Inaugural Market Street Arts and Theater Festival to take over SF’s Mid-Market District

This weekend, a new event will put the spotlight on San Francisco's theater district. Tomorrow night, the inaugural Market Street Arts and Theater Festival is taking over the mid-market neighborhood. The free event will span six blocks along Market between Fifth Street and Van Ness. More than 100 arts organizations, businesses, and cultural groups will be taking part in the celebration. There will be concerts, dance performances, and a drag karaoke show, among a number of other performances. For more, we are joined now by Fernando Pujols, who is the executive director of the Mid-Market Foundation, which organized this festival. Fernando, appreciate the time. This sounds really exciting. Well, I'm so excited, as you said. I mean, there's so much to do. There's something for everybody. And I couldn't be prouder of all the partners and the people coming together from the city, the private sector, and the creatives. And it's all on display in Mid-Market from 5th to Van Ness from 4 to 10 p.m. You can find out all about it at marketstreetarts.org slash fest. and not just all the creative stuff, but incredible food. I highly recommend as people go to the website, you can plan your itinerary, that you plan stops at all the different great spots to eat something and visit all the great local businesses that we have there. All right, talk about how this all came together. How did this get conceptualized here? And why did you want to put the spotlight on this really dynamic neighborhood that is a cultural hub in San Francisco? Well, you said it. We've been looking at the neighborhood afresh over the last couple of years. And when we look at it, the answer is staring at us in the face. This is the Arts and Theater District of San Francisco. On four blocks, between just 5th and 9th, you've got 15,000 live performance seats from our large cultural venues. You have a history as an arts and theater district, and you have a fabric of community art organizations and independent venues. And we thought to ourselves, nowhere else, maybe on the West Coast in the world, could you have big names like Sara Bareilles right next to your local drag performers, your acrobats, and your street performers. We've got public art on digital display across buildings. You're going to see stuff in the public realm as you move back and forth. You're going to have DJ inside of a museum and come to dance, come to make arts and crafts. But it's all right there in mid-market where these mom-and-pop restaurants are connected to the biggest concert promoters in the country. And we wanted to bring it all and put it on display for one night for people to feel. Yes, it's such a variety of performances that you're talking about. They're going to be part of this festival. Well, you know, did everyone want to be a part of this? When you went to the theaters, to the venues in the neighborhood, to the cultural organizations, did everyone just immediately say, yeah, we want to be a part of this? Everyone is behind this, to be honest. I mean, that sounds kind of crazy, but all we get for doing this work and putting it out there and putting the idea is gratitude. The partners want to be part of this. People want to express themselves. They have tremendous pride in their neighborhood, in their city, and their craft. And we're just a platform. It's a gift, honestly, to be able to be a witness to this. And I've got to thank, we have a small and incredible team that has pulled this off. And they're just doing an amazing job with all of the partners, all the restaurants, all the businesses, everybody coordinating. The first 500 people to register for the event got a chance to come pick up a $20 voucher to some of those restaurants and get out to try out some food a little bit on us. Yeah. How do you think an event like this really helps to connect people in San Francisco and beyond, right? You obviously want people from all over to come and be a part of this. How does it help to connect them with the arts? Well, one of the things about the neighborhood that's great, first off, is that it is connected to the whole region, very accessible by BART or Muni, either Powell, Van Ness, or Civic Center stations, right? But what it does, it just brings people, if they haven't been to the neighborhood in a while, to fall back in love with it and find some places that they wouldn't have experienced and come together. The other thing is that we're an arts and culture city. We have created trends throughout history influencing the world's arts and culture, and it happens right here. And so this is just another opportunity to lift that up and allow the creatives to express themselves, and that's where the magic happens. And for the folks that live in the neighborhood or visit it frequently, it is another source of pride, a sense of connection and belonging that happens through these kind of experiences. Yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, historically, when we think about the Mid-Market neighborhood, it has had its fair share of struggles. How far do you think an event like this, a festival that brings the city and the community together, How far does that go, do you think, in helping to kind of transform the neighborhood and reshape maybe the way people view the mid-market area? Well, I think that's it. I mean, it gives an opportunity to position the neighborhood in its rightful place for people in their minds. But these events, you know, even if they're small-scale or large-scale, they have a residual positivity. And the hope, of course, is that we bring this back next year bigger and better, learn from this one, and then do it again after that and after that. But what's happening on a day-to-day basis is also really beautiful, and we see that every day. And so doing something larger like this is a way to get more people to experience the good things that we see on a week-in, week-out basis. All right, talk to me real quick with the time we have left about some of the performances that people can experience here, because this is an incredible lineup. There's going to be a vertical dance performance on a building right above UN Plaza? That's right. We're really recommending folks come out to the opening ceremony at 4 o'clock, where it starts with Dear San Francisco, a beloved show that celebrated its fifth anniversary right now at Club Fugazi. And then shortly after that, you're going to have an aerial dance performance by Bandaloop, Oakland's own based, internationally recognized troupe, who's going to be doing that stuff all over the side of the building. I saw the rehearsal today. It was phenomenal. There will be a few chances to see that. Then you can hop on a street car that's being taken over by SF Oasis and our drag laureate, D'Arcy Drew Baker. So you can do karaoke with the drag queens up and down. Okay, I was going to ask you about the Hotsy Totsy Cable Car, what that's all about. We created the Hotsy Totsy Cable Car last year at one of our events, and it's returning now and taken over by Oasis. And in between that, you might find some dueling pianos. You might find some street performers. You might see some of that public art. You might find a DJ inside the Market on Market. You'll find something that you love and something you enjoy. So it's a free event, but people should sign up? That's right. People should sign up so that they can get information. They can maybe get a chance for one of those vouchers that maybe are sold out, maybe not. Maybe you'll put some more out there, right? Hey, you know what? If we get enough, maybe we will. All right. All right. Fernando, thank you very much. Thank you so much. Sounds like a fun time.