Early Bird Special Now On-Sale for 2011 SF International Festival. Tickets only $12 During March.

Feb. 28, 2011 - PRLog -- February 28, 2011, San Francisco. Tickets for the Eighth Annual San Francisco International Arts Festival go on sale tomorrow, Tuesday March 1 (actually at one minute after midnight tonight). For the month of March the Festival will be offering tickets at the incredible giveaway-price of $12.

This includes shows by all artists participating in this year’s 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.

Executive director, Andrew Wood said of the Early Bird Special, “The Early Bird gets more popular every year, we think it is a fantastic program. Ticket prices will never be this low again. They represent a saving of more than 50% off the at-the-door cover price. It means everyone can afford to see some of the great performances that we are featuring this year.”
SFIAF 2010 will feature artists from the Bay Area, Seattle and the countries of Cuba, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Iraq/the Netherlands and Israel.

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.

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.

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.
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, 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.

Video Sceenings
Curated by Frank Pietronigro of the Zero Gravity Consortium, the screening series will feature arts, culture, humanities, space science and engineering themed 'video-shorts' (no longer than 20 minutes) showcasing collaborations created by international space artists, institutions and organizations working within the interdisciplinary nexus of culture and space exploration.

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, Yoshi’s San Francisco, 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.

SFIAF 2011 Venues
This year’s festival includes dance, music, theatre and visual arts with events taking place at the Marines Memorial Theatre, St. Gregory’s Church, Potrero Hill Neighborhood House, Herbst Theatre, Yoshi’s San Francisco, Mission High School, the Southside Theatre and counterPULSE.

SFIAF 2011 Funders
SFIAF and its Presenting Partners are funded in part by generous grants from the following foundations: 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 of the New England Foundation for the Arts, Trust for Mutual Understanding, Western States Arts Federation (WESTAF), Zellerbach Family Foundation

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The San Francisco International Arts Festival celebrates the arts through an annual gathering that brings together a global community of artists and audiences. The organization presents and produces innovative projects that are focused on increasing human awareness, understanding and appreciation. We develop long-term relationships with Bay Area artists participating in international collaborative projects and also present ground-breaking artists from around the world; many of whom have rarely, or never previously, performed in the United States.