When award-winning dancer and choreographer Joanna Haigood co-founded Zaccho Dance Theatre 45 years ago, she leaned into site-specific work using unique locations and creative choreography to move people, literally and figuratively.
By suspending dancers in air, dressing artists in eye-catching costumes and utilizing storytelling to illustrate the human spirit, she wanted to push audiences to reimagine our collective environment and reconsider how we interact with the world around us.
Now, nearly a half-century later, she has choreographed performances at government buildings, defunct grain silos and public parks. She’s created pieces criticizing the death penalty, and others celebrating San Francisco’s diversity.
Most importantly, she says, she’s helped pave the way for the next generation by helping young folks believe in their own voices. Some of Haigood’s former students have become dancers and choreographers. Others are community leaders and city employees.
During those full-circle moments, when she crosses paths with former students, their children or grandchildren, Haigood says, “That’s kind of a testament to the good work. And the fact that we’re really aging.”
On Tuesday, Nov. 11, former students, teachers, dancers of Zaccho Dance Theatre will help celebrate the company’s 45th anniversary with a benefit concert.
The show’s lineup includes renowned Bay Area musicians Marcus Shelby, Tiffany Austin, and Martin Luther McCoy. They’ll be joined by circus artists Toni Cannon and Natasha Kaluza, as well as storyteller Diane Ferlatte, aerialist Joey The Tiger, Grammy-award winning beatboxer and music educator Tommy “Soulati” Shepherd and more.
In a director’s note ahead of the event, Haigood writes, “Forty-five years is a long time to commit to anything, especially in the arts, where survival is a constant challenge.”
Despite this year’s widespread cuts to nonprofit funding and arts programs, which she says isn’t anything new (“we are always fighting for our survival”), Haigood believes artists will always figure out a way.
“Our urge to create is something that you can’t suppress,” Haigood attests. “There’ll always be artists.”
Raised in New York, Haigood attended Bard College, where as a senior she was inspired by the Puccini opera Gianni Schicchi. Working with a group of friends, she created a dance piece for her final project that, after graduating, they took on tour in Europe.
“Which,” she says, “was a remarkable feat for young people.” The collective included a small chamber orchestra, a group of dancers and a big production team. That experience gave her a glimpse into her career path. “My future in dance,” says Haigood, “was to be a choreographer.”
As the calendar flipped from 1979 to 1980, Haigood moved to the Bay Area and co-founded Zaccho Dance Theatre with Lynda Riemann, who left the company a few years later.
One of Zaccho’s earliest performances was Trees From the Backyard, part of the 1983 San Francisco International Theater Festival held at Buena Vista Park in San Francisco and Samuel P. Taylor State Park in Marin County.
“I was living in a forest,” says Haigood matter-of-factly, explaining that she’d become fascinated by trees and their larger ecosystems; she even took up a gig working in a state park.
While working in nature, she thought: “Well, if I’m spending all this time here, maybe I can find some way to enter from my creative side.” The result was a performance where humans dressed as birds perched in trees and audience members followed the flute of a pied piper through a park.
Six years later, Zaccho Dance Theatre moved into a former Serta mattress warehouse-factory in Bayview-Hunters Point. Aware of the neighborhood’s issues with over-policing and the influence of crack cocaine, as well as community members’ longstanding ability to organize and advocate for themselves, Haigood wanted to be involved.
“That’s part of the motivation for starting our youth program,” she says, crediting team members who helped establish the program, including Jo Kreiter, who would go on to found Flyaway Productions, and the late Shakiri.
Zaccho Dance Theatre has since added an Artist in Residency program and the San Francisco Aerial Arts Festival into their fold, as well as a Hip-Hop Artist Residency & Training Program and a Black Futures Fellowship.
While constantly expanding the organization and sinking deeper into community, Haigood maintained her own practice.
At the turn of the millennium, she debuted the first piece in her Pictured Trilogy, with Picture Powderhorn. The performance, based in the Minneapolis neighborhood where George Floyd was later murdered, included large images projected on a grain silo while dancers, suspended in air, performed above the audience below. The aim of the work was to bring attention to the hopes and dreams of working-class people in underfunded communities.
A decade later, Haigood debuted her piece Dying While Black and Brown, co-created with Marcus Shelby, and featuring Steven Anthony Jones. Haigood traces the origins of the piece back to her partnership with civil rights attorney Eva Patterson, co-founder of the Equal Justice Society.
“She had this extraordinary vision,” says Haigood, explaining that Patterson’s organization was using art to bring people deeper into legal issues, like abolishing the death penalty.
In 2024, Haigood debuted another piece that mixed politics and dance on the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall. Backed by a 2023 Ranin Fellowship, she created The People’s Palace, with pristine lighting, elegant costumes and dancers levitating through the decadent halls just outside of the mayor’s office.
She created the piece, she says, to reflect the true diversity of San Francisco. In doing so, Haigood did some “deep learning about the impact of architecture on the way we see ourselves and interact with each other on a civic level.” (She quips that “it was time for some type of intervention with the architecture.”)
Haigood, a 1997 Guggenheim Fellow and winner of the 2014 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, hopes for the day when artists are seen as essential workers, and the understanding that “without them we will not survive.”
A purveyor of art as a means of building community, stimulating the economy and encouraging political discourse, Haigood realizes that her dedication to creativity comes with struggle.
But, she says, “I would not change my life in any way. It’s been a pretty remarkable and meaningful journey.”
Zaccho Dance Theatre’s 45th anniversary benefit concert starts at 6 p.m on Tuesday, Nov. 11, at Club Fugazi (678 Green St, San Francisco, CA 94133). Check here for tickets and information.
