The Do List: Listen to Our Weekend Picks for Sept. 6–8

It’s time for the weekend!

Looking for things to do? Listen to KQED Arts’ Gabe Meline and Sam Lefebvre discuss their critic’s picks for this weekend at the audio link above, or read about each event below.

Opera in the Park: How can you go wrong with arias and other music from SF Opera’s upcoming season, in Golden Gate Park, for free? Opera snippets you might hear include Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet, Britten’s Billy Budd, Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, or even the new opera about Steve Jobs by local composer Mason Bates. We’re always in favor of so-called “high art” being as accessible as possible, and this is a great way for kids, students, or people curious about opera to experience it. That’s Sunday, Sept. 8, at Robin Williams Meadow in Golden Gate Park. Details here.

‘Underground Living’ Book Release: V. Vale, a San Francisco publishing legend, has his first-ever book of photography coming out. Vale was the one behind the old fanzines Search & Destroy and RE/Search, and since the late ’70s he’s really obsessively documented San Francisco punk and industrial scenes, as well as a wide variety of subcultural offshoots, under the banner of RE/Search Publications. Yet it’s only now that he’s beginning to share his photography from this journey, including photos from the first-ever Ramones show in the Bay Area. He celebrates the book’s release at City Lights in San Francisco on Sunday, Sept. 8. Details here.

‘The Body Electric’: Only in the Bay Area would an underground figure like V. Vale exist alongside the headquarters of Google, Apple, and Facebook. So I’m glad for ‘The Body Electric,’ a giant show at YBCA exploring the intersection of art, tech, and the human body. The exhibit incorporates video, sculpture, virtual reality, and photography, and it zeros in on themes of race, gender, and class. It comes here from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and it’s a natural touring show for the Bay Area, where we’re always trying to get art and tech to talk to each other more smoothly. It opens Friday, Sept. 6, and runs through January of next year, at YBCA in San Francisco. Details here.

Black Choreographers Festival: The Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts is an essential performing arts hub for the East Bay, which hosts this dance festival this weekend. Saturday features new works by artists including Kendra Kimbrough Barnes, Gregory Dawson and Reginald Savage, and then on Sunday, the program spotlights youth dance groups from around the Bay. There’s satellite programming and several noteworthy performers and organizers involved here, so check out their website. It runs Sept. 7 and 8 at Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts. Details here.

Giraffage and Astronautica: You might expect a place called the Jerry Garcia Amphitheater to be in the Haight-Ashbury, but no, it’s in the Excelsior neighborhood of San Francisco, which is where Jerry Garcia grew up. But the amphitheater isn’t used as much as it should be, especially for music, which makes this show there on Saturday with some electronic artists really welcome. It’s free, and the performers reflect the demographics of the neighborhood—this weekend, it’s Giraffage, the stage name of electronic producer Charlie Yin, whose music you just heard, and Astronautica, the stage name of Edrina Martinez. That’s the middle of McLaren Park, at at Jerry Garcia Amphitheater, on Saturday, Sept. 7. Details here.