San Francisco Public Press (https://www.sfpublicpress.org/category/arts-culture/)
The Bay Area Reporter distributed its first edition on April 1, 1971. While publisher Bob Aaron Ross may have chosen April Fool’s Day as as a light-hearted start for the gay community’s latest bar “rag,” the newspaper would go on to do serious journalism, covering the major events of the post-Stonewall era.
Seventy-six years ago, the San Francisco Ballet introduced “The Nutcracker” to America. This year, the company will introduce the “Nutcracker Online” — a virtual holiday experience for the era of COVID-19.
S.F. Ballet is just one of many local arts organizations that have adapted their holiday offerings for a socially distanced season. It’s not easy to capture the spirit of live performance without an audience, but constraints have bred creativity and opened new channels of artistic expression.
The San Francisco Mime Troupe has been performing socially conscious and often very funny productions in Bay Area parks since 1959 and was preparing for its summer series of live shows when the COVID-19 pandemic made that impossible.
The Troupe has been releasing half-hour radio plays for the last 10 weeks and now, with the first series, “Tales of the Resistance,” coming to an end, we wanted to find out how the move from live to radio play has worked out.
“She Represents” offers politically aware teens a reframing of the election season. But author Caitlin Donohue said the book is decidedly not for fangirls and takes an often critical look at the lives and actions of women with political power.
The new documentary “The Boys Who Said NO!” shows how young draft resisters built a massive movement with a commitment to nonviolence that followed in the footsteps of civil rights organizers. Hundreds of thousands of people ultimately refused to be drafted into the military.
In his memoir “Between Heaven and Hell: The Story of my Stroke,” writer and journalist David Talbot reflects on the long journey toward recovery from a stroke that attacked his ability to swallow, care for himself and speak and write.
The Word for Word performing arts company at Z Space, which brings short stories to the stage while staying loyal to both the letter and the spirit of the written work, is turning to podcasting during the pandemic, when audiences aren’t allowed to gather. “WORD for WORDcast,” which turns short stories into podcasts with theatricality and rich sound design, will also be broadcast on the radio station operated by the San Francisco Public Press, KSFP 102.5 FM, on Saturdays at 6 p.m. and Sundays at 5 p.m.
When you tune your radio to 102.5 FM in San Francisco, depending on the time of day, you might hear public radio style talk programming, or you might hear music from local artists. That’s because two radio stations share the frequency — KSFP, from the San Francisco Public Press, and KXSF, a project of San Francisco Community Radio. Carolyn Keddy and Ellie Stokes, two DJs at KXSF, joined us on “Civic” to talk about their experience working with scores of volunteers who bring a broad array of music and cultural programming to the airwaves and to the station’s live stream at kxsf.fm.
As events that would draw crowds under normal circumstances go virtual, an upcoming performance from American Conservatory Theater centers on building connections in digital spaces as a central theme. “In Love and Warcraft,” a play by Madhuri Shekar, is a romantic comedy about a young woman’s exploration of her identity in an online role-playing game and expressing it in the real world.
The San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus has been an institution within the LGBTQ community since 1978. Now, like many organizations, it’s scrambling to shift its focus to virtual events. The group’s annual gala, too, will be going virtual.
When actor and director Khalia Davis was growing up in the 1990s, children’s entertainment rarely addressed racism. When it did — in books about Ruby Bridges or special episodes of television shows like “Family Matters” and “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” — it was never explicit.
Now in 2020, after the killing of George Floyd at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement across the country, Davis is producing and directing “A Kids Play About Racism,” which will be streaming, free of charge, on Broadway on Demand this weekend.
