On the edge again - Dance Matters - San Francisco International Arts Festival fund raising efforts by Andrew Wood

Dance Magazine, Sept, 2003 by Allan Ulrich

San Francisco already boasts an ethnic dance festival, a lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender dance festival, a retail dance festival, and (until 2002) a butoh festival. Does the city really need another?

Andrew Wood thinks so, and he has mobilized the arts and business communities, proposed an initial $200,000 budget, and engaged an array of foreign companies to prove his point. The gangly Englishman warns that the first San Francisco International Arts Festival, slated far September 4-21 at Yerba Buena Center far the Arts, may be modest in comparison to what he envisions for the future, but the planning nevertheless expresses a long-held philosophy by Wood, who, over the past decade, has directed such alternative performance spaces as ODC Theater and Life an the Water.

"This is not to criticize the fine jab already done by local dance presenters, but we here in the Bay Area are so isolated from the international touring circuit that it tokes at least three years for new work to appear and make its way west," notes director Wood. For this "pilot" festival, he has invited a trio of troupes--the Akrom Khan Dance Company (London), pictured above, Salia ni Seydou (Burkina Faso in West Africa), and Quasar Companhia de Danca (Brazil)to make their northern California debuts, while Yerba Buena Center, one of the primary presenting partners, will host the local bow of Tere O'Connor Dance by commissioning a new piece from the New York postmodernist.

"International collaborative work" is what fascinates Wood. "This is modern dance from non-Western traditions. It's a vocabulary we don't see here. These artists feel free to break their own rules."

The interviewer suggests the word "balkanized" to describe the local dance community, and Wood concurs: "We all have our own interests, our own agendas. I want dancers in this area to work with their peers from abroad, so that they are not making dances without any context of what is happening around the world." To that end, Wood has invited his visitors to stay in San Francisco far a week of teaching and master classes.

There have been two previous attempts to produce an international festival by the Golden Gate and they both ended in financial disaster. So Wood has moved cautiously. His other prime partners in this seventeen-event project include the Son Francisco World Music Festival, the Bay Area Hip-Hop Theatre Festival, Intersection for the Arts, Yerba Buena Arts and Events (an alfresco series), and the San Francisco Opera.

Wood has approached the business community with a suitcase full of research. All of it indicates that festival cities from Charleston, South Carolina, to Lucerne, Switzerland, reap immense financial rewards from culture-hungry visitors. "It's not about the arts; it's about economic stimulus," Wood says.

Thus, the second edition of SFIAF is slated for late May 2005, chosen for those weeks because that is when tourist and convention traffic traditionally slows down. Wood mentions a few possibilities for that festival--the Royal New Zealand Ballet performing work by the controversial Venezuelan-born modernist Javier de Frutos, and a Kennedy Center-sponsored reconstruction of George Balanchine's 1965 Don Quixote by the original Dulcinea, Suzanne Farrell.

For all that to happen, he is hoping for a $1.6 million grant from the city, to be matched by the private sector. Even in hard times, Wood remains optimistic: "We will be marketing to the progressive crowd." In San Francisco, that should include just about everybody.