This week we’re sharing tributes to all the 2024 Dance Journal Award honorees. For tickets to the awards ceremony on December 2, go to retailer.dancemedia.com.
For 44 years, Joanna Haigood’s imaginative and prescient as creative director of Zaccho Dance Theatre has mixed hovering creativeness and deeply grounded curiosity. She goals to shift communities’ relationships with historical past—and to encourage recent dedication to the longer term.
Haigood’s best-known works excavate the historical past of place, revealing the previous’s hidden connection to the current. Her haunting and unusually hopeful 1998 work Invisible Wings was the results of her discovery that the grounds of the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Competition in Massachusetts had been a cease on the Underground Railroad for individuals escaping slavery. Her most up-to-date work, 2024’s The Folks’s Palace, reclaimed San Francisco’s Metropolis Corridor for a various citizenship, drawing on in-depth analysis in regards to the relationship between race and structure, and sending dancers spinning under the constructing’s 307-foot-high dome.
However Haigood’s course of additionally encompasses philosophy and spirituality. For 2022’s Love, a state of grace, she drew on writings by the likes of James Baldwin and Buddhist activist Thich Nhat Hanh, in addition to private reflections on love from 100 group members. She labored with two theologians to create a guided meditation booklet that led guests by way of San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral as aerialists flew between the stone rafters, utilizing metal buildings designed by Haigood’s longtime collaborator (and life companion), Wayne Campbell.
Although she has mounted greater than 30 productions in areas throughout the nation, Haigood’s deepest roots have remained in San Francisco’s Bayview–Hunters Level neighborhood. Since 1989, Zaccho has occupied one of many metropolis’s largest dance studios there, holding performances, artist residencies, and a youth performing arts program that has supplied free dance coaching to greater than 5,600 neighborhood youngsters. Zaccho additionally organizes the San Francisco Aerial Arts Competition, which Haigood based in 2014.
As she approaches her 68th birthday, Haigood is trying to make sure Zaccho’s work continues. She not too long ago handed route of the youth program to veteran Zaccho performing artist Veronica Blair. Maybe most fervently, she hopes to tour Love, a state of grace.
“As I’m getting older, I’m eager about what is helpful,” Haigood says. “Proper now, I really feel that our society is misplaced in so some ways. Discovering our manner again to like—not simply of household, however of group, and of the planet—that feels crucial.”
