Best Bets: Marcus Shelby Orchestra, Joe Goode Performance Group, Desi Comedy Festival, ‘Yellow River Cantata,’ ‘A German Requiem’

Freebie of the week: The annual Yerba Buena Gardens Festival in San Francisco is in full swing, offering several free performances a week through early October. Shows range from poetry readings to concerts to puppets for kids, a dance/workout class, movie screenings and more. This weekend sees a return to the series by acclaimed Bay Area musician and bandleader Marcus Shelby, who also happens to be the festival’s resident composer. Shelby is well-known in the local music scene for his extended jazz and blues compositions that weave in elements of African American history. On Saturday, his 15-member band performs a show titled “Blues and the Pursuit of Freedom,” made up of segments from previous Yerba Buena Gardens Festival commissions. The work will touch on everything from abolitionist Harriet Tubman, to Black history in baseball, the Ohlone tribelets and even the pandemic. The performance takes place from 2 to 3:30 p.m. on the Yerba Buena Gardens Great Lawn, on Mission Street, between Third and Fourth streets. More information is at ybgfestival.org. 

A Goode show: Bay Area choreographer, writer and director Joe Goode is known for creating and presenting highly relatable dance works—ones that capture the pain and passion of everyday life. He is considered a groundbreaking choreographer for combining spoken word, text, film and other sonic and visual imagery into his storytelling; his lauded dance-theater productions include “Body Familiar,” “Gender Heroes,” “Wonderboy” and more. Goode’s site-specific productions have taken place in the cavernous Haas-Lilienthal House in Pacific Heights, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the San Francisco Mint and other distinctive venues, allowing the surroundings to play a primary role in the storytelling process. Now the Joe Goode Performance Group is back with a new work, titled “Are You Okay?” Something of an urgent variant on the “Why Can’t We All Get Along?” theme, it posits that togetherness—he calls it “collaborative creativity” —is more than a lofty notion nowadays; it may be the only blueprint to humankind’s survival in an unstable world. “Are You Okay?,” another site-specific production, is in San Francisco’s Rincon Center, 83 Mission St., opening at 8 p.m. Thursday and running through Aug. 31. Tickets are $48-$60 at joegoode.org.