“This is a small way back for us to international performances,” says Andrew Wood, founder-director of the San Francisco International Arts Festival. He’s referring to the lineup for this year’s festival, which runs May 1-12 in various locations and includes three productions from outside the United States.
With its ambitious umbrella title, the festival, founded in 2002, has had its ups and downs over the years, not counting the restrictions of the pandemic. Wrangling a production of this size takes time, money and, if it’s to be truly international, willingness on the part of various governments to provide visas and money to the performers. International politics can be a factor.
Venues, too, are a consideration. After about a decade based in Fort Mason, last year the festival returned to its original and more centralized neighborhood, the vibrant Mission District, where 50 individual artists and ensembles, for a total of 100 concerts, performances and presentations (including a dozen premieres) will appear in about a dozen venues, from the Mission Cultural Center to Red Poppy Art House and more.
“There’s an incredible multiracial spectrum of artists operating here,” says Wood, of the neighborhood, “and people we can create strong partnerships with.”
This year’s program comprises six categories: music (the largest category); dance and theater; and three smaller categories: performance art, spoken word and walking tours.
Two among the three representing international arts this year are “Warm Up” by Mykalle Bielinski from Montreal and playwright-actor Pat Kinevane’s “King.”
Canadian Bielinski is a multidisciplinary artist, composer, sound designer, producer and singer whom Wood, who travels July through January to scout new participants, saw at a Canadian booking conference a year ago November.
In “Warm Up,” as he describes it, she asks the question, “How do we fundamentally change what we’re doing?”
San Francisco performances on May 2-4 mark Bielinski’s U.S. debut, though she has performed in Canada and Europe.
The piece examines our relationship with nature “through the lens of overconsumption by rethinking the act of making art.”
“My vision was to have a more respectful view on nature,” says a soft-spoken Bielinski, on Zoom, in French-accented English. “I wanted to make a show that was self-sufficient, that could respect nature without consuming it.” Hence “Warm Up,” in which she generates energy throughout the performance by pedaling a battery-charged bicycle, filling the battery by, in fact, pedaling.
“It’s a metaphor of how we think: We depend on fossil fuels, on energy resources,” she continues. To create the piece, she studied climate geology: “The metaphor of the bike is about our society,” she explains. “We overproduce—that’s the logic that hits a wall in the show: I produce electricity, but I use too much and have to produce more and more and become tired…”
Although the show’s text is precise, she also improvises, integrating the audience into the action.
She was also inspired by indigenous spirituality, and aside from its political, activist components, “Warm Up” is soft, meditative, includes music and songs. “It’s …convivial,” she explains. She pauses to look up the word. “Yes, very convivial… You get the emotion that is behind all the facts and thinking and fears to feel something together, to dream together about how we can be this post-capitalist society, be with each other in a more human way.”
“Warm Up” is at 7:30 p.m. May 2-4 in Studio 210, 3435 Cesar Chavez Blvd.
Of Irish writer-actor Pat Kinevane’s solo show “King,” a production of Ireland’s 35-year-old Fishamble: The New Play Company and directed by Fishamble’s Jim Culleton, Wood says he saw the piece at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe last year and found it “sad and funny . . . brilliant.”
Kinevane is a longtime actor in Ireland who has branched off into playwriting, winning an Olivier Award along the way; “King,” which has garnered rave reviews, is his fifth solo show (he has written three other plays, also produced by Fishamble). The Edinburgh Festival Fringe named it a “Pick of the Fringe.”
This performance is part of a seven-week tour that includes stops in New York, Serbia and elsewhere.
On the phone from Los Angeles, his stop before coming to San Francisco, he might have been jet-lagged, but chatted with great enthusiasm (and the de rigueur melodic Irish accent) about his artistic inspiration. He says he shifted into playwriting to explore stuff that “really, really matters to me, stuff about the world I was curious or sad or angry about.”
The characters he creates in his one-man shows have been described as “old, abandoned, homeless, physically deformed, estranged.” In “King,” which references Martin Luther King and is set in rural Ireland, the character Luther is an agoraphobic Elvis impersonator who makes a living singing at local karaoke bars to care for his aging father. It explores “prejudice, privilege and resilience.”
But, he adds, “These aren’t unusual characters. Everyone feels sometimes they don’t have a proper home, a place of love. Rejected by society. We feel physically deformed at times. Agoraphobic. … I’m very interested in the façade, what we put out: ‘Everything is fine and dandy.’”
The character Luther is, he says, “probably a composite of me, and of other men. I’ve aways been interested in male isolation. It’s easier for men [than women] to go inward and isolated, it’s got to do with pride, masculinity, how they’ve been raised.”
For him, the play is, as much as anything, an homage not just to MLK and the civil rights movement but also to the Irish patriots (James Connelly and others) who sought dignity and freedom, he says. He’s well aware that, although he himself has never been oppressed by a regime, “Somebody laid down their life for me.”
“King” is at 8 p.m. May 8 and May 10 and 3:30 p.m. May 11 at Mission Cultural Center, 2868 Mission St.
Also on the international roster is “The Soul Catcher: Unmasking the Modern Predator” about narcissistic personality disorder. It is “really intense,” says Wood. It is a partly immersive-theater piece—”The audience doesn’t get to just sit back and watch,” he explains, performed by a trio under the name Kassandra. The show’s director-choreographer, Annika Lewis, a half-Swedish San Francisco native based in Denmark, has described the play as “moving through what they call the abuse cycle, using that as dramaturgy for the performance”: a “multidisciplinary exploration of psychological abuse.” It promises to be dark and edgy.
“The Soul Catcher” is at 8 p.m. May 1 and May 3 and 2 p.m. May 4 at Mission Cultural Center, 2868 Mission St.
Above and beyond performances, cyclists can meet Mykalle Bielinski on National Ride a Bike Day on May 5; would-be performers who want to create their own show can take a free, five-hour master class with Fishamble artistic director Jim Culleton on May 9; artist Carmela Gaspar leads a mural walk in the Mission on May 4 and 11; and much more, including a lineup of free performances.
Says Wood, “We always hope to bring in more international artists depending on money and what we’ve seen.” At Edinburgh alone, he attends 35 to 40 shows a week every August and ends up pursuing perhaps 10 percent of those. He’ll be there this summer, booking for 2026—that’s just how long it takes to plan a festival of this size that includes international performers.
The San Francisco International Arts Festival runs May 1-12 at numerous Mission District locations. Tickets for most performances are $20-$30; passes are $65 for three shows and $107 for five shows. For more information, call (415) 399-9554 or visit https://www.sfiaf.org.