Foreign Performers and U.S. Gigs

LA Times. Monday, July 22, 2002

Foreign Performers and U.S. Gigs:
Getting Here Is a Tougher Ticket

By MIKE BOEHM, Times Staff Writer

The aftermath of Sept. 11 has created a new kind of MIA: foreign
performers missing their engagements in the United States.
Immigration authorities at home and officers at U.S. embassies abroad
have intensified security checks to keep out potential terrorists;
consequently it can take months longer to issue the clearances
foreigners need to get into the country. Some have been denied entry;
others haven't made it through the maze in time.

Since June, venues from Lincoln Center in New York to California
Plaza and the Conga Room in Los Angeles have felt the impact. Those
unable to gain entry have included a Welsh harpist who was going to
perform at a small festival in Pennsylvania and an English player of
the sackbut, a medieval wind instrument, who failed to make it to UC
Berkeley. Eliso Virsaladze and Alexander Melnikov, two pianists from
the former Soviet Union were supposed to help the Newport Music
Festival in Rhode Island uphold its tradition of presenting U.S.
debuts of classical musicians. Not this time.

The Lincoln Center Festival has been hit hardest: 10 players in a
28-member Iranian theater troupe, including one of the lead actors,
did not make it past the U.S. consulate in the United Arab Emirates.
Officials there ruled that the 10 were a risk to remain illegally in
America, festival director Nigel Redden said. That forced Lincoln
Center to reconfigure its U.S. premiere of a cycle of 'Ta'ziyeh'
plays, traditional musical-theater works based on Shiite lore. The
Lincoln Center Festival took a second hit when the Paris-based
Algerian singer-guitarist Souad Massi bowed out. Redden said that her
partner, a Moroccan, was held up because of a waiting period imposed
after Sept. 11 on visa applicants from 26 Muslim nations in North
Africa, the Middle East and East Asia; Massi did not want to travel
without him.

World music fans in L.A. last month missed what was to have been the
Southern California debut of Toto La Momposina, a Colombian
singer-dancer billed as 'The Queen of Cumbia.' Her agent, Alison
Loerke, described a bureaucratic nightmare of documents being
misplaced and delayed by immigration authorities; the mess could not
be untangled in time for Momposina's scheduled June 24 concert at the
Conga Room.

Cheika Rimitti, an Algerian rai singer, made it to California Plaza
for a free concert on July 13, but she was missing her keyboard
player and a guest singer, Cheb Sahraoui. They were held up by the
new 20-day security waiting period for North Africans and Middle
Easterners, said Walter Nick Durkacz, the New York City festival
director who handled visa arrangements for Rimitti's tour. Durkacz,
who has directed the Central Park Summerstage series for 17 years,
said that delays he encountered this year included having the
Immigration and Naturalization Service bounce back visa applications
because he had signed them in black ink rather than blue, and because
he mistakenly had written a check for $135--$5 more than the required
application fee.

The INS has been criticized since Sept. 11 for, among other things,
granting student visas to the two pilots who felled the World Trade
Center--six months after they died carrying out their attack. 'There
has been a lot of criticism and they're playing it extremely by the
book because they don't want to make mistakes,' Durkacz said. 'I
can't blame them. We all do things differently now.'

Presenters point to June 1, 2001, as well as Sept. 11 as a milestone
on the road to uncertainty for importers of foreign talent. That's
when the INS began offering to ramrod visa applications through the
system in 15 days--for those willing to pay a $1,000 fee. Executives
of service organizations such as Opera America and the American
Symphony Orchestra League say that many of their members can't afford
the fee and that visa approvals that could be obtained in 30 to 60
days early in 2001 now take 100 days or more.

Ron Johnson, a supervisor at the California Service Center in Laguna
Niguel, one of four INS centers nationwide that process visa
applications, acknowledges the average time for unexpedited visa
approval has increased from 75 days early in 2001 to more than 100
days now. The culprit, he said, is global terrorism, not the 'premium
processing fee' criticized by arts groups. It takes five to 10
minutes to run post-Sept. 11 computerized security checks on each
visa applicant, Johnson said--a big reason for the slowdown.

In June, he said, the California Service Center received 9,500
applications for temporary worker visas--about 500 of them for
artists. Their American presenters must persuade the INS that the
performers possess 'extraordinary ability' or are 'culturally
unique'--a process that for many years has generated periodic
instances of esteemed but not-so-famous performers being denied
entry. Once the INS has OKd a performer, it is up to officers at U.S.
consulates around the world to decide whether they are trustworthy.
Are they apt to break the law? Is there a risk that they will try to
use a temporary visa as a portal to illegal immigration? Besides the
20-day security waiting period for those from 'countries considered
problematic,' as the State Department's consular affairs spokesman,
Edward Dickens, put it, all male visa-seekers ages 16 to 45 must now
provide detailed biographical information.

Charlotte Lee, who handles visas for IMG Artists, which has a large
roster of classical musicians, said it recently took her more than
five hours to help a client from China complete the form. Jan Denton,
executive director of the American Arts Alliance, is trying to
educate INS officials about the unique needs of arts presenters--and
the potential damage to their reputations and pocketbooks when
advertised performers fail to appear. She hopes that will lead to
more consistent procedures for evaluating visa applications for
artists and more flexible ways of handling emergencies and preventing
no-shows.

'We understand that [immigration authorities] are very, very
beleaguered. Maybe they'll understand what we're up against.' The INS
is not about to streamline anything in ways that would compromise
security, said Virginia Kice, spokeswoman for the service's Western
Region. 'Nobody wants to make a mistake that has awful repercussions.'

Arts presenters fear that without relief from visa delays, some
foreign performers may give up on the U.S.--and that some American
producers may balk at booking lesser-known artists, or ones from
hot-spot nations, for fear they won't get through the system. 'The
last thing I want is to let that be a decisive factor in what we
program,' said Redden, the Lincoln Center Festival director. 'But at
some point it may come to that.'

Copyright 2002 Los Angeles Times
--
emailed by Ian Anderson
Editor: fRoots Magazine

Local Music From Out There . . .

email: ian@frootsmag.com

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