Join us on Wednesday, October 2 from 6–8 PM for an evening of art, dialogue, and community with New Orleans–based artist Auudi Dorsey, in conversation with Key Jo Lee, Chief of Curatorial Affairs and Public Programs at Museum of the African Diaspora. The conversation will be moderated by interdisciplinary artist, curator, and community advocate Mattie Loyce.
Legendary vocalist The Dynamic Miss Faye Carol & Her Sextet present an evening of blues, blues, and more blues! From Johnnie Taylor to Fats Domino to B.B. King, Miss Faye and her slammin’ band will raise the roof and let loose on the blues in their own unique fashion.
This 12-Week Youth Vocal Intensive is offered at no cost for youth participants ages 10-16 of all skill levels. Our goal is to instill and cultivate a love of the arts in each student, with a well-rounded, powerful curriculum in vocal performance. We aim to foster a community based on mutual respect and encouragement so all students can discover and explore their creativity and expression. Our powerful faculty features legendary vocalist and educator Faye Carol, who will guide students of all levels through a life-changing learning experience.
The Royal Underground Theatre Company proudly presents Theresa Rebeck’s Seminar, a sharp-witted comedy about power, ambition, and the price of success. Four young writers sign up for a private seminar with Leonard, a celebrated novelist whose unorthodox teaching style borders on brutal. As the sessions unfold, alliances form, secrets surface, and each student must decide how much they are willing to sacrifice to make it in the literary world.
We are pleased to invite you to the International Conference on Nursing Education & Healthcare 2026, taking place on June 22–23, 2026, in London, UK.
Theme: “Caring Beyond Boundaries: Nursing’s Impact on Global Health”
Join over 300 international professionals—nurses, educators, and researchers—for keynote sessions, presentations, panel discussions, and global networking opportunities focused on advancing nursing education and healthcare.
American Conservatory Theater’s Annual Gala Ignite the Night.
San Francisco Fashion Week is the “REAL” and ‘OFFICIAL’ Fashion Week of San Francisco, ‘NOT’ affiliated with any other fashion week events in San Francisco – originated by FASHION FOR THE PEOPLE in 2011. San Francisco Fashion Week takes place annually during the months of March and October. Fashion For The People is a member of SF Citi, the tech trade association of San Francisco.
The fifth annual Black Women’s Roots Festival celebrates powerful, pioneering, Black women in blues, jazz, gospel, country, roots music, and beyond. Showcasing a dynamic lineup of legendary artists, renowned performers, and emerging talent, this intergenerational program features the finest vocalists and instrumentalists of roots music that you’ll find anywhere in the world! Join us for what is sure to be a fantastic evening of music and culture. Supported by City of Berkeley and Zellerbach Family Foundation.
Featuring: The Dynamic Miss Faye Carol, Lady Tramaine Hawkins, Linda Tillery, Bishop Yvette Flunder, Miko Marks, Big Gems Daughter
House Band featuring LJ Holoman (keys), James ‘Booyah’ Richard (bass), & Qyu Jackson (drums). Hosted by Traci Bartlow.
Campbell Oktoberfest has been awarded Best South Bay Festival by Metro readers multiple years running.
Set along the streets of historic Downtown Campbell, this two-day German-themed event is a family-friendly affair that is free and open to the public. Filled with over one hundred artisan booths, five stages of live music featuring German, Rock & Roll, R&B, Blues, Country and more, a Community Stage featuring performances by local musicians, dance teams, and martial arts studios, multiple food vendors, Kids Zone (Kinderplatz); and a Biersch Garden, the hub of Oktoberfest with Gordon Biersch beers and ales, Bavarian pretzels, German food vendors, and a stage with continuous live German music with the Zicke Zacke band. The large covered tent has tables, making it an ideal place to enjoy a meal, or watch the costume or stein-holding contests.
Join us in Downtown Mountain View as we celebrate the 10th Annual Mountain View Oktoberfest, brought to you by the Mountain View Chamber of Commerce.
This is a family-friendly 2-day festival featuring live entertainment, contests, dancing, food, and so much more! Sit under our massive 200 ft tent and enjoy a wide selection of classic German beers and wine, or treat yourself to a delicious authentic food.
Oaktoberfest returns in its full Bavarian glory with outdoor dining, drinking, and entertainment with free entry for the whole family. Don’t miss the live German music, traditional German food options, hundreds of vendors, 5 stages of live music, and the Bay Area’s best craft beers.
