Pop-Up Magazine events combine live storytelling, music, art, and performance strictly for those attending — no recording, video, podcast, de nada. Be there or miss out. That’s the Pop-Up difference: “Nothing goes online after — you have to be there to see it.”
The current series of Pop-Up performances celebrates the theme of escape, “devoted to escapes big and small, daring and mundane, physical and mental.” Locally, the show is on in San Francisco’s Sydney Goldstein Theater on Sept. 20 (sold out), and in Oakland’s Paramount Theater on Sept. 21.
These two shows will also feature singers from the sponsoring SF Opera’s upcoming production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro: Jeanine De Bique (Susanna) and Jennifer Davis (Countess). They will accompanied by pianist César Cañón, a San Francisco Opera Adler fellow, while the rest of the show features the Magik*Magik orchestra. As De Bique, Davis, and Cañón are in the middle of rehearsals, an SFO spokesperson says their participation is “subject to change.”
Representing the usual variety of participants, the Pop-Up Escape shows in NorCal include comedian Jordan Carlos, poet Sarah Kay, singer-songwriter Nat Puff, comedian Chris Duffy, photographers Lucas Foglia and Lisette Poole, writer Clio Chang, journalist Keri Blakinger, and others.
The Pop-Up Escape Issue features stories about escape in partnership with The California Sunday Magazine. The show is created for a stage, a screen, and a live audience. Contributors tell vivid, newly created multimedia stories, accompanied by illustration, animation, photography, and an original score.
The way the organization explains the theme of these shows:
We could all use a little escape in one way or another. From politics, from the past, from hostile governments and climate change. From the Internet. From negativity. Maybe even from ourselves.
Pop-Up Magazine’s Escape Issue tour will be devoted to escapes big and small, daring and mundane, physical and mental. The Escape Issue will feature a migrant’s trek through Panamanian jungle, a fugitive’s close call with the law, New Age hippies, reluctant viral sensations, death row dungeon masters, a cow (long story!), and much, much more.
Correction: As originially published, this story incorrectly stated that pianist César Cañón was the only accompaniment for the San Francisco programs. Cañón will accompany singers De Bique and Davis, and Magic*Magic will also perform.
