Interview with Delina Brooks, Co-Producer of the San Francisco International Arts Festival.
Delina Brooks grew up in the Mission District, and as an Afro-Filipina artist and Co-Producer of the San Francisco International Arts Festival, Delina carries the neighborhood in the way she thinks about art and about who deserves to be on a stage. This May, that stage is the Community Music Center and the performances and events that will take place on campus over two weeks are hard to fit into a single genre.
“As an Afro-Filipina artist born and raised in San Francisco — and specifically in the Mission District — I’m most looking forward to feeling the city’s pulse gather and concentrate in the Mission during the Festival,” she says. “There’s something powerful about watching the neighborhood become a deliberate point of convergence for art-makers and art-lovers, where the energy feels both hyperlocal and global at once.”
The festival opens at CMC on May 1 with the graduation concert of Women in Jazz and World Music, a vocal training program for young singers led by Professor Dee Spencer and vocalist Michelle Jacques, which has been meeting throughout April in CMC’s spaces. The program was born from recognizing that jazz and global vocal traditions have always been shaped by women, and that those histories deserve to be “both studied and embodied.” Weeks of work culminate on stage, in front of an audience, where “voices are strengthened, histories are restored, and emerging artists can begin to locate themselves within a continuum that is as political as it is musical, and as personal as it is global.” Free admission.
And it doesn’t stop there! Contemporary tango with Sumi Lee and Ramiro Boero on May 2. Classical Egyptian music fused with jazz and Irish influences with Music in-Takht on May 3. An interactive a cappella experience with MOTION that same weekend. Global jazz with Lua Hadar and her band Twist on May 8, a voice that connects samba to swing in a musical world voyage. Afro-Colombian Pacific coast marimba de chonta with Neblinas del Pacífico on May 9, music of rivers and mangroves, of polyrhythms and resistance. Tango from its golden age to the present with Orquesta Típica Tarareando — plus the official release of their new EP. Chinese and Persian music with Melody of China. On May 10, choral ensemble Conspiracy of Venus is returning to the festival with music demonstrating the power of the human voice to build community and oppose fascism.
Delina acknowledges the space that CMC makes in the community for artists. “Community Music Center holds the everyday heartbeat of artmaking. It is a place where practice is ongoing, where access is not an afterthought, and where generations pass knowledge hand to hand. To include it in the festival is to root the work in something lived and continuous.” What happens on stage during the festival, she says, is just one moment in a much longer story. “It reminds us that what we witness on stage is only one moment in a much longer story that is shaped by teaching, by community, and by the quiet, persistent act of showing up to learn, create, and make something together.”
At its core, that longer story is the story of San Francisco. “It feels like a return to something essential,” she says about what it means to bring artists from around the world to the city. “San Francisco has always been shaped by migration, by exchange, and by layered histories speaking to one another. When artists from around the world gather here alongside our local artists, the city remembers itself. Distance collapses, and we see performance, understanding and empathy intersect.”
More information about SFIAF here.