Kennedy Center takes San Francisco to its heart

Kennedy Center, that bastion of East Coast culture, may have left its heart in San Francisco. Ralph P. Davidson, president of the center, announced that it will hold a San Francisco Festival, spotlighting a dozen performing arts groups, plays, dance, films, music, and artists from the Bay Area in June.

The announcement was made at a joint press conference with San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos at that city's historic Fairmont Hotel. The festival will involve four of the center's six theaters, public galleries, and south lawn. At its restaurants and concessions, San Francisco foods ranging from Fishermen's Wharf seafood to a Dim Sum dumpling bar will be featured.

The San Francisco Festival, June 1-26, will include the George Coates Performance Works presenting ``Actual Sho,'' a multi-media spectacle; the San Francisco Mime Troupe will present its South African work ``The Mozamgola Caper''; Theatre Rhinoceros, a gay theater troupe, will do ``Quisbies,'' from its cycle of AIDS plays. The Kronos Quartet, dedicated to experimental contemporary music, will present ``Live Video,'' a fully staged work, and ODC/San Francisco, the Oberlin Dance Company, based in Frisco's Mission district, will perform works from its repertory.

The National Symphony Orchestra will dedicate an evening to the music of several of San Francisco's major composers. The American Film Institute Theater will screen two nights of films by San Francisco artists and independent filmmakers, along with lectures. Also, there will be a World Drum Festival on the South Lawn and an Ethnic Dance Festival in the center's Terrace Theater.

Beginning May 17 and continuing through the festival, there will be two concurrent happenings.

Composer and audio artist Bill Fontana, creator of what he calls ``sound sculpture,'' will bring to Kennedy Center's North Gallery his new work ``Sound Sculptures Through the Golden Gate.'' It will broadcast at this Potomac site the metallic clangs of the Golden Gate Bridge, its fog horns, and surrounding sounds of the bay, birds, boats, and underwater mammals.

And the Exploratorium, a ``museum of science, art and the human perception,'' will preview exhibits that include an echo tube, a giant convex lens, and a form of ``sun painting'' with prisms.