Hailed as “her generation’s most imaginative and thrilling jazz interpreter” (Spin), vocalist and composer Cécile McLorin Salvant is much admired for beguiling projects that bring fresh perspectives to jazz performance through dramatic storytelling, vivid historical context, and daring original composition.
A MacArthur Fellow and three-time Grammy winner, Salvant is classically trained and steeped in jazz, blues, and Caribbean music, as well as Baroque repertoire and musical theater—an extraordinary musician who also surrounds herself with many of the best and brightest artists on today’s scene.
It is not every day you get to hear a saxophone virtuoso reimagine seminal works composed for bassoon, cello, and voice on his deeply expressive instrument of choice. In his Cal Performances debut, Steven Banks, “the saxophone’s best friend, fiercest advocate, and primary virtuoso in the classical realm” (Washington Post) and the first saxophonist to win the coveted Avery Fisher Career Grant, offers a whirlwind musical tour on the mighty baritone saxophone.
Revel in the warm sonic embrace of a couple hundred talented tenors, baritones, and basses dressed in ugly Christmas sweaters and elf outfits at this year’s Holiday Spectacular!
A little naughty, but mostly very nice, the much-adored San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus returns for its annual—and wildly popular—Christmas pageant at Zellerbach Hall. The hilarious and heartwarming spectacle is different each year, as the chorus offers clever sendups of pop culture and political personalities, and chart-topping music hits are mixed in with classic holiday carols.
There is possibly no sound on earth more stirring, more uplifting than the voices of the storied Soweto Gospel Choir raised in song.
In this special holiday season concert, the multi-Grammy-winning South African cultural ambassadors return to Berkeley singing of love and peace, from gospel classics and spirituals to feel-good pop songs by Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, Leonard Cohen, and others, all delivered with their superhuman vocal blend and dazzling showmanship.
Follow the mesmerizing dancer-illusionists of MOMIX down the rabbit hole in Alice, a wild and fantastical take on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland by company founder Moses Pendleton.
Blending illusion and acrobatics with a sense of whimsy and wonder, Alice features the bold athleticism and theatrical flair of MOMIX’s celebrated dancers as they traverse a series of absurdist vignettes inspired by Carroll’s characters that just get curiouser and curiouser!
Disney Concerts and AMP Worldwide present Disney’s MOANA Live-To-Film Concert North American tour, featuring a full-length screening of the beloved movie accompanied by live performances of a unique on-stage musical ensemble of top Hollywood studio musicians, Polynesian rhythm masters and vocalists, celebrating the music and songs from this award-winning Walt Disney Animation Studios’ animated classic.
Rediscover the profound power of human connection in The Lunchbox — a new musical adaptation of Ritesh Batra’s internationally acclaimed film that overflows with heart, humor, and hope. A mistaken delivery in Mumbai’s famously efficient lunchbox system connects a lonely housewife to a jaded office worker, setting off an exchange of handwritten notes. Tucked in the folds of fragrant chapatis, amidst the vibrant pulse of Mumbai, their words blossom into a connection that might save them both. Directed by Tony Award-winner Rachel Chavkin (Hadestown) and featuring a sweeping and intimate score by Daniel and Patrick Lazour, The Lunchbox is a tale of the beauty of small gestures — one that will leave you believing in the bravery of opening your heart to the unexpected.
For years, LIL has observed her estranged brother from the shadows — watching, waiting, studying every punch he throws. BIG, an aging but respected force in the local Mixed Martial Arts circuit, remains unaware his little sister has been tracking his career from afar…until she appears unexpectedly on his doorstep. Award-winning playwright Ngozi Anyanwu (Good Grief, The Homecoming Queen, The Last of the Love Letters) writes and stars in this West Coast premiere of a sibling love story that grapples with reunion and buried resentments. Raw and riveting, The Monsters delivers an emotional knockout and wrestles with the demons we must face to reconnect, rebuild, and forgive.
The American Dream comes at a price. But who truly pays it? Arthur Miller’s searing indictment of moral compromise erupts with new urgency in this groundbreaking production. Reimagined around a Puerto Rican family’s hard-won success, a father’s fateful decision sends aftershocks that ripple far beyond his own home and community. Berkeley Rep’s Associate Artistic Director David Mendizábal reexamines this American classic through a lens of race, ethnicity, and class, honoring Miller’s original text while sharpening its existing themes of justice and inequity. This powerful revival reveals a tragedy where the pursuit of prosperity collides with the reality of who America was built to serve.
