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.”