Early Bird Tickets for San Francisco International Arts Festival on Sale 3/1

Early Bird Tickets for the San Francisco International Arts Festival go on sale on Sunday March 1. Ten percent of tickets to all performances at SFIAF 2015 will be made available for the incredible Early Bird Rate of $12. General admission tickets that usually cost between $15 and $30 will be sold at the reduced rate throughout the month of March for as long as the allocations last.

The three week festival with a 2015 Theme of BEARING WITNESS runs from May 21 through June 7 in eight different venues at the Fort Mason Center. It will include visual arts exhibits and installations and 150 dance, music and theatre performances by more than 60 artists and ensembles representing the Bay Area and 16 different countries.

SFIAF is also pleased to announce that for the first time there will be free shuttle buses to bring audience members direct to (and from) Fort Mason from Embarcadero and Civic Center MUNI/ BART Stations and 24th Street BART Station for the duration of the Festival.

Headlining the Festival in 2015 will be Teatr Zar the resident company of the Grotowski Institute from Wroclaw, Poland with their powerful new production Armine, Sister reflecting on the phenomena of 1915 that become known as the Armenian Genocide. The performances in San Francisco mark the 100th anniversary and will be the U.S. Premiere of the piece. Following the Bay Area run of six performances Teatr Zar will present the work in New York City.

Other leading international artists include the US debut of one of the most talked about and provocative theatre artists in Europe: Fabrice Murqia of Belgium will lead his Compagnie Artara to the Bay with a fascinating French language performance piece titled Les Chagrin des Ogres (The Sorrow of the Ogres) that poses questions about the passage to adulthood and society's views about, and treatment of, teenagers.

The Republic of Ireland is represented for the first time at SFIAF by two different projects with the US debut of a brilliant young theatre artist named Áine Ryan with a powerful solo play titled Kitty in the Lane and the return of Croi Glan Integrated Dance Company with a new repertoire.

There will also be US debuts for performance artist Jesper Arin from Sweden with a project titled Evil based on the novel by Jan Guillou, Olga Kosterina from Russia with Dilemma and Paris based Cuban classical pianist Gabriel Urgell Reyes. Direct from Cali Valle Colombia will be Hugo Candelario and Grupo Bahia playing a vibrant mix of music evocative of the cultural mix of Colombia's Pacific coast. Making their Bay Area debut will be HORSE Dance Theatre from Taiwan who lit up the New York dance scene with their US debut in 2013. They will present the US premiere of 2 Men accompanied live on piano by improviser Shih-Yang Lee.

Mr. Lee will also perform in collaboration with the Bay Area's Melody of China. Other International collaborations will include Anne Bluethenthal and Dancers working with members of the El Salvadoran music collective MezoAmerica, Mary Armentrout Dance Theater in collaboration with composer and sound designer Evelyn Ficarra from England, Christine Cali of CALI & CO in collaboration with Na Hoon Park from South Korea and Kitka Women's Folk Ensemble working with Armenian guest singers visiting the Festival with Teatr Zar.

A stellar line up of Bay Area artists is led by San Francisco's third Poet Laureate devorah major in a new play titled Classic Black directed by Ellen Sebastian Chang and co-starring Brian Freeman. World premieres of new work by Kiandanda Dance Theater, project agora, Theatre of Yugen, Francis Wong and Tatsu Aoki presented by the Asian Pacific Island Cultural Center.

May 28-31 will see African influenced traditional dance and music take over the Cowell Theater with concerts by ABADA Capoeira-SF who will share the stage with members of their parent company from Rio de Janeiro, Loco Bloco and Peruvian Grupo de Rompe y Raja. The week will begin with a tribute performance produced by Congo SQ West to Blanche Brown who has led and mentored many dancers and choreographers over the course of five decades in the Bay Area.

The full lineup of performance artists in the 2015 Festival is: ABADA Capoeria SF, Abhinaya Dance Company, ?ine Ryan, Allison Lovejoy, Alyce Finwall Dance Theater, Anne Bluethenthal & Dancers with MezoAmerica, Ariel Luckey, Bob Ernst, CALI & Co with Ha Noon Park., Carte Blanche, Christine Bonansea, Christine Germain and Dancers, Congo SQ West Kinship Society, Croi Glan Integrated Dance Company, Davalos Dance Company, Deanna Said Quartet, Debbie Goodwin dance Company with Seth Asarnow y su Sexteto Tipico, Deborah Slater Dance Theatre, devorah major with Brian Freeman and the Destiny Mohammed Trio, Detour Dance, Diana Gameros, Eth-noh-Tec, Francis Wong & Tatsu Aoki with Lenora Lee, Fua dia Congo, Gabriel Urgell Reyes, Gretchen Garnett and Dancers, Grupo de Rompe y Raja, HORSE Dance Theatre, Hugo Candelario and Grupo Bahia with Colombian Soul, Inferno Theatre, inkBoat, Jesper Arin, Jesus Diaz, Katerina Wong, Kiandanda Dance Theater, Justin Ancheta, Ka.nei.see Collective, Kitka Women's Vocal Ensemble, Krista DeNio Productions, La Peche, Laura Inserra, Ledoh / Salt Farm Butoh, Loco Bloco, Madan Oak with Aditya Kaylanpur and Purbayan Chatterjee, Maria Jose Montijo, Mary Armentrout Dance Theater, Matt EL, Melody of China & Shih-yang Lee, Musette, Olga Kosterina, Perfect Planet Productions (Chad Wilkins,Eostar, Ilan Navah and Mathias), project agora, PunkkiCo, Right Brain Performance Lab, Sarah Cahill, Survival Research Laboratories, Tawil + Tiberius, Teatr Zar, The Foundry, Theatre of Yugen, Tim Rubel Human Shakes, tinypistol, Trance Mission, the Vahdat Sisters, Voodoo Cabaret and Wang Fei with Li Xiangting.

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