If the San Francisco International Arts Festival’s plunge back into the already-vibrant Mission District is a bold experiment, it’s a gambit made possible by the organization’s many years presenting at Fort Mason. 

Kicking off Wednesday, May 1, the annual event plans to double down on the Mission’s thriving cultural scene, presenting 50 individual artists and ensembles over the course of 100 concerts, performances and presentations. Its new approach will see the festival pop up at more than a dozen venues throughout the neighborhood, organized around a theme that builds on its commitment to showcasing the region’s cultural diversity: “In Diaspora: I.D. for the New Majority.” 

The programming is set to encompass dance, theater, music, poetry, puppetry and various multidisciplinary practices at many of the neighborhood’s signature spaces, including Accion Latina, Bissap Baobab, the Community Music Center, Dance Mission Theater, El Rio, Red Poppy Art House and Medicine for Nightmares, where SFIAF has been presenting the spoken-word series “The Last Supper Party” since the fall. 

Working with multiple venues simultaneously rather than one entity requires a juggling act coordinating ticket sales, production and promotion with every co-presenter, “and we’re incredibly grateful to Fort Mason, where we learned how to run multiple venues at the same time,” said Andrew Wood, SFIAF’s founder and executive director. “The difference is that at Fort Mason, there was one box office and if we wanted to initiate another venue there, we had to do it ourselves.”

Wood launched the festival at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2003 and for the next five years hosted it mostly in the South of Market and Mission neighborhoods. In 2009, it moved to Fort Mason, allowing for the expansion of SFIAF offerings. With the cultural center’s rising fees, however, the festival began pursuing a partnership with San Francisco State for this year’s festival. 

But that option soon proved to be  a poor fit, Wood said, citing in part the “inconvenient location” and lack of public transit, since more than half of the festival’s audience come from outside of the city. He credits SFIAF’s board of directors with pushing him to come up with a backup plan in the Mission, which is how the festival returned to “the neighborhood that represents San Francisco at its best.”

“It’s the center of everything,” Wood added, “with two BART stations that bring the world right here.” 

Over the last two decades, the festival has made a name for itself by introducing an eclectic array of international performers to Bay Area audiences, acts that otherwise would have been unlikely to perform here, like Hong Kong’s Theatre de la Feuille and the Czech Republic’s Spitfire Company. Though SFIAF always drew on local talent too, the advent of the pandemic in 2020 forced the festival to focus exclusively on U.S.-based artists, as the expense and red tape required to procure visas for noncitizen artists became prohibitive. 

This year, the gates have started to swing open again, starting with Denmark’s Kassandra Production, which kicks off the festival at Mission Cultural Center with the U.S. premiere of a harrowing multidisciplinary piece about narcissistic personality disorder, “The Soul Catcher: Unmasking the Modern Predator.” 

The next day at Studio 210, Montreal singer-songwriter Mykalle Bielinski presents another U.S. premiere with “Warm Up,” a one-woman piece in which she deploys bicycle-generated electricity for lights and sound while questioning humankind’s relationship with nature and the resources required to create art, running through Saturday, May 4. May 8-11 at Mission Cultural Center, Ireland’s Fishamble Ensemble presents the Bay Area premiere of “King,” a portrait of a lonely Elvis Presley impersonator.

In some cases, Wood has long-standing ties to venues, like Poppy Art House. The performance space’s artistic and managing director is Dina Zarif, an Iranian-born vocalist who performed at SFIAF in 2017-18. The Red Poppy’s extensive history of curating cross-cultural and international music made the collaboration a no-brainer, with the venue presenting four SFIAF shows, including a program of Egyptian instrumental music by Egyptian American violinist Basma Edrees’ Music In-Takht (May 4), and vocalists Bryan Dyer and David Worm’s improvisational Flex Duo (May 11).

For Zarif, the festival is a “great opportunity” for the pandemic-impacted Mission District, “especially the 24th Street corridor, where you see a lot of out-of-business businesses,” she said. “It shows how fragile the arts and entertainment scene is. I’m sure a lot of people who’ll come to the Red Poppy from the festival’s list will have never been here.” 

If Red Poppy’s SFIAF programming builds on what the venue is already doing, El Rio is taking the opportunity to expand its identity. The nightclub has long been a cultural hub of the neighborhood, and isn’t usually associated with new music like the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble’s eclectic “Borealis” program featuring flute, viola and double bass (Thursday, May 2). Punky-tonker Shawna Virago’s double queer bill with the country music-loving Secret Emchy Society (May 2) is more in keeping with El Rio’s identity, but there’s also the Pandan Leaf Collective showcasing the Asian American female singer-songwriters Katherine Park, Lisa Graciano, Frances Ancheta and MJoy (May 9). 

“We actually do a lot more live music than people realize, but we’ve been through so many eras and evolutions, it’s a great opportunity for us,” said El Rio’s booker Tyla Jones. “The festival aligns with what the Mission stands for, uplifting different cultures.”

It’s a mission SFIAF is willing to fight for. When the city tried to shut down the festival’s outdoor Fort Mason programming in the fall of 2020 — after already approving a permit — citing that the event didn’t adhere to California’s COVID safety protocols at the time, SFIAF brought a lawsuit to federal court claiming the city was violating its First Amendment rights. The shows went on, “but the case dragged out until it became a moot point when COVID restrictions were lifted,” Wood said. 

If all goes well this year, Wood sees opportunities for a major expansion next year, perhaps doubling the number of venues. 

“We have to figure out how they think and work,” he said of this year’s festival partners. “For the first time we’re dealing with multiple management styles. Everyone’s got their own contracts and way of doing business. 

“But San Francisco is a festival town. It’s what we do better than anybody, and the Mission is the place to do it.” 

Andrew Gilbert is a freelance writer.