October 2nd @ 7:00 – 10:00 pm Free

Tune in 10 minutes before each event starts to test your devices for connection.

The event will be streamed live through the Red Poppy Art House Facebook page

Click here on the date of the event to see the live performance streaming on Facebook.

During the last 18 months, our goal has been to continue providing excellent and uplifting programs to our dedicated audiences. We are pleased to announce the next FREE MAPP program. 

Our MAPP FESTIVAL program includes 4 performances on Oct 2nd, live streamed from artists’ homes to your homes. Live streaming on Facebook

Please consider investing in the future of the Arts and the Artists and the important role of the live performing arts in our community. 

Make a gift to the Red Poppy Art House today! 

Red Poppy Art House Needs You

MISSION ARTS & PERFORMACE PROJECT (MAPP) 

Launched in 2003, the Mission Arts & Performance Project (MAPP) is a homegrown bi-monthly, multidisciplinary, intercultural happening that takes place in the Mission District of San Francisco. On the first Saturday of every even month of the year, the MAPP transforms ordinary spaces, such as private garages, gardens, living rooms, studios, street corners, and small businesses into pop-up performance and exhibition sites for a day/night of intimate-scale artistic and cultural exchange among a kaleidoscope of individuals and communities.  Due to COVID-19 we have temporarily changed this dynamic program from an onsite to an online series. Thanks to the mastery and innovation of the presenting artists and curatorial vision we are pleased that the kaleidoscope of cultural exchange continues to be an incredibly enriching experience for the presenter and the viewer. We look forward to the days that we can safely present at our neighborhood venue and we are grateful for everyone’s ingenuity in making the online presentations meaningful and unique experiences.  

This program is funded by California Arts Council Local Impact Grant and  Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Relief Fund and will continue our work in presenting unique artistry to the communities that we serve.

RED POPPY MAPP TEAM:

Curator | Artistic Director | Managing Director: Dina Zarif 

Tech Support: Leeav Sofer

PR and Digital Marketing: Jennie D. Legary

RPAH PROGRAM (ONLINE) SATURDAY, OCTOBER 2nd 

PROGRAM (ONLINE) OCTOBER 2nd | 7 – 10 pm 

Anais & Adrian

Bay Area Artists connected through music, poetry and painting

DESCRIPTION: 

Percussion often exists as part of a larger ensemble to create sonic texture and rhythmic energy, but I enjoy the challenge of creating standalone musical statements as a percussion soloist. This is a collection of composed and improvised pieces for solo percussion. 

Featuring:

Adrian Arias – Visual Artist 

Anaís Azul – singer-songwriter, composer

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

Adrian Arias, is a visual artist, poet, performer, curator, activist, and cultural promoter, who brings together multidisciplinary artists to engage in community projects with messages of social justice, racial equality, climate change, peace, beauty, health, and hope in the San Francisco Bay Area.

He has participated in international poetry performances: The poetic Nights of Struga, Macedonia, winning the prize for the best poem of the festival, and is one of the founders and creators of MAPP (Mission Arts Performance Project) and creator of festivals in the San Francisco Bay Area such as: VideoFest, Luna Negra, and ILLUSION show.

In Pandemic 2020-2021, Adrian has been commissioned to create a series of pieces related to both BLM movement and his personal vision of freedom, like the BLM on the pavement of the Petaluma Regional Library, the altar dedicated to George Floyd in Somarts, among others.

Adrian uses his dreams as creative initiatives, which he makes come true in performances and community projects, such as his multimedia shows called DREAMS, or most currently Tarot in Pandemic & Revolution, where 24 visual artists and 37 poets from the SF Bay Area have participated.

“Adrian Arias, the ever brilliantly inventive poet of the gesturing Word”. Jack Hirschman, Emeritus Poet Laureate of San Francisco.

Peruvian first generation immigrant Anaís Azul (they/them) is a California Based singer-songwriter, composer, and teaching artist. Described as “stunningly honest and vulnerable,” their artistry engages with music as a tool for community building, cross-genre collaboration, and collective healing.

