Carnaval San Francisco 2012 Festival & Parade Live Stream

Event Information:

The Grand Parade for SF Carnaval 2012 will be held on May 27 at 9.30pm starting at 24th & Bryant Streets. On Saturday and Sunday, May 26 and 27, the San Francisco Carnaval Festival will transform Harrison Street into a wonderland of miscellaneous food, music, dance, art, crafts and other fun activities and events on several stages for the entire family to enjoy. Spanning seven blocks, the San Francisco Carnaval Festival will take place on Harrison Street between 16th and 23rd streets (10 a.m.-6 p.m.). This year’s festival highlights include three stages of continuous live music from around the globe, salsa dance classes and competitions, children’s activities, drumming and much more.

Carnaval San Francisco is an annual street parade and festival in San Francisco, California on the last weekend in May. It was founded by a large group of visionary artists brought together by percussionist Marcus Gordon, dancer Adela Chu, and costume designer Pam Minor in 1979 who came together in Precita Park to celebrate living a rich cultural life in tune with the rhythms of nature and the ancestors. The following year the second Carnaval San Francisco was held in the Mission District's Dolores Park. Since 1979, the Carnaval has been the central event for many thousands of artists who spend hundreds of hours each year getting ready for the Sunday parade.

The San Francisco Bay Area Carnaval season begins in February as the great Western hemisphere Carnaval celebrations are concluding. The four Carnaval Cities with the greatest influence and presence in the San Francisco Carnaval are Port of Spain, Trinidad; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Salvador, Brazil; and Oruro, Bolivia. The Mission District, San Francisco, California since the 1950s, has been a metro center for the many different Spanish speaking populations of Latin America and these groups will often enter a group or Carnaval contingent in the parade.

Carnaval or Mardi Gras is best seen as a spring festival celebrating the rebirth of life and thus it is a universal festival celebrated by all cultures as well as the first festival. Besides the strong American hemisphere presence in the parade there are generally Carnaval groups from the Philippines, India, China, Middle East and Africa.

As a parade, Carnaval San Francisco is most recognized for its spectacular choreographed dancers and scantily clad beautiful women. The Inner Mission District with two BART stations supports the Bay Area's highest concentration of dance studios and instructors. Many of these dance instructors have been pillars of the Carnaval parade instilling the sublime sense of uniting with the Carnaval spirit though movement and song into their students during the peak moments best experienced in the parade.

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