February 12th, 2010 by soul4dance

Ethnic Dance Festival-2010

The 32nd annual San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival is to be held from June 5-June 27, 2010 at the Palace of fine arts, San Francisco.

The San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival was founded to present the diverse ethnic dance companies in the Bay Area. Over the years, the Festival has expanded its reach to include performers from throughout Northern California and has presented over 600 dance companies from over a hundred different genres.

Ethnic Dance Festival-2010

The 31st annual San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival featured 36 local dance companies representing over 20 distinct cultures. More than 500 Northern California dancers and musicians brought their repertoire to the Palace of Fine Arts over four weekends in June of this year. Over 11,000 local Bay Area arts lovers attended the performances, some for the first time, but many as part of an annual, cherished cultural tradition.

The Festival has presented over 14,000 dancers, with dancers from community groups performing alongside internationally recognized professionals, students beside masters, and cultural groups as different as Senegalese dancers from the Kaolak region and Mexican folkorico dancers from the Tobasco region all performing on the same stage. Each program features 7-11 companies. The Festival performers are selected from an annual audition, where each company has ten minutes to present its work, while soloists have five minutes. Participants in the field come from varied socioeconomic backgrounds and represent a broad range of occupations and lifestyles. Many are second and third generation dancers and musicians, and after so many years, the children of Festival pioneers are now recreating, preserving, and innovating important work as their contribution to contemporary culture.

Since 1978, the Festival’s performance have reached hundreds of thousands of audience members, providing excellent opportunities to artists who seek to present the dance expressions of their cultural and ethnic heritages.