Zaccho Dance Theatre presents the world premiere of Love, a state of grace, a major performance installation featuring aerial dance and ritual and meditation stations throughout Grace Cathedral in San Francisco.

Love, a state of grace will be a performance installation, presented in one hour cycles repeated over three hours daily, during which the audience can move freely within the Cathedral.

Performances will be followed by panel discussions with activists, artists, and theologians, allowing the audience to explore their own perceptions of “otherness” and examining how we might move towards greater acceptance and understanding.

With over 90-foot ceilings, stained glass, and multiple chambers, Grace Cathedral will provide a multifaceted platform of many vantage points for audiences.  The rhythms and height of Grace’s Gothic design also present unique challenges for Zaccho Dance Theatre Artistic Director Joanna Haigood’s choreography.  Haigood will be choreographing the dancers’ movements using original props created by collaborating designers Wayne Campbell and Sean Riley, such as an anchored 90-foot ladder and 70-foot swinging pendulum.

Love, a state of grace will feature some of the Bay Area’s most talented aerial dancers who will interact with original props created by collaborating designers Wayne Campbell and Sean Riley. These props include an anchored 90-foot ladder and 70-foot swinging pendulum, each a unique response to the rhythms and height of Grace Cathedral’s Gothic design.

Composer Walter Kitundu’s sound score will incorporate recorded material, the activation of live acoustic instruments within the space, the Cathedral’s massive pipe organ, and voices of a small choir, all in conversation with the Cathedral’s cavernous interior space and prolonged reverberation. Artist theologians Yohana Junker and Claudío Cavalhaes will design a series of meditations and small rituals with which the audience may engage throughout the Cathedral. At the heart of each ritual, the question that emerges is how to intimate and love our places, our bodies, our communities, our land otherwise.

An aerialist leaps suspending in mid air off of a dangling swing with a stained glass cathedral window shinning behind them. The scene is washed in majestic purple. Another aerialist climbs on a ladder in the background.