Zaccho Dance Theatre aerialist Ciarra D’Onofrio at Grace Cathedral. Photo courtesy of Zaccho Dance Theatre.
Zaccho Dance Theatre’s Love, a state of grace: aerial, ethereal, magical
By Sima Belmar
I couldn’t get the word “empanada” out of my head. I was lying on Mary Armentrout’s Feldenkrais table in Berkeley and the word kept circling round and round as she gently adjusted my whacked out nervous system. When I mentioned this strange fixation on empanadas, Mary asked if I’d ever been to the empanada place in the Ferry Building in San Francisco. I hadn’t but I took it as a sign.
I picked up my plus-one in Downtown Oakland and we made it over the Bay Bridge in record time, enough time to warrant a stop at El Porteño for empanadas. An easy double-park and an indecisive group of people in line meant two hot empanadas—one mushroom, one swiss chard—delivered to my car in a mere moment. A moment of grace.
From the Ferry Building, we drove to the cathedral. We parked in the garage across from a Rolls Royce occupying a bishop’s spot. Vescovo is the beautiful word for bishop in Italian and we chanted it as we tripped up ramps and steps to the cathedral doors where we were met by kind folks who checked our vaccination cards and who couldn’t find the press list but trusted us that we were legit. After a brief subterranean labyrinthine escapade to find the bathrooms, we emerged, just in time for the start of Zaccho Dance Theatre’s Love, a state of grace.
The space is enormous, so although there was a nice crowd (I can’t say exactly how many people were there; I’m terrible with those sorts of estimates), there was ample room to maintain social distance and everyone was masked. I’ve been to a few live performances since March 2020, but this one, thanks to French Gothic spaciousness, felt by far the safest.
Three dancers in Joan Raymond’s jewel-toned costumes that echoed the cathedral’s stained-glass windows moved through the spectators to meet in the nave, emptied of its pews. The meeting was brief; slowly (but not Butoh slowly), Suzanne Gallo walked toward a bench swing; Ciarra D’Onofrio toward a ladder bent at odd angles (designed by Wayne Campbell), positioned at the center of the labyrinth, and rising over 90 feet, disappearing as if to heaven itself; and Nina Sawant to the North Transept, an arm of the cruciform, where a sculpture in the shape of an hourglass (designed by Sean Riley) stands.
Zaccho’s artistic director Joanna Haigood chose to work with the affordances of the space, physical and spiritual. Gallo, seated on the swing, rises 70 feet at the speed of a death march before the rigging lets go, catapulting her toward the altar. I knew this would happen (what else can a pendulum do but swing?) but, still, my breath caught in my throat. What I didn’t expect, because I was still marveling at the speed and height of Gallo’s soaring, was the moment when she released herself from the swing and flew-floated alone. And this is just what I needed: a sense of soaring, of quietude, of holy ecstasy.
Because the audience is invited to explore the space at any point during the performance, and because you can’t look at two places at once, I didn’t see D’Onofrio make quiet progress up the ladder. Meandering alone toward the altar, I snuck peeks: I would look and she’d be a third of the way up, then three-quarters until, suddenly, she was gone. A choreographic assumption.
My gaze had been pulled away in the direction of Sawant revolving around the hourglass “seated” in lotus position, a circling meditation. When Sawant’s feet would connect with the rim of the sculpture, her body leaning impossibly far from the edge, I felt that despite the supernatural, goddess-like, gravity-defying feel of the work, the message was that we are tethered—to the ground, to ideas and identities, and most importantly, to each other. Walter Kitundu’s score, which incorporated recorded and live elements (the cathedral’s mammoth pipe organ was played by Christopher Keady), had been unobtrusively supporting the ethereal proceedings until it climaxed with a single bone-rattling chord. The sound, familiar to church-goers and early-horror-film-watchers alike, brought the dancers down to earth and gave the rest of us mere mortals wings.
After a quick pass around the space, and a moment to linger in front of a chapel lit in the colors of the rainbow flag, my plus-one and I stood on the cathedral steps and talked about that moment of release when Gallo soared. We ran into a friend who was with her mom on their way into the cathedral. We were all so happy to be together on a beautiful, unseasonably warm day, with live performance back in all its glory, in all its grace.
I’m not a religious person but I’m a sucker for majesty, for over-the-top glory. We’ve been living in a treacherous mundanity. I felt blessed to be among bodies aiming higher.
Love, a state of grace, like the labyrinth on which it begins, invites meditation. The program includes “Rooted in Love,” a series of rituals and meditations written by artist-theologians Yohana Junker and Cláudio Carvalhaes. Had I been able to stay for all three performance cycles, I may have accepted this invitation to participate more actively. You can still catch Love, a state of grace on Thursday, February 17, 1-4pm, and Friday, February 18, 7-10pm, and if you do, try to carve out some time to engage with Junker’s and Carvalhaes’ invocations and ruminations. Ponder Haigood’s questions about how to cultivate love as a state of grace. Read through the dozens of reflections on love offered by members of Haigood’s community. Or just bear witness to the dancers as they call forth love. Get your tickets here.
Zaccho Dance Theatre aerialist Helen Wicks at Grace Cathedral. Photo courtesy of Zaccho Dance Theatre.
Sima Belmar is a Lecturer at UC Berkeley in the Department of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies, and the host of the ODC podcast Dance Cast.