Arts & Events

International Theater & Music in the Bay Area: Part One, The San Francisco International Arts Festival

Ken Bullock
Friday May 29, 2015 - 03:36:00 PM

There's been a great profusion of international theater and related music events springing up all over the Bay Area the past few weeks, some of it by touring groups, some by residential companies--and the biggest producer for them, the San Francisco International Arts Festival, which presents moire than 70 ensembles and individual performers over three weeks, has shows continuing through this weekend and next, until Sunday, June 7th, at Fort Mason, including performers from Berkeley as well as from all over the world. 

The SFIAF continues to feature theater inspired by the performances, training and dramaturgy of Jerzy Grotowski (1933-99), whose influences went from great early modern innovators in stylized and experimental physical theater (Jacques Copeau, V. S. Meyerhold) to folk and religious rituals and singing from around the world. Last year the Festival presented the remarkable work of director Piotr Borowski's Studium Teatralne, from Warsaw, 'The King of Hearts is Off Again,' from a novel based on the real-life experiences of Izolda Regensberg, who escaped the Warsaw Ghetto during Nazi occupation, reentering it to get her husband and her family out, too--an unusual premise for a Grotowskian staging, but a great triumph of physical theatrics by the company of four, lifting its profusion of gesture and athletic--even acrobatic--movement above the least hint of Expressionism to what may be a new definition of Epic Theater. (A trailer with tableaux from 'King of Hearts,' 'Krol Kier ... ,' is online on their YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwok8gppAPA

Right now, Teatr Zar, from Wroclaw, is presenting their long-term project commemorating another holocaust, the Armenian Genocide of a century ago this year, 'Armine, Sister,' its final shows at 9 tonight (Friday) and tomorrow at the Herbst Pavilion in Fort Mason. In contrast to the maelstrom of movement of Studium Teatralne, Zar envelopes the audience, seated around their specially-realized space, with extraordinary music and singing from the Caucasus and beyond in Central Asia: Armenian liturgical music and Persian-Kurdish singing ... while among stout pillars--sometimes moved by block and tackle, sometimes showering sand on the performers--figures move in dim, allusive lighting from above and the side, making tableaux reminiscent of the motifs of side panels of Counter-Reformation altar paintings of the Passion of Christ and the martyrdom of saints, male and female bodies in physical travail and suffering, attitudes of hope and hopelessness, displaying some of the hallmarks--and maybe a few of the cliches--of Grotowskian staging in an intense program, ending with the audience's silent exit into an expansive room with glowing projections of old Armenia. 

(A trailer, 'Armine, Sister--Vehicle of Memory,' is online at: https://youtube.com/watch?v=tCNV3KZ8Q_w ) Golden Thread Productions, the Bay Area's theater for plays from and about the Middle East, which just presented their founder Torange Yeghiazarian's new play 'Isfahan Blues,' about Duke Ellington's band in the Shah's Iran of the 60s, with African American Shakespeare, was also a co-sponsor for Zar. 

And Berkeley's Inferno Theatre continues performing their founder Giulio Cesare Perrone's new work, 'Quantum Love,' through this weekend. Fresh from their own Diasporas Festival at the South Berkeley Community Church, but with an hour-long version showing more breadth and depth than the intriguing "preview" at Diasporas, 'Quantum Love' is a six person show (founding Inferno member Simone Bloch, new member--but recognizable to Berkeley theatergoers--Jody Christian, another newcomer--G. Scott Heath, veteran physical theater actor Michael Needham, violinist and actor Emmy Pierce, and actor-dancer Tenya Spillman) that goes from meditations on physics to rash acts of attraction, at times like an ecstatic Laocoön of interwoven actions by couples and individuals of the troupe. ( infernotheatre.org/

--Just a few of the events in the continuing Fest, others coming up this weekend including on Saturday, Berkeley's Sarah Cahill, playing solo piano works by Pauline Oliveros and young SF composer Danny Clay at 4:30 in the Firehouse and Francis Wong, brilliant jazz saxophonist, with shamizen player and dancer performing his suite Wong Wei's Gamble, about a jockey reopening a racetrack in Japanese-occupied China, at 7 in Festival Central hall; on Sunday exceptional classical music on the oldest Chinese stringed instrument, the Guqin, by famed player and teacher Wang Fei and her teacher, Li Xiangting, honoring the 120th anniversary of Lu's teacher, Zha Fuxi, in the Chapel at 5 (Wang Fei on YouTube: https:www.youtube.com/watch?v=zptY64M_EsY --and more info at guqin.org), Kurdish storytelling to music by Dengbesz Kazo with Murat Iclinalca (who participated in Teatr Zar's show) at 8, also in the Chapel; Irish storyteller Aine Riley's solo performance, also at 8, in the Southside Theater (she's performing for the duration of the Festival)--and next week, co-founder of Berkeley's great Blake Street Hawkeyes, Bob Ernst, performing solo in the Firehouse at 9:30 on Saturday, 3:30 Sunday--and much, much more ...  

www.sfiaf.org; (800) 838-3006 for tickets