Sorrow, hope and joy, the emotions of this year, were expressed Monday evening at the winter performance of the San Francisco Girls Chorus. Celebrating its 45th anniversary, the event was also a reminder of the organization’s original mission to create a respectable space for young women to be vocal in public life.

Artistic director Valerie Sainte-Agathe has managed to square the relation between a city composed of world cultures and a European art form that dates to the Middle Ages. A program of community-sung folk songs from Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Middle East shared space with Christmas carols that migrated west with the pioneers.

Continue reading for free

Sign in to read this story and receive the weekly roundup in your inbox.

Or

Terms & Conditions

Success! Your account was created and you’re signed in.
Please visit My Account to manage your account.

Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.