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2 Joanna Haigood Joanna Haigood is the artistic director of Zaccho Dance Theatre in San Francisco. From a San Francisco clock tower to airport terminals to the bucolic fields of Massachusetts, Haigood excavates the historical, architectural , and natural features of her chosen sites to reinvigorate our understanding of place. Using diverse movement genres including aerial work and postmodern dance vocabulary, Haigood demonstrates how sites can be saturated with past memories and previous manifestations. Her work has been commissioned by the National Black Arts Festival, Festival d’Avignon, Dancing in the Streets, the Walker Art Center, and Jacob’s Pillow , among others, and she has earned such awards as a 1997 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 1999 Alpert Award in the Arts as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Irvine Foundation. Kloetzel interviewed Haigood on November 22, 2004, in Haigood’s spacious dance studio located in an aging warehouse in the Bayview/Hunter’s Point area of San Francisco. An Interview with Joanna Haigood MK: Do you remember your first steps into the site-specific genre? JH: There are some vague beginnings. I went to Bard College in upstate New York. The campus was situated in a rather beautiful and serene landscape . The winters there were often very cold and snowy, and by the time spring arrived, the only thing anyone wanted was to be outside. From time to time our classes—composition in particular—were held outside. I always found that interesting. I think that was the beginning of a more focused look at making dances outside of the theater. In the late 1970s I was a student at The Place (the London School of Contemporary Dance). A couple of my classmates and I created our own choreography lab outside of the studio. We made dances in the streets, on the stairs and escalators at Euston Station, in the subway. We even made a 53 An Interview/Looking for the Invisible dance for the vegetable section of a supermarket—a short one before security ejected us. This was before getting permits became an established part of the process. It was more of an “anything goes” situation. We never really set a structure for these dances, and they were always improvisational, although the sites and time of day were never random. In all, I wouldn’t say these were great intellectual exercises. We were more interested in having fun. Anyway, a few things stuck with me out of that experience. The physical constraints or the body’s relationships to specific situations, like stairs, doors, or moving objects—the inherent movement vocabularies in a particular situation or place—became a foundation in my work. Also, while I was in England, I lived next door to a woman named Judith Holmes. She had been an aerialist for Barnum and Bailey and enjoyed going to see the circus when it came to town. Sometimes she would take me along. I started looking at space differently as a result of my circus adventures with her. The process of exploring these two ideas—movement as it relates to objects or environment and choreography using three dimensions—catapulted me from the theater permanently. Well, let’s say, for the most part anyway. Site work became the most engaging work for me. MK: Do you feel there is something in particular that lures you to the sitespecific process? JH: My mother always wanted me to be an architect. In her attempts to point me in that direction, I became aware and interested in buildings. And although I didn’t become an architect, I feel that some of the principles of architecture apply or inform my artistic process. One thing that continues to attract me to site work is the challenge of working in such diverse environments. Negotiating new materials and situations keeps the creative process fresh for me. I presume I also like the mountains of administrative work involved as well because that is a big part of making site work. But I am not sure I’m ready to accept that! MK: How do you choose a site initially? JH: It varies. Sometimes I’ll feel deeply inspired by a place and want to make something there. Sometimes I am moved by an event or by a period in history, and then I try to find a place or a site where that history is relevant. Sometimes I am invited to make a piece by a festival, presenter, or producer. They might...

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