San Francisco International Arts Festival Announces Line-up for Eighth Annual Gathering

Nov. 16, 2010 - PRLog -- Calendar Editors Please Note
Who: Multiple Artists
What: The Eighth Annual San Francisco International Arts Festival
Where: Multiple Venues
When: Wednesday May 18 – Sunday June 5, 2011
Tickets: $12-$25. Full Time Students & Seniors $16
Box Office for Advance Purchase: www.sfiaf.org and 1-800-838-3006
For more information: 415-399-9554

November 16, 2010, San Francisco. In exactly six months and two days the Eighth Annual San Francisco International Arts Festival (SFIAF) will kick off on May 18 with more than 40 performances being presented by 23 arts organizations and ensembles at multiple venues throughout the city. With its annual theme, The Truth in Knowing/Now: Threads in Time, Place, Culture, SFIAF 2011 will include World Premieres, US Debuts & International Collaborations featuring leading artists from the Bay Area performing alongside their peers from around the world. This year’s festival includes dance, music, theatre and visual arts with events taking place at the the Herbst Theatre, Yoshi’s San Francisco, Mission High School, Z Space at Theater Artaud, the Southside Theatre and counterPULSE.
Executive director, Andrew Wood said of this year’s event, “We are tremendously excited by the 2011 program. It has been over two and a half years in the making and we are very pleased with the results. I would like to thank the artists, our presenting partners and the numerous foundations, sponsors and governments who have worked with us over this protracted period to raise the money to bring the 2011 festival to fruition.”
SFIAF 2010 will feature artists from the Bay Area, San Diego, Seattle and the countries of Cuba, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Iraq/the Netherlands and Israel.

Special Pre-Festival Show
On Monday April 4, as a curtain raiser for the 2011 Festival, SFIAF is proud to present the great Los Muñequitos de Matanzas from Cuba. Los Muñequitos are amongst the highest regarded percussionists in the world and masters of Afro-Cuban ritual and rumba music and dance. Founded in 1952, the group currently spans three generations of an extended family of musicians, singers and dancers. The performance with SFIAF will be the company’s first appearance in San Francisco since 1992

Dance
A company titled Iraqi Bodies will make their US debut as part of SFIAF with Crying of My Mother, a metaphor for the religious conflict in Iraq. Three men living in the same house start, with time, to disagree and resist each other. Greed, malignance, violence and killing become their only language. (Stark and effectively lit, each gesture of a hand or flex of a naked foot told of the pain……this was war poetry at its finest……uniquely memorable. Dance Europe, February 2008).
The company’s artistic director, Muhanad Rasheed is fast becoming a dance phenomenon in the Netherlands, where the artists currently reside. He is the recipient of the prestigious 2010 Dance Days Choreographer Award (past recipients include Jiří Kylián) and also the Swan Award for Best Production in Holland 2010 for his work Mourning with the Netherlands Internationaal Danstheater. The company will share a bill with the Bay Area’s Nina Haft & Company who will present the US Premiere of T:here based on the their travel and research in the Middle East.
Iraqi Bodies are also collaborating with the Bay Area’s Leyya Tawil and Dance Elixir. The two companies will present work-in-progress showings of THIEVES, a piece that will eventually premiere at SFIAF in May 2012.
The Barak Marshall Company from Israel will present Monger, originally created at the Suzanne Dellal Centre in Israel in 2008. The occasion will mark Marshall’s (who is the son of legendary Yemeni Jewish dancer Margalit Oved), first ever performance in the Bay Area.
lean to productions, perhaps better known as Bay Area ex-pats Rachael Lincoln and Leslie Seiters, will present the Northern California premiere of their latest work, titled May and June.
Dancing Earth, a Native American contemporary dance ensemble directed by choreographer Rulan Tangen, will make a rare Bay Area appearance with the local premiere of Tangen’s evening length work Of Bodies of Elements, as part of a National Dance Project supported tour.
Hope Mohr Dance will present a new solo work developed in residency at the Montalvo Arts Center titled Plainsong for Aleta Hayes, design by Katarina Rodabaugh.  FACT/SF will present a further treatise of artistic director, Charles Slender’s popular The Consumption Series. Scott Wells and Dancers will also play host to Khambatta Dance Company from Seattle.

Music
The opening night of SFIAF 2011 on May 18 will be at Yoshi’s San Francisco and will feature two old friends, Messrs. Omar Sosa and John Santos making their first Festival appearance in three years backed by Sosa’s multitalented Afreecanos Quintet. It is high time! Who can forget the fantastic concert they gave at a sun-splashed Yerba Buena Gardens as the closing show of SFIAF 2008 before over three and a half thousand enthusiastic supporters? Opening for the group will be The Jazz School Ensemble.
SFIAF’s longest presenting partners, The Earplay Ensemble will present an international program featuring  the work of  Hector Parra of Spain, Olga Neuwirth from Austria, and Mauricio Rodriguez of Mexico who will be in attendance for the world premiere of a new work commissioned by Earplay.

Theatre
SFIAF is proud to present the northern California debut of Teatr Zar the resident company at the Grotowski Institute in Wroclaw, Poland. The Gospels of Childhood Tripych is the culmination of artistic director, Jaroslaw Fret’s more than 10 years of investigative research and development into ancient sacred songs. It is a seminal work that also builds on the nearly half a century of teaching and exploration conducted by Jerzy Grotowski. The company emulates Grotowski’s ethos of ensemble work and develops its productions through a long process of creating its own theatrical language. A language that, like Grotowski’s in the last years of his life, utilizes Eastern Orthodox music as a source for the creation of a performance that seeks to recreate the very roots of theatre itself.
SFIAF 2011 will feature the restaging of Queer to mark the 10th anniversary of Erling Wold’s original verbatim musical theatre production of William Burrough’s landmark novella starring Joe Wicht (aka Trauma Flintstone) recreating the landmark, narcotics fueled role of Burroughs’ pseudonym—William Lee. The anniversary performances will again be directed by Jim Cave.

SFIAF 2010 Presenting Partners
Dance Elixir, Dancing Earth, Earplay, Erling Wold’s Fabrications, FACT/SF, Hope Mohr Dance, Khambatta Dance Company, lean to productions, Nina Haft & Company, Scott Wells & Dancers, The Jazz School, Israel Center, the Consulate General of Israel, Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, Galeria de la Raza, Yoshi’s San Francisco, Mixed Bag Productions, Polish Cultural Institute of New York, American Indian Contemporary Arts, the Arab Cultural & Community Center, the Zero Gravity Arts Consortium in collaboration with Golden Star Productions, the Space Arts Development Fund and The STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at the College of Fine Arts, Carnegie Mellon University.

Tickets & SFIAF Early Bird Special
Tickets go on sale on March 1st and, as is SFIAF’s tradition, 5% of single tickets for all shows will be on sale for an incredible $12 each until March 31. Starting April 1st (or before if Early Bird Tickets sell out) single tickets will be $20 in advance and discounts are available for ticket purchases to multiple shows. Tickets are $25 at the door.

Funders
SFIAF and its Presenting Partners are funded in part by: Association of Performing Arts Presenters, the Bernard Osher Foundation, California Arts Council, Kenneth Rainin Foundation, LEF Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Dance Project, Trust for Mutual Understanding, Western States Arts Federation (WESTAF), Zellerbach Family Foundation

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SFIAF's mission is to work with multiple artists and arts organizations to promote the arts and the city of San Francisco through the production of an annual, multi-disciplinary festival that brings together a world community of artists and audiences.