“America tried to take my life, and somehow a five-hundred-year-old white dude saved it.”
In an autobiographical and music-filled tour-de-force, award-winning performer Jacob Ming-Trent dares to rescue himself from the “slings and arrows” of his past. Born with a gift for poetry but rejected as unfit to play the poet, his search for home yields results both hilarious and tragic. Invoking artistic geniuses like Biggie, Tupac, and Basquiat, he takes us on a propulsive ride that reaffirms the power of language and music. Directed by Tony Taccone, How Shakespeare Saved My Life begins with the Bard but becomes a ritual of communal salvation.
Four highly-gifted teens collab and collide one pivotal summer at a prestigious Berkeley girls’ music program. They improvise and crack wise atop a steadily thrumming undercurrent of disaster and emergency. This world premiere play with music comes from A.C.T.-commissioned playwright Eisa Davis, the singular writer-musician-actor whose keen ear for the language and inner lives of adolescent women brought us the Pulitzer finalist Bulrusher. At turns hilarious and melancholy, raucous and poetic, ||: Girls :||: Chance :||: Music :|| is an exquisite and achingly true story of friendship, self-discovery, and the salvation of art-making.
American couple James and Lou move to London to escape their past…
An original story set in the world of the Paranormal Activity film series, this world premiere play will haunt you long after the lights go out.
Tennessee Williams’s exploration of family, sex, death, and decay is a haunting: family, trauma, relentlessly recurring patterns of destruction. It’s about the abuse we heap upon ourselves, and the pleasures we use to forget. In that spirit, director Nick Westrate and an ensemble of four astonishing New York theater actors set out to create a performance of the play like no other. By presenting Tennessee Williams’s complete, unabridged text, with just four performers—no props, no set—this production can exist anywhere. It strips bare to the bones the greatest piece of American drama.
For the third year in a row, Visit Oakland is excited to present Oakland Style, an annual five-day series of events taking place October 8-12, 2025!
This year, Oakland Style includes an amazing art competition, a mixology and music event, art walks, fashion shows, interactive workshops, culinary celebrations, a very creative collaboration with our Oakland chefs and Oakland School for the Arts – and so much more!
Marin Fashion Night isn’t just an event; it’s a movement towards nurturing local talent and giving back to the community.
You’re invited! Glamp Out is our signature annual fundraiser. It’s also your open invitation to support all that we’ve accomplished and aspire to achieve in the outdoors. This year, we’re celebrating 16 years of Outdoor Afro and 11 years of Glamp Out. This always-special occasion will honor 2025 success stories and revisit past accomplishments in our organization’s history—from pioneering leadership to outdoor community programming.
What does it mean to be “Black Female Strong”?Growing into Strength is a curated program of powerful short films that explore Black womanhood, identity, and resilience. These early works center on the voices and journeys of Black girls and women as they navigate personal transformation, spiritual growth, and resistance in the face of systemic challenges.
He’s arrogant. He’s disobedient. He’s becoming the most powerful being in creation, and he’s about to wreak havoc on heaven.
Based on the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West, The Monkey King makes its much-anticipated world premiere at the War Memorial Opera House. This new, action-packed opera combines high-energy music and text with puppetry, dance, Peking opera, and Buddhist sutras to tell the tale of the Monkey King’s beginnings.
Brandee Younger is revolutionizing the harp’s role in modern music. Over the past 15 years, she has worked relentlessly to stretch boundaries and limitations for harpists. In 2022, she made history by becoming the first Black woman to be nominated for a Grammy award for Best Instrumental Composition. That same year, she was also nominated for an NAACP Image Award and later, the winner of the 2024 NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Jazz Album for her latest album Brand New Life.
Parking
Center Street Garage, next door to The Freight, is currently open nightly until 1am except Sunday. More details here.
Public Transit
The Freight & Salvage is BARTable! Downtown Berkeley BART station is a half a block from the Freight. Details at bart.gov. Many AC Transit bus lines stop within a few blocks of the Freight. Details at actransit.org.
Nearby Favorites Bars/Restaurants
Revival Bar + Kitchen | 2102 Shattuck Avenue, (510) 549–9950
Comal Next Door | 2024 Shattuck Ave, (510) 422-662
Gather | 2200 Oxford Street @ Allston, (510) 809-0400
The world knows Ledisi as an R&B star who earned a dozen GRAMMY nominations before taking home her first award in 2021 for her song “Anything For You.” But Bay Area audiences first got to know the New Orleans native during her formative years in Oakland when she was stretching her wings as an ostentatiously gifted jazz singer. For this exclusive night, she returns to Davies Symphony Hall with her heartfelt tribute to the “Queen of the Blues,” Dinah Washington, backed by her finely minted band.
