Arts & Events

This year’s BAF venue is 2133 University Ave, Berkeley,CA.

Every year the volunteer-driven Berkeley Arts Festival commandeers a vacant retail space in downtown Berkeley for an extraordinary month of music, arts, activist and literary offerings. A dormant, often badly in need of renovation space – past years have included historic banks, UC Berkeley office space, and the former Edy’s Coffee Shop – is transformed into an art gallery and a concert hall, complete with carefully chosen grand piano and state of the art Meyer Sound system. This year’s edition is snugly tucked between two venerable downtown Berkeley institutions: Long Life Veggie House and Ace Hardware.

Because the use of these spaces is donated, and they are often in a state of ownership transition and/or construction, the “lead time” of the festival, when publicity can be generated, is typically very short. We rely on word of mouth, and friends forwarding our schedule to their friends.

Berkeley Arts Festival Schedule:July 12-August 14, 2011 -more-

Alice, a young girl, tells fantastic stories about her family life at Show & Tell in school ... Alice and her father, a seismologist, live alone in Parkville, on the San Andreas Fault in the Coast Range (not far, curiously, from where James Dean bought it), sharing their shadowy dreams about her late mother, his wife ... The earth shakes; Alice's house--the walls of the theater--tremble. Only Alice and her father seem to feel it ... -more-

"It's a suspicious thing, medicine. It's black magic. It's mojo. And it scares me." -more-

Playwrights come from motley day-jobs: George Bernard Shaw was an estate-office clerk, Anton Chekhov was a physician, and Jim Colgan is an asbestos defense attorney.

Local playwright Colgan’s “The Story of Oh” was one of the 40 out of 1000+ applicants selected for the Samuel French OFF-OFF- Broadway Festival of Short Plays in NYC in July. -more-

A pair of shoes on the floor of the parlor of the Samsa family home. The Father (Allen Mckelvey), staring at the shoes, calls the Mother (Madeline H. D. Brown) to see them, as their daughter Grete (Megan Trout) hovers near--and son Gregor (Alexander Crowther) lies in bed--or rather on an iron bed-frame on a tilted floor that resembles a washboard (Nina Ball's compact, homey yet vertiginous set)--upstairs in his room, not having gone to work ... -more-

This past Tuesday afternoon I had enormous pleasure, and I might say, inspiration, when I attended the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's fabulous exhibit, "The Steins Collect." Having over the years visited magnificent art galleries in Europe -- the Louvre, National Gallery in London, and the Pitti Palace in Florence, I assumed this exhibit would be anticlimactic and rather ordinary. I was sadly mistaken! -more-