Monday, January 18, 2016

Filmed at Zaccho Studio!


Amy Seiwert's Imagery Featured on Twixtor 













Amy Seiwert’s Contemporary Ballet Company Imagery, was filmed for Twixtor at Zaccho Studio, by RE:Vision Effects' own Peter Litwinowicz Twixtor, the program that RE;Vision Effects has created allows the movement of dancers to be viewed up to 160x slower than real time!

 The effect is utterly spellbinding.

 Follow the link below to see Amy Seiwert’s Imagery, at Zaccho Studio;

Perfect Form in Slow Motion
 




Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Zaccho Studio’s Artist In Residence Program is accepting applications



Zaccho Studio’s Artist In Residence Program is accepting applications  

The Artist in Residence Program at Zaccho Studio extends subsidized studio space to outstanding established and emerging artist in the field of contemporary and aerial dance.  Our studio is equipped with a 3,200 square foot spring floor, multiple anchoring points for rigging, seating for up to 99 audience members and ample natural and artificial light.  The Artist In Residence are also given the opportunity to present affordable master-classes and free works-in-progress showings to our under-resourced community of Bayview Hunters Point, Zaccho’s home base since 1989. These work in progress showings also provide a chance for artists to gain critical feedback on new work from a live audience.

Zaccho Studio is a place where artists can share new ways of thinking and new ways of dancing. By extending partially subsidized rent to you as our Artist In Residence, we strive to provide a platform for you to deeply explore your artistic process, as well as an opportunity to present your own Master Classes and Work-in-Progress showings within our 5,000 ft² studio.



Summer Resident, Amy Seiwert's Imagery
Dancer Rachel Furst, Photo by David DeSilva

Offered Benefits 


·       12 week residency, up to 8 hours a week *Artist scheduling is subject to studio availability
·       Subsidized Studio Rental of $10 per hour (standard rate $25 per hour) up to 96 hours
·       Endorsements of AIR on Zaccho’s website, e-newsletter, residency blog, and social networking
·      Discounted performance rental rate 

Submission Deadline : 31st December 2015

Residency Time Frame :  February 2016 – May 2016




For more information and to request an application, please contact:
Zaccho Studio Manager, Sandia Sexton  sandia@zaccho.org


Thursday, July 9, 2015

Amy Seiwert's Imagery, SKETCH 5 | Stirred



Celebrate the fifth SKETCH series with the amazing artists of Amy Seiwert’s Imagery. This year’s program, ‘Stirred’, is all about premieres. Back To and Traveling Alone (West Coast premiere) will be joined by a new collaborative work between Seiwert and ODC Co-Artistic Director KT Nelson. This collaborative world premier is the result of Seiwert’s summer residency at Zaccho Studio, allowing two unique artists to explore new ground.


 Rachel Furst of Imagery.   Photo by David DeSilva

  The SKETCH series was created to foster risk and innovation in ballet based choreography. In 2015, we are mixing it up. Seiwert will be collaborating with ODC Co-Artistic Director KT Nelson on a new work. The artists will be editing each other's work and interrupting each other's process, in hopes of discovering something entirely new. This type of collaboration is extremely rare in ballet. A co-production of ODC Theater. Also on the program, Seiwert's premiere of Back To, set to the recordings of bluegrass artist Gillian Welch, and the West Coast premiere of Traveling Alone, created for Colorado Ballet in 2011.
 
Amy Seiwert’s Imagery, a contemporary ballet company in San Francisco, believes that ballet is an expressive and vital voice relevant to our times. Imagery’s artists share the belief that through collaboration & experimentation, vibrant and courageous ideas are expressed and habitual reactions are discouraged. Imagery’s mission is to expand the definition of ballet by exploding preconceptions of what ballet is and can be.

         SKETCH 5 | Stirred is co-presented by ODC and supported in part by Zaccho Studio’s Residency Program


SKETCH 5 | Stirred
Thurs-Sat, July 16th-18th at 8:00pm; Sun, July 19th at 7:00pm
$25-$40
Discounted tickets available through July 13th
ODC Theater, 3153 17th St., San Francisco

Monday, June 15, 2015

An Interview with RAWdance

Joanna Haigood, Artistic Director of Zaccho Dance Theatre, asks Resident Company RAWdance's own Wendy Rein and Ryan T. Smith about their upcoming project, Through My Fingers To The Deep, to learn more about their intimate approach to site-specific work. 

 

Wendy Rein directing collaborators Katerina Wong & Kelly Del Rosario,  photo: Charline Formenty



Joanna Haigood: Tell us about your new work and about your collaborators. 
Ryan & Wendy : What happens when the ground beneath your feet is not what you had imagined? Where does the surface end and the foundation begin? Do we follow the clearly constructed paths designed for us, or invent our own? And how do our fantasies interrupt our tangible reality? We’re launching from these broad questions for Through My Fingers To The Deep, our newest work, being created for the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival. We’ve been inspired by the topography of the Gardens landscape, the contrast of organic material and constructed pathways, as well as from the Edgar Allen Poe poem from which the title of the dance was taken, “A Dream Within a Dream.”
We are working with two amazing past collaborators for this work. Scenic designer Sean Riley, known for his unexpected interactive designs, will create a 3-dimensional set for the dance, bringing the strange amalgam of the Gardens’ physical underpinnings into the open as an active, visible partner in the work. Composer Joel St. Julien will create three distinct, but interwoven scores for the work, synchronized to start and end at the same time in different locations.

JH: Is this your first site-specific work?

R & W: We create a great deal of site-specific work for RAWdance, and have always split our programming between public spaces and the theater. While we love some of the drama and craft of working in a controlled theatrical environment, it’s important to us to regularly bring dance to new people and places. We all know that the contemporary dance world can feel too insular. For us, sharing work in diverse public spaces combats that insularity and opens access to the art form. Furthermore, there are some projects that really only make sense in a non-theatrical environment. They need to live in the real world to make sense.
Our work Per-Verses (2006) took place in multiple gallery rooms as a performance installation at the Belcher Street Studios.  A Public Affair (2011) was created for Orson Restaurant, during the middle of dinner service. The Beauty Project (2009) was created for an empty storefront in the Westfield mall. Two by 24: Love on Loop (2012) was created for UN Plaza and To Have and to Hold (2009) and Checkbox (2007) were created for Union Square Park.

Ryan and Wendy directing collaborators,   photo: Charline Formenty



JH: What are your primary concerns when beginning a new creation? Are they different when creating a piece for the theater and creating a site-specific work? 
R & W: A blank canvas is always the hardest for us. The beginning of a work can be overwhelming, whether creating for the theater or site-specifically. So we start with questions, experiments, vague ideas, a handful of moves and a plan that may only hold up for a couple of weeks (if we’re lucky). We never really know where we are going to end up until we are there. 
We do always consider the audience as an integral part of the work from the beginning of creation. How (literally) will they see the work? This is definitely different for someone who has “bought in” to a theatrical performance and is seated at a specific angle, than from someone wandering through Yerba Buena Gardens.

There are additional concerns with site-specific work or any work without a fully controlled environment: audience flow, site lines, working with the surrounding environment, making room for the unpredictable. This particular work, with three simultaneous pieces, in three different locations in the Gardens, timed to start and end at the same time, has a slew of extra coordination complications.
 
RAWdance collaborators, Katerina Wong and Kelly Del Rosario,  photo: Charline Formenty

JH: You asked "where does the surface end and the foundation begin?” What does “surface" and “foundation” mean to you?
R & W: In its simplest form, the surface is everything visible. Concrete pathways, grass, and benches throughout Yerba Buