San Francisco–based choreographer Joanna Haigood is renowned for her site-specific aerial dance performances that inhabit natural, architectural, and cultural environments. In a dialogue with local choreographer Mary Lee Hardenbergh, she speaks about the creative process behind these massively scaled, technically challenging works, including Picture Powderhorn, the culminating project of her residency at the Walker in 2000. Haigood and her Zaccho Dance Theatre visited the Twin Cities to mount a monumentally scaled site-specific work on one of the area’s largest grain silos. Suspended by specially designed riggings, Haigood and company performed a breathtaking aerial dance on the face of 120-foot silos, interacting with both the magnificent projections of New York video artist Mary Ellen Strom and the architecture itself. The experience was heightened by elaborate lighting by Jack Carpenter and an original electronic sound score by Lauren Weinger.
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