Door Dog Milestones

1995: Door Dog Music Productions started in the basement of a San Francisco Chinatown music center with “Cultural Awareness Through Music”, a workshop that introduced to Bay Area school groups the instruments and sounds of different traditional music from around the world.

1997: Door Dog adds a weekly world music concert series called “World Music at Clarion”, with the purpose of creating more performing opportunities for musicians in the Bay Area from different backgrounds and countries. For 4 years, the Chinatown venue became the hub of a growing world music arts scene in the Bay Area.

2000: Door Dog launches the “San Francisco World Music Festival”, the first festival of its kind in the Bay Area where many facets of the world music community unite to present some of the most unusual music from around the Bay Area and the globe. At the same time, Door Dog pilots a “World Music in Schools” program at San Francisco’s Alice Fong Yu Alternative School to foster the generational transfer of musical traditions and enable immigrant artists to share their expertise within their cultural communities.

2002: Door Dog’s festival grows from presenting local and overseas master musicians to commissioning masters from different cultures to create new music through centuries old traditions, including the premiere of – from “Dynamic Spirit” (2002) in collaboration with the SF Ethnic Dance Festival, to “Marcel Khalifé & International Masters” (2003) at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, to “Kronos Quartet & International Masters” (2004) at Herbst Theatre.

2005: With the critically acclaimed “Nowruz Project,” festival commission at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, celebrating pre-Islamic rituals from 7 Middle Eastern countries, and the creation of a short documentary film “The Taste of Pickled Turnips” featuring Taiwanese Chantefable Master Yang Hsiu Ching, Door Dog becomes a leader in the Bay Area for giving international musicians a voice through groundbreaking multi-media stage productions.

2006: Door Dog directors travel into distinct parts of the world to document, research and help revitalize endangered music traditions within their places of origin, working to launch the first “Green Yayla Arts, Culture and Ecological Festival” in the Eastern Black Seas region of Turkey for the Laz people, and to set-up their NGO with a local board to manage the festival independently.

2007: Door Dog’s “World Music in Schools” program at the Alice Fong Yu Alternative School yields a professionally produced multi-disciplinary, multi-generational, Chinese performing arts production, “Journey to China: Scholars, Goddesses and Warriors” at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

2009: Door Dog launches the “International Youth Music Initiative”, which travels around the globe to unite the youth of the world through music. This dialogue between youth from many countries, having diverse global perspectives, is an effort to promote and preserve ethnic music here in the Bay Area, as well as, to provide youth from oppressed or endangered cultures of the world a voice to express themselves through their traditional music.

2010: Door Dog debuts a three-day commissioned world premiere, “The Ritual Project: Offering | Entering the Fire | Feasting”, creating an international social platform for its innovative stage productions so as to harness the power of music to challenge human nature and inspire social change, which integrates interactive live-satellite streaming from abroad for the first time.