Azul writes music that is in conversation with jazz harmony, classical melodies, and Latin American singer-songwriter traditions. Their songs are bilingual (Spanish and English) and about mental health, queerness, facing harsh realities and finding inner peace in spite of chaos. Press highlights include a feature on Remezcla, NPR, WBUR, and Berkeleyside for their work not only as a performer, but as a community arts organizer.

Classically-trained with an experimental spirit, Azul received their B.M in Music Composition and Theory from Boston University with a concentration in piano. Having composed and arranged for theatre and orchestra, Azul composed the music for the award-winning Displaced: A Response to Qurban produced by the Boston Conservatory at Berklee. Their current projects include serving as sound designer for Brandeis University’s production of “The Laramie Project” (Boston, MA) and co-organizer of Weird Folk Fest (Boston, MA). Outside of their performance life, Anaís currently teaches private music lessons in Spanish at Escuela Bilingue Internacional (Emeryville, CA) and is pursuing a Composer-Performer MFA at California Institute of the Arts.

My Americana soul

Songs for my grandma Ruby and other Americana

Featuring:

Ren Geisick- Vocal

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

Ren Geisick is a jazz singer turned singer/songwriter from Silicon Valley, California. Her first album, “Ren, Love Song” produced by Jesse Harris, was released in 2017 and, since May 2019, Ren has been releasing singles from her upcoming “Ruby EP” inspired by the life, and catchphrases of her Grandma Ruby from Oklahoma. Borrowing elements of jazz, blues, country, and soul, Ren delivers heartfelt performances of original music and reimagined classics.  

Baroque to Contemporary

A Modern Take on An Ancient Instrument

DESCRIPTION: 

Performing baroque and contemporary works on lever harp, Amelia is excited to share a program featuring the lever harp in the repertoire of the 18-19th century.

Featuring:

Amelia Romano – Harp

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

An eclectic blend of austere serenity and kinetic vibrancy, Amelia Romano takes what is known about conventional harp and surpasses it every time. Pulling from her roots in the cultural hotbed of San Francisco, Amelia not only plays music from the repertoire but reprises them and creates originals. Latin American music, jazz and classical are all genres that she touches but her music defines its own path.

A San Francisco native, she began her lessons on a lever harp, at the age of 9, with Diana Stork, who inspired early compositions, improvisation and playing in a variety of youth ensembles, including the Bay Area Youth Harp Ensemble.  She graduated from the San Francisco School of the Arts High School, performing Laura Zaerrs’ Celtic Concerto, and releasing her first solo album, Seeking Peace, in her senior year.  

Amelia earned a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Field Studies at U.C. Berkeley in 2010, with a thesis examining the legacy of the South Africa apartheid.  She continued her harp studies while an undergraduate, with Dr. Cheryl Ann Fulton.  She spent 2010-2011 at Ntonga Music School in Gugulethu Township, Cape Town, South Africa, sponsored by the Playing for Change Foundation.  South Africa deeply shaped her musical creativity  and desire to re-conceive her sound. With her return to the S.F. Bay Area in 2011, she took up the electric harp and formed StringQuake, (2012) and Luminance, (2016).  She released two full length albums with StringQuake: Take 15 and Cascade, and two EP’s with the Luminance Ensemble. Luminance in 2018 and Late Dawn in 2021.

Currently pursuing an undergraduate and masters degree in classical lever harp performance at San Francisco State University, studying with pedal harp instructor, Karen Gottlieb, she finds deep satisfaction composing and arranging for her chamber music ensembles – forging new sounds and directions in the global lever harp community.

Dan Cantrell and the Dainty Krakens

Smote by song

ABOUT THE PROJECT:

The Dainty Krakens perform traditional songs and music from the Middle East, the Levant, Balkan Folk tradition, Romany Diaspora and Sephardic singing tradition. Their original songs and music reflect the merging of ideas and cultures from their areas of study and mastery but also combine to form a new living tradition rich with reflections into the past but strong with hope for harmonious new blending. These humble monsters are always looking for the love, beauty, and fun in music, and revel in the discovery of new crossroads that tie us all together in song and spirit. They will be joined by the cuddly Cthulhu of dancing, Elizabeth Strong, who’s deadly undulations smite the eyes and gently join the fight for beauty and harmonious exploration.

