Zaccho Dance Theatre Returns to YBCA, 4/15-17

Zaccho Dance Theatre presents internationally acclaimed choreographer Joanna Haigood's performance installation The Monkey and the Devil, created in collaboration with visual artist Charles Trapolin. Haigood's visceral hybrid of dance, theater, and visual art combines contemporary movement, hip-hop elements, and spoken text in an energetic production that is both searing and immediate. Zaccho Dance Theatre was last seen at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2008 with The Shifting Cornerstone, in which dancers performed on Mission Street just outside the arts complex. Addressing a lasting condition of America's racial history - present-day incarnations of racism that subtly course through popular culture - The Monkey and the Devil plays April 15-17 in the Forum at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and is free and open to the public. There will be no seating or ticketing for performances; audiences are welcome to navigate the performance space as they wish. Performances will run on a continuous loop April 16 and 17, from 12pm to 2pm and 3pm to 5pm. Additionally, there will be a special one-time showing April 15 at 8pm, followed by a panel discussion on race relations at 9pm moderated by Dani McClain of ColorOfChange.org, featuring political humorist W. Kamau Bell.

Taking its title from ethnic slurs, The Monkey and the Devil was created and workshopped in 2008, and revised for this installation at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The hour-long work traces a contemporary racism with roots in America's slave trade. Performers twist, flip, and pound through interactions fraught with tension and misunderstanding, their movements a vehicle for otherwise inexpressible thoughts. Speaking text drawn from a variety of contemporary and historical sources, the performers articulate race-based emotions hundreds of years in the making.

In The Monkey and the Devil, Haigood references the process of "mirroring," whereby one racial group responds to the race-based mistrust of the other by developing their own indicators of mistrust. Her work thus takes duality as a theme, from its casting-one couple is white, one is black, with intentionally similar body types-to its set pieces, matching halves of a bare room that stand in opposition to each other, designed by visual artist Charles Trapolin; these half-houses recall Abraham Lincoln's speech foreshadowing the abolition of slavery where "A house divided against itself cannot stand."

In creating The Monkey and the Devil, Haigood and Trapolin drew from their respective family histories and from the lore of antebellum South Carolina. Trapolin's great-grandfather was a slave owner and kept a journal of plantation life, which he published at the turn of the last century; although Haigood has found no written history connecting her ancestry to slaves, she shares the last name of a family descended from slave-owners living in an area where her relatives have also lived for many generations. Haigood says, "It is hard to find anyone who has not encountered racism; harder still to imagine someone who has never had a racist thought. Racism, as a socially constructed concept, establishes superiority based on skin color and the securing of power-economic, political, social, and psychological; it has taught us to hate our neighbors and even to hate ourselves."

As The Monkey and the Devil reveals, today's cultural figures unwittingly rehash old race-based arguments and misrepresentations, and that such instances are common enough that many Americans, regardless of their background, consider them unremarkable. A century and a half later, still grappling with the artifacts of slavery, Americans struggle to re-unite a split house.

Joanna Haigood is the co-founding Artistic Director of Zaccho Dance Theatre. Her work focuses on creating dances that use natural, architectural, and cultural environments as a point of departure for movement exploration and narrative, often integrating aerial flight and suspension. Her work has been commissioned by Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, Dancing in the Streets, Walker Arts Center, the Exploratorium Museum, the National Black Arts Festival, Lines Contemporary Ballet, Boston Dance Umbrella, Axis Dance Company, Festival d'Avignon, and Festival d'Arles in France; her work is also in the repertory of the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago. Haigood has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Wallace A. Gerbode Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the James M. Irvine Foundation, and is the recipient of a Bay Guardian Local Discovery (GOLDIE) Award and three Isadora Duncan Dance Awards. She has taught at the National des Arts du Cirque in France, the Laban Centre in England, Spelman College, the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University, the University of California at Davis, and the San Francisco Clown Conservatory.

Born into a family of artists from New Orleans, Charles H. Trapolin is a visual and performance artist whose work has been seen at the Oakland Museum, the San Jose Museum of Contemporary Art, SOMAR, and the Jon Sims Center for the Arts. His work is in the Permanent Collection of the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok, Thailand. Following the creation of the maze at Burning Man at Black Rock City, Nevada, in 2000, he was commissioned to create a 300' mural and installations for the Maze of Reflection in 2001. More recently, his work was selected for Sculpture by the Sea in Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia. As a professional dancer, he was a member of the highly acclaimed dance company ODC/SF, performing throughout the United States. Since 2002, he has been a partner in Teatro ZinZanni. His awards and accreditations include nominations for the Isadora Duncan Dance Award (1998) and a SECA Award at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2002.

Panel moderator Dani McClain is a campaign manager at ColorOfChange.org, the largest African-American online political organization in the country. Before joining ColorOfChange, she reported for The Miami Herald and was a staff writer covering education for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Prior to working in daily news, McClain taught high school social studies in the Cincinnati Public Schools system and specialized in communications and event planning while on staff at Drug Policy Alliance. McClain graduated from Columbia University and received a master's degree from Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. She serves on the board of Allied Media Projects.

Panelist W. Kamau Bell is one of the fastest rising stars in the world of political humor. Praised by Punchline Magazine as "one of our country's most adept racial commentators with a blistering wit," Kamau was recently named "Comedian of the Year" by SF Weekly and "Best Comedian" by the San Francisco Bay Guardian. His new stand up album, "Face Full of Flour," just made the 10 Best Comedy Albums of 2010 list at both iTunes and Punchline Magazine. Kamau's critically acclaimed solo show, The W. Kamau Bell Curve: Ending Racism in About an Hour, has sold out runs in San Francisco and has enjoyed an extended run New York as part of the soloNova Festival at PS122. Kamau recently performed at the Just For Laughs Festival in Montreal, where his set was filmed for HBO Canada, at the New York Comedy Festival, where he was a critic's pick in Time Out NY, who gave him "FOUR STARS" and offered that, "Bell finds comic gold in the wide range of material he mines, offering provocative insights into an ugly reality." Kamau's upcoming performances include stops in London, Glasgow and Edinburgh where he'll be premiering The Curve internationally.

Now celebrating its 30th anniversary, Zaccho Dance Theatre is one of the nation's most established dance companies using site-specific methods. Since the company's founding in 1980, Artistic Director and choreographer Joanna Haigood has used a range of influences-the Underground Railroad, post-industrial landscapes, the politics of gentrification-to illuminate the challenges facing her community in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.

 

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