to where real life was really happening, into environments that we could explore. And we found that, as we started to go, we developed an audience that was interested in site work, the kind of an audience that didn't typically see dance.
Loretta Livingston>> I work with live music, I work with video as a component. I think that it has expanded the audience or the family of audience, people that would come to see what we do.
Vicki Curry>> Performers and choreographers agree that there is a vibrant dance scene in Los Angeles. You just have to look to find it.
John Pennington>> I have great hope for the artists of Los Angeles. There are people here that are sticking here, that are not leaving, and that are trying to make this home and to make this their community and they're doing a damn good job of it.
Val>> Loretta Livingston and the Collage Dance Theater are both having performances this weekend. For details, you can check out their websites. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.
Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.
And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.
This program was made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department.
Val>> Next time on Life and Times --
It's a tough choice with no clear favorites: preserve an historic dam or help endangered fish?
>> We've gone from fifty thousand steel heads in Southern California to less than two hundred. They are on the brink of extinction. It's time for us to decide. Do we save them for our children or do we wave goodbye?
Val>> That's next time on Life and Times.
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