Honoring of the unseen and forgotten is the focus of the 11th annual San Francisco World Music Festival which brings together the music of many cultures in a festival-commissioned world premiere called, “The Ritual Project: Offering, entering the fire, feasting.”
For over a decade, Door Dog Music Productions of San Francisco has staged innovative productions with master artistes and youth in the Bay Area and abroad to facilitate cultural understanding. “The Ritual Project” brings many diverse traditions together through the exploration of ancient rites and rituals, in an effort to find balance among the increasingly complex global forces affecting individuals and their communities: among them are Tibetan shamanistic rituals from the Himalayan and Pamir Steppes; the spiritual classical musical traditions of India, the initiation rites of the West African and Caribbean Santería, the centuries-old divinations from the Chinese oracle, the I-Ching, and several others.
The three-day festival will open with a traditional piece by an ensemble of Ohlone Native American drummers, singers, and dancers, a forgotten tribal group which, many hundred years ago, occupied present-day San Francisco. The presentation hinges on the notion that every ethnic group around the world is rooted in similar customs and rituals regarding life and death and that, unfailingly, across every culture, music is at the heart of all healing.
In keeping with the philosophy of Door Dog that music must be tied to social activism, “The Ritual Project” will also project onto the stage a real-time “face montage” of marrow transplant patients–those who have passed, those who are in need of a transplant, and those who have survived–and offer audience members on-site donor stations to register with Be The Match, so that people with diseases that can be treated by marrow donation can increase their odds of finding match.
Nov. 19, 8-10 p.m.; Nov. 20, 8-10 p.m.; Nov. 21, 7-9 p.m. Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, 3200 California St., San Francisco. $15. Tickets: (415) 292-1233.ychen@doordog.org. www.sfworldmusicfestival.org. www.doordog.org.