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Dear Friends,
We hope you are all having a blessed holiday season. Thank you for taking the time to follow our posts and messages. Through your presence here, we hope you will consider making a tax deductible donation to the San Francisco International Arts Festival on or before New Year’s Eve. Donations can be made easily on our website AT THIS LINK or on our Facebook Page HERE.
After three years of pandemic caution, outdoor programming, biblical storms and other high drama, we are pleased to announce that the Festival will finally return in June 2023 with 40 artistic ensembles presenting in five venues throughout San Francisco’s Mission district. The long-lead media release announcing our program can be viewed AT THIS LINK and a PDF version of our advance flyer can be downloaded from THIS LINK (or reply to this message and we can mail you a hard copy).
Next year will also be our 20th anniversary (which is very hard to believe). Twenty years! since the likes of the then-unknown-in-these-parts, Akram Khan, Salia ni Seydou and Quasar Dance Company first stepped onto our stage; since the debut of Keith Hennessy's new company, Circo Zero and a still-youthful Will Power presented the West Coast Premiere of Flow. Two decades and more than 600 artists / companies later we are still striving to present a dynamic interactive platform for local artists to share their work with international peers -- and vice-versa.
Reflecting on 2022, we continued to build back from the pandemic by successfully presenting a summer series with some statement World Premieres. Daughters of the Delta by Michelle Jacques and Religion Kitendi by Kiandanda Dance Theater both eloquently espoused themes of racial justice and cultural equity. We eventually managed to traverse the artist visa conundrum once again, when David Brandstätter (with Michelle) presented his nuanced and multi-layered treatise on freedom with the US Premiere of FRE!HEIT in October.
We’ve also created the monthly spoken word and music series, The Last Supper Party; the next installment of which will take place on January 7 with Abdul Kenyatta, J.P. Frary and Lisa Graciano. We hope you will become a regular guest here too. It is FREE to attend and we break bread and share food with the audience as part of the program.
Thanks for reading our end-of-year update. In what can most modestly be described as trying times, we have done our best to support local artists, raising money for and presenting as many as we could during the COVID years. Now we are putting our best foot forward to take the organization to a new-but-somewhat-familiar place (back to the Mission!) and we are asking you to help support us with this.
As our last hurrah for 2022, it just remains for me to say, on behalf of all of us at SFIAF—artists, staff, volunteers and board members; we wish you a Happy and Healthy New Year and we hope you can join us for our latest manifestation in 2023.
Sincerely
Andrew Wood
Executive Director
San Francisco International Arts Festival
T - 415-399-9554
http://www.sfiaf.org
Donations can also be made by cheque by sending to:
San Francisco International Arts Festival
1222 Sutter Street
San Francisco, CA 94109
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