Gallery Wendi Norris presents My America, Julio César Morales’ sixth solo presentation with the gallery. Marking the artist’s homecoming to San Francisco after twelve years in Arizona working as a senior curator and museum director, Morales returns full-time to his multidisciplinary artmaking practice that, over the last two decades, has explored migration, labor, and underground economies. My America coincides with his first career survey, OJO, at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis, on view August 7 – December 1, 2025, underscoring a pivotal career moment and the impact of his deeply rooted and continually evolving practice.
Join us for a vibrant and heartfelt celebration of Día de Muertos at the Healdsburg Plaza on Saturday, October 26. Hosted annually by Corazón Healdsburg in collaboration with the City of Healdsburg, this cherished community event honors the rich traditions of this beloved holiday, where families come together to remember and celebrate the lives of loved ones who have passed.
The event features a stunning, marigold-adorned community altar where guests are invited to leave photos or mementos in tribute. The day will be filled with live music performances, a classic car show, food vendors, face painting, games and crafts for children, and interactive cultural activities that celebrate heritage and community.
The 2025 Healdsburg Arts Festival will feature over 50 fine art and craft booths, food, wine, music and entertainment. Featured creative arts and crafts include painting, ceramics, sculpture, jewelry, fiber arts, fine art prints, glass, photography, mixed media and wood.
Booths will be set up under the trees of Healdsburg’s Plaza which was named by Travel & Leisure as one of America’s Most Beautiful Town Squares.
Set in the heart of California wine country, the highly anticipated Healdsburg International Short Film Festival (HISFF) returns this September for its 4th year, promising another weekend of unforgettable cinema, parties, and a red carpet opening night. This three-day festival runs from September 26th through September 28th. Organized in collaboration with the Healdsburg Center for the Arts (HCA), HISFF 2025 coincides with HCA’s Festival of the Arts in the Healdsburg Plaza, creating a vibrant, art-filled weekend.
Mezzo-soprano Irene Roberts joins Scottish conductor Donald Runnicles and the San Francisco Symphony for Berg’s Seven Early Songs. Although Berg was in his early 20s at the time and a devoted disciple of Schoenberg, these surging and sumptuous songs reveal his late-Romantic leanings, too. Occasional touches of Strauss, Mahler, Brahms, Debussy, and Wagner combine with Berg’s rigorous originality in an appealing package. Mahler understood the value of his First Symphony right away, confessing that conducting it “sent shivers down my spine.
Sunset Piano, Gardens of Golden Gate Park, and San Francisco Recreation and Park Department, present one of the most unique, creative, and interactive music festivals in the Bay Area
In the final days of summer and celebrating its 10th anniversary, Flower Piano will fill San Francisco Botanical Garden with music for everybody, September 12-21, 2025.
Participants are invited to explore and enjoy the Botanical Garden’s plant collections as they seek out 12 pianos spread out across the 55-acres. At each of the pianos, there will be scheduled professional and community partner performances as well as open play time for anyone to sit down and play, reflecting a range of genres, ages, and cultures.
Universally adored for its “pure and pristine sound” (San Francisco Chronicle), the legendary Vienna Boys Choir returns to Berkeley with a lively program celebrating the 200th birthday of one of Vienna’s most cherished native sons.
Johann Strauss Jr. was the grandfather of the Viennese waltz and polka styles that defined that city’s music for generations, and this choir has been singing choral renditions of his music since the 1920s! Come hear classics like the Blue Danube waltz, Tales from the Vienna Woods, and a selection of rollicking polkas, all sung with spirit and finesse by these angelic young voices.
In a poignant tribute to the late tabla master and longtime Cal Performances friend Zakir Hussain, Chicago’s Third Coast Percussion continues a collaboration initiated with the music legend before his passing.
The Grammy-winning ensemble, praised for performances that “push percussion in new directions, blurring musical boundaries and beguiling new listeners” (NPR), had commissioned Hussain to compose Murmurs in Time—a major work that combines the beauty and complexity of Hindustani classical music with the group’s new-music ethos. In this new work, Salar Nader, a tabla virtuoso and disciple of Hussain since age seven, performs his teacher’s part in the ensemble.