Featuring:

Dan Cantrell – accordion, piano and voice

Rachel Valfer Sills – oud and voice

Faisal Zedan – percussion and voice

Elizabeth Strong – dance

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Accordionist/pianist/saw player Dan Cantrell is an Emmy winning composer known for his innovative and energetic approach to documentary film and television scoring. He can be heard on albums from Tom Waits, Joanna Newsom, the Toids, Beats Antique, as well as numerous self-produced albums. He was recently a featured soloist with the San Francisco Symphony and has performed with the Oakland Symphony, Mike Marshall, members of the Klezmatics, Brave Old World, and Fishbone. 

Dan composed music for three seasons of The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack on Cartoon Network and received an Emmy Award for his scoring work on the PBS documentary Home Front. Influenced by the music of Eastern Europe, Early American Jazz and modern alternative rock, His extensive scoring catalogue for film and television is described as “hauntingly beautiful…quirky and energetic” (SF Bay Guardian). Dan’s music spans a wide range of emotion and style, rich with virtuosic performance, lush acoustic orchestrations, sonic textures resonant with sound design, and strikingly innovative melodic themes.  

Rachel is a passionate vocalist and oudist (Middle Eastern lute) who brings depth of feeling to every song. Born to a family of esteemed musicians, she began studying music at the age of 6. Upon arriving in Israel/ Palestine, Rachel studied maqam and Persian dastgah modal systems for six years at the Center for Middle Eastern Music Studies, with masters such as Eyhab Nimir, Piris Eliyahu and Shlomo Takhalov. Over the years Rachel has performed with many ensembles in the Bay Area, California, and toured the country with the Qadim Ensemble. With vocals touted as ‘succulent’ by NPR, and dubbed ‘the golden throated one” by fans, Rachel is known both here in the Bay Area as well as in the Middle East for her authenticity in representing the vocal traditions, from cultures spanning Central Asia, the Balkans, Caucauses, Greece/Turkey and the Levant. She is known for keeping the beautiful Ladino song tradition alive and evolving.

Faisal Zedan is a master percussionist in the Syrian classical tradition. He plays riqq (tambourine), derbakki (goblet drum), and tar (frame drum) with equal mastery. Born in 1972 in oum D’Baib, Syria, Faisal Zedan grew up impassioned with the derbakki. At the age of 15, after intensive study with a local drummer, Faisal began studies of the wide repertoire of Arabic music. Upon arriving in California in 1992, he met UCLA’s noted professor of ethnomusicology, Dr. Ali Jihad Racy, and was invited to join the acclaimed UCLA Near East Music Ensemble. Faisal co-founded the Near East music group, Kan Zaman, in 1993. Faisal is on the faculty of the the Middle East Music Camp and the Kosmos Camp in Northern Califo

Elizabeth Strong is a Bay Area based dancer, choreographer and dance ethnologist who is passionate about tradition and finding ways to relate these roots to our lives and art today. She currently teaches Turkish Roman dance, finger cymbals and Folkloric Belly Dance and is loving learning more about Greek circle dance. You can study with Elizabeth weekly on Zoom or in Berkeley, CA.

PREVIEW THE PERFORMANCE  

Anais & Adrian

Ren Geisick 

Amelia Romano

Dan Cantrell and the Dainty Krakens

Portrait of Place | Lauren Bartone

The current exhibition on view in the windows of The Red Poppy Art House

ARTIST STATEMENT

Making art is how I raise a question or explore a problem. This means my work is often driven by subject matter that I have personal experience with; subjects from my daily life that challenge me. Paper trash, found objects, and site-specific materials become important in my work because of the experiences they reference. In public works, I produce images with the materials brought to the project by participants, and the result is the product of some form of dialogue. In my paintings and sculptures, the materials are borrowed from everyday life and are transformed, or are represented as subject matter. In either case, I enjoy finding meaning in the little bits of refuse that are leftover from my daily life.

ONLINE EVENT DETAILS 

Time: October 2nd, 2021, 7:00 pm -10:00 pm 

Admission: Free (donations are encouraged)

Tune in 10 minutes before each event starts to test your devices for connection.

The event will be streamed live through the Red Poppy Art House Facebook page

DONATE