The Cultural Corridor Proxy Event

Students from the San Francisco Ballet were dancing to live music played by young musicians from the SFJAZZ Center on a makeshift stage in the Hayes Valley Saturday afternoon.



One of the pieces looked choreographed but the rest looked improvised.



The primary sponsor was the African-American Shakespeare Company who had joined up with the SF Ballet School, the SF Symphony, and a few other local arts organizations to put on a free show linking the "cultural corridor" of the Hayes Valley to the Fillmore District.



There didn't seem to be a lot of ethnic mixing, with the African-American performances taking place further west on Fulton and mostly white performers at Hayes and Octavia.



After the charming dance performance, an SF Ballet spokeswoman tried to get members of the audience to join in a dance-a-long piece.



This was followed by a musical comedy singer from a Bay Area theater company, and then by a string quartet from the SF Conservatory of Music playing Verdi, although the music was mostly drowned out by a noisy generator providing the electrical power for the show.



In the middle of the piece, they were interrupted by a drum corps that was marching down Hayes Street, merging the two performance spaces. They stopped playing when they saw they were winning an unintentional battle of the bands, and took the stage after the quartet finished with Verdi.