A program of free, large-scale, site-specific dance in San Francisco
The People’s Palace
Conceived and Directed by Joanna Haigood
San Francisco City Hall
May 9, 10, and 12, 2024
[ID: Aerialists Veronica Blair and Ciarra D’Onofrio inside San Francisco City Hall]
The People’s Palace was a 3-day artistic intervention with City Hall’s Beaux-Arts Roman and Greek iconography. Aerialists and performers interacted with the architecture and large scale projections, transforming these symbols into new, more inclusive narratives that more accurately reflect San Francisco’s diverse and dynamic cultures and community. Through performance, music, storytelling, and immersive technologies, The People’s Palace invited the audience to actively engage these new narratives, to see themselves within the broader context of the city, and to appreciate the richness of diverse perspectives.
Conceived and directed by Joanna Haigood, this work was developed in collaboration with composer Marcus Shelby, visual artist Mildred Howard, scenic designer Sean Riley, rigging designer David Freitag, design consultant and fabricator Wayne Campbell, lighting designer Krissy Kenny, projection designer Aron Altmark, costume designer Dana Kawano, indigenous culture bearers Gregg Castro and Jonathan Cordero, and performing artists Veronica Blair, Tristan Ching Hartman, Ciarra D’Onofrio, William Brewton Fowler, Jr., Jocelyn Reyes, Nina Sawant, Saharla Vetsch, and The Skywatchers Ensemble.
A co-presentation of Dancers’ Group and ZACCHO Dance Theatre.
Supported by a Hewlett 50 Arts Commission, with additional support from the California Arts Council, Grants for the Arts, Bernard Osher Foundation, Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, San Francisco Arts Commission, and our generous community of individual donors.
Dancers’ Group and Joanna Haigood are a recipient of the Hewlett 50 Arts Commissions, launched in 2017 to celebrate the foundation’s 50th anniversary. It is a five-year, $8 million initiative supporting the creation and premiere of 50 new works from outstanding artists working in five performing arts disciplines. The largest commissioning effort of its kind in the country, the initiative is a symbol of the Hewlett Foundation’s longstanding commitment to supporting art that matters to the people and communities of the San Francisco Bay Area. The Hewlett Foundation has supported the arts in the region for more than 50 years, and currently makes grants of roughly $20 million per year to more than 200 nonprofit arts organizations, mostly in the form of long-term general operating support. More information about the Hewlett 50 Arts Commissions can be found at: hewlett.org/50Commissions.
Artist Information: Joanna Haigood/Zaccho Dance Theatre
Read articles about The People’s Palace
We, The Majestic
by Maurya Kerr
Musings on The People’s Palace
by Ellen Sebastian Chang
Designing for More People in the Palace
Sean Riley Interviewed by Rowena Richie
Learn more about past ONSITE performances:
October 2020: House/Full of BlackWomen
New Chitlin Circuitry: Reparations Vaudeville – a site specific ritual performance project that addresses issues of displacement, well being, and sex trafficking of black women and girls in Oakland
July 2019: Fog Beast
The Big Reveal – a focus on human migration, ecology, living history and belonging
July 2017: AXIS Dance Company
Occupy – a site-specific journey through an urban garden
August-September 2016: NAKA Dance Theater
RACE: Stories From The Tenderloin
February-July 2015: Shinichi Iova-Koga/inkBoat
95 Rituals (for Anna Halprin)
April-May 2014: Sara Shelton Mann
The Eye of Horus: Five Solos: Views of the Primal Body
June 2013: Amara Tabor-Smith
He Moved Swiftly But Gently Down the Not Too Crowded Street: Ed Mock and Other True Tales in a City That Once Was…
September 2012: Jo Kreiter
Niagara Falling – a visually arresting aerial dance and multimedia event
September-October: 2011 Katie Faulkner
We Don’t Belong Here – a portable movement, video, and sound event
March 2010: Ben Levy
Intimate Visibility – a collision of new media, dance, and flash mob
February 2010: Erika Chong Shuch
Love Everywhere – a public celebration of love
August 2009: Patrick Makuakane
Hit and Run Hula: Taking San Francisco by storm in a hula ambush
May 2009: Anna Halprin
Spirit of Place – a performance responding to the site at Stern Grove, a space designed by Lawrence Halprin
August 2008: Joanna Haigood
Shifting Cornerstone – a window between the present and the past, between memory and imagination
