16 unify strengthen amplify in dance SPRING 2024 16 A In Dance | May 2014 | dancersgroup.org unify strengthen amplify 44 Gough Street, Suite 201 San Francisco, CA 94103 www.dancersgroup.org ARCHITECTURE IS THE ANCIENT GLOBAL ART OF THE STRUCTURES OF A PLACE REVEALING THE FUNCTIONAL AND BEAUTIFUL NEEDS OF THE PEOPLE OF THE EARTH. JOANNA HAIGOOD’S ZACCHO DANCE THEATRE IS ALSO AN ANCIENT ART THAT PORTRAYS THE LIVING BODIES OF A PLACE IN MOTION, FLIGHT, AND PROXIMITY TO THE STORIES THAT BECOME ENSHRINED BUILT AND UNBUILT PLACES UPON THE EARTH. ERIKA CHONG SHUCH | INTERVIEWED BY ROWENA RICHIE PHOTO BY HECTOR ZAVALA MUSINGS ON THE PEOPLE’S PALACE by Ellen Sebastian Chang Joanna Haigood describes her collaboration for The People’s Palace as “an artistic interven- tion and dialogue with the architectural ico- nography with the intention to insert the com- munities and the narratives that are excluded from representation, and to provide a more accurate picture of who and what defines San Francisco.” I recall the architectural ideas of Christopher Alexander and his colleagues who crafted a Zen like approach towards the built world noting the beauty and soul of architec- ture is born from the people as a “living pattern language…A quality in buildings and in towns cannot be made, but only generated, indirectly, by the ordinary actions of the people, just as a flower cannot be made, but only generated from the seed.” ZACCHO Dance Theatre is also a pattern language soulfully seeding for decades: dancing, singing, speaking within the natural world of trees, butterflies, and bees as an expression of the interdependent unity of all things; and a researched chore- ography interacting with site specific struc- tures to reveal forgotten enforced labor or cultural contributions of enslaved Africans, silos of urban renewal and gentrification, sites of love and sustenance and the “ghost archi- tecture” that inhabits our memories. ZAC- CHO Dance Theatre’s visions are spiritually engineered within the divine site of the body as an ongoing reminder that we, the cultur- ally diverse peoples, have always been here as sacred stewardship, valuable knowledge, and creative contributions. SPRING 2024 in dance 17
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