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GHOST ARCHITECTURE
Zaccho Dance Theatre, Ghost Architecture
Reviewed By: RACHEL HOWARD
for
Joanna Haigood's latest work for Zaccho Dance Theatre, Ghost Architecture, runs in continuous half-hour loops from 11 a.m. to five p.m. at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum. Viewers, who are asked for a mere $10 donation, may enter and exit and pace beneath the set during the performance at will. This arrangement may sound like a gimmick to those accustomed to the conventions of concert dance, but it is not. Ghost Architecture is a true installation, and it demands to be encountered and understood as a work of visual art.
It is both heady and haunting. Haigood and sculptor Wayne Campbell have scrupulously researched the history of the South of Market area and found a more than usable past. In the space the Forum now occupies once stood the West Hotel, the Peerless Movie Theater, and two apartment buildings; all were razed in the 1970s to make room for redevelopment. The beneficiaries of the demolition are numerous, including those of us who now regularly enjoy performances at the Yerba Buena Center, but the transformation had its casualties, too - namely the hundred-odd evicted pensioners who once lived in the West Hotel.
Campbell and Haigood have collaborated to uncover the architectural coordinates of these buildings, but their reconstruction is far from literal. Windows and staircases hang in the precise locations they once occupied, but metal grates take the place of floors and hanging wires suggest corners and bearing-posts. Tissue-thin white fabric substitutes for walls, capturing fleeting shadows.
The entire structure is three stories high, sparsely furnished with white tables and chairs and a twin bed with iron rails that recall prison bars. Along the Forum's east wall, exactly where the Peerless' movie screen once stood, Campbell and Haigood have hung white fabric. A camera obscura filters the light from the Forum's window to project the view of the Museum of Modern Art across the street, the image eerily miniaturized and multiplied and turned upside-down (the lighting design is by Jack Carpenter). The effect of all this is like entering a far more sophisticated and thought-provoking version of Disneyland's "Haunted House."
There are two performers at a time (a cast of four rotates seamlessly). They are dressed like hotel residents, with fedoras and ties, except costume designer Callie Floor has added an almost imperceptible layer of white gossamer that seems to coat them in the dust of time. As Gregory T. Kuhn's score movies from silence to creaky steps to throbbing electronic sounds (all marvelously engineeredăthe door slams will make you bolt upright in your chair), one performer plays solitaire while another slugs liquor, shadowboxes, and stands on the bed as though contemplating suicide by hanging.
Haigood is known as an aerial choreographer who has sent dancers reeling from abandoned granaries and even the clock tower of the San Francisco Ferry Building; many of her works, like her recent evocation of Chagall's paintings, have had a visual art orientation but still incorporated passages of dancing. Ghost Architecture crosses the line. Robert Henry Johnson, Jose Navarrette, Suzanne Gallo, and Shakiri are all gifted dancers, and their kinesthetic intelligence shapes their characterizations, but Ghost Architecture is not a dance work.
I have no beef with this. Haigood has labeled it a "performance installation," apt enough. But more importantly, Ghost Architecture is the work of an inquiring imagination that refuses to be hemmed in by rigidly defined disciplines. I will leave interpretation of the rich questions presentedăhow does the past manifest itself in the present? How do traces of light define place? And as Haigood says in her program notes, what is a ghost anyway? - to individual viewers. Ghost Architecture is worth grappling with one-on-one.