Praised for its “total commitment” (The Strad) as an ensemble and for “exquisitely unified playing” (Washington Classical Review), the fabulous Isidore Quartet returns with a program that combines familiar repertoire with an exciting recent discovery. Gabriella Smith’s Carrot Revolution mines contrasting musical influences to explore, in her words, “new ways of looking at old things.” Haydn’s burnished and brilliant Sunrise quartet represents the height of his mastery, and Dvořák’s joyful penultimate quartet in G major is bursting with color and lyricism.
Join us for a tail-waggin’ good time at The Howl-O-Ween Pawp-Up Party — a spooktacular market celebrating all things pets and community! This family- and pet-friendly event features a costume contest for furry friends and their humans, a curated lineup of local pet vendors, and plenty of festive fun for everyone.
Dimensions Dance Theater, one of the nation’s oldest and most respected African American dance companies, announces the world premiere of The Reclaiming: Healing to Joy Part 2 for its Fall home season. This powerful, two-part production honors the resilience and brilliance of Black dance traditions, bridging generations while presenting bold new work that reflects the urgency and beauty of our current cultural moment.
Rena Bransten Gallery is pleased to present a selection of paintings, sculptures, and works on paper from celebrated artist Oliver Lee Jackson. The works on view span decades, and exemplify Jackson’s breadth of material mastery and expansive, nuanced visual language.
Internationally renowned Olivier and Tony Award-winning playwright Jez Butterworth (The Ferryman, Jerusalem) weaves the compelling, tender, and savagely funny tale of the Webb sisters’ return to their childhood home in an English seaside town. As girls, their fierce and ambitious mother trained them for a singing career à la The Andrews Sisters. Now, past and present collide within the once-vibrant guesthouse as memories resurface with haunting clarity. The Hills of California explores how sibling bonds both sustain and suffocate, and how songs of youth echo through life. Loretta Greco returns to the Bay Area to direct the West Coast debut of this masterwork, following its acclaimed West End and Broadway productions.
Josh is a hot mess of a queer twenty-something. He’s dropped out of school to get his life together — but can’t manage to stay sober. Struggling with fogginess and memory loss, he finds unlikely allies in his four hilarious grandparents. Desperate for a sense of purpose, Josh sets out to bring them along on his road to recovery. He drags them to Jazzercise at the JCC. He makes them play memory games. He insists they eat spinach by the handful. Eventually, he slams up against the limits of his quest. When he can no longer help his grandparents, they begin to help him. The Reservoir is Jake Brasch’s sharply funny and deeply heartfelt new comedy about family, memory, and the path toward healing.
The most Tony Award–winning Show of the year. The most Tony Award–nominated Play of all time. Stereophonic mines the agony and the ecstasy of creation as it zooms in on a music studio in 1976. Here, an up-and-coming rock band recording a new album finds itself suddenly on the cusp of superstardom. The ensuing pressures could spark their breakup—or their breakthrough. Written by David Adjmi, directed by Daniel Aukin, and featuring original music by Arcade Fire’s Will Butler, Stereophonic invites the audience to immerse themselves—with fly-on-the-wall intimacy—in the powder keg process of a band on the brink of blowing up.
Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing will be the most significant retrospective of the work of Maren Hassinger to date, presenting her work across sculpture, performance, video, and installation from the early 1970s to the present. Hassinger’s work addresses social and cultural issues through an awareness of interconnectedness, ephemerality, and relationships between humans and the natural world. These themes emphasize the importance of caring for the things we share in contrast to the things that divide us. The exhibition will survey Hassinger’s expansive career, making connections across her practice and asserting her dynamic place in the history of contemporary art.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings is the first retrospective in over two decades dedicated to the groundbreaking work of the artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (b. 1951, Busan, South Korea; d. 1982, New York City). Beginning her artistic career in the Bay Area during the early 1970s, Cha produced an expansive range of works across text-based media, video, and performance. Best known for her posthumously published book, Dictee (1982), which weaves the personal and familial into historical narratives of displacement through word and image, Cha’s interdisciplinary practice gave shape to the experimental art scenes in San Francisco, New York City, and beyond.
Object Oriented: Abstraction and Design in the BAMPFA Collection explores how artists have represented, reshaped, and reimagined familiar objects, drawing attention to the role of design in our everyday lives. This exhibition encourages acts of close looking, asking viewers to question their immediate recognition of what they see. In this way, an object that might at first appear to be a chair could also be considered a sculpture, a stand-in for a body, or simply a piece of metal.
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