The Mission looks very different when you’re walking down 24th Street with S.F. International Arts Festival founder Andrew Wood.
On a recent sun-drenched afternoon, the British-born founder, also the artistic director of the festival, sees opportunities to put on a show everywhere. He’s not just pointing out theaters and venues. The SFIAF, which runs April 30 through May 11, manifests throughout the Mission in yoga studios, cafes, and art galleries — even the headquarters of an internet provider.
“We put out the call, and the response was pretty amazing,” he says. “We’ve expanded our footprint this year, and we’ve learned a lot about how to work with local businesses from last year.”
Founded in the Mission in 2003, the itinerant festival fully came into its own during a long tenure at Fort Mason, “where we had the run of the campus during a bank holiday,” Wood says. In returning to the neighborhood last year, the S.F. International Arts Festival has embraced a whole new approach to presenting dance, music, drama and performance art, carefully matching each act to an appropriate space.
The vast majority of shows are gleaned from the Bay Area’s teaming scene. With nearly 100 performances and events, the festival showcases the global array of arts in our backyard, from the Carnatic jazz of the Prashant Radhakrishnan Trio and the Egyptian maqam grooves of Music In-Takht to dramatic tablao of Melissa Cruz Flamenco and the East-meets-East encounter of Melody of China with the Ali Akbar College of Music Ensemble.
But the “international” aspect of the S.F. International Arts Festival reflects a curatorial lens that reaches far beyond the Bay Area. In many events, the programming offers a taste of the expansive Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where Wood scouts every summer for acts that would be economically feasible to bring to San Francisco. That’s how the S.F. International Arts Festival landed Duane Forrest’s “Bob Marley: How Reggae Changed the World,” a one-man musical that plays May 1-3 at Fingersnaps Media Arts. (Forrest also performs the work-in-progress “Tree of Dreams,” an immersive theatrical piece about overcoming trauma, with Tide & Foam at Noh Space May 8-9.)
Fingersnaps, a DJ academy that moved into its space on 20th Street six years ago, is one of the S.F. International Arts Festival’s first-time venues. The proprietor, DJ Lamont, is too busy running the business to make it out to see many performances, but last year his husband “went to some shows and thought the festival was great,” he says. When he heard Wood on KALW talking about the plans for expanding this year’s festival, he reached out to offer his space, and now Fingersnaps is one of SFIAF’s busiest venues with seven concerts.
“It’s a great way to be part of an event larger than myself, part of a community effort hosted here in the Mission,” DJ Lamont says. “It’s an opportunity to meet people who wouldn’t normally be here, to extend a hand and have a hand extended.”
At first glance, the most unlikely enterprise hosting performances is the local internet provider Monkeybrains. But it turns out that, since moving into their space on Treat Avenue, the company has set aside a room for community events — they call it Napsugar — which has already seen numerous performances and community gatherings.
“We’re not curators,” says Monkeybrains co-founder Alex Menendez. “It’s more free-for-all. People come to us when they think of a community event. We haven’t turned anyone away yet.”
Menendez and fellow founder Rudy Rucker met Wood at a Mission Merchants Association meeting, which led to the 80-person capacity Napsugar space, which is outfitted with a professional sound system, taking on a significant role in the SFIAF.
Like Fingersnaps, Monkeybrains is hosting seven performances, including the May 2 world premiere of renegade composer Moe Staiano’s “Music For Eight Guitars,” pioneering Asian American jazz saxophonist Francis Wong’s work-in-progress “Wong Wei’s Legacy” on May 4, and Wandering Ensemble’s new dance theater production “Lost & Found” on May 8.
For Rucker, an author, mathematician and painter, Napsugar continues his long involvement in now shuttered Bay Area arts spaces like the Mission’s CELLspace and Cyclone Warehouse in Dogpatch. “We love the arts,” he says. “We may be a tech company, but we come from a strong background where arts and tech intersect.”
If the festival has a blockbuster, it’s “In the Name of the Son” by Northern Ireland’s Green Shoot Productions. A one-man play starring Irish actor Shaun Blaney, it essentially picks up the post-prison story of Gerry Conlon, one of the Guildford Four, who were wrongly convicted for an IRA pub bombing that killed four off-duty British soldiers and a civilian.
The notorious case was portrayed in the 1993 true crime film “In the Name of the Father,” starring Daniel Day-Lewis, which was nominated for seven Academy Awards. Written by Conlon’s lifelong friend Richard O’Rawe and Green Shoot Productions Artistic Director Martin Lynch, the play explores Conlon’s disorienting return to society after receiving a major financial settlement. In the wake of the film, he mingles with celebrities such as Johnny Depp and Day-Lewis while battling addiction and waves of guilt over his father’s death in prison.
“In the Name of the Son” opens the festival Wednesday, April 30 at the Victoria Theatre, and returns to the Vic on May 2 and May 3. It’s one of more than a dozen events that are quintessentially SFIAF, available to Bay Area audiences courtesy of a shoestring operation. In many ways the festival is a miracle held together by Wood’s perseverance, and the return to the Mission is an ongoing experiment in making the most out of the least.
“We haven’t got any money,” Wood says. “How do we make it work? We’re the best at getting the most out of a dollar.”
The San Francisco International Arts Festival runs from April 30 through May 11 at venues throughout the Mission. For tickets and more information, visit www.sfiaf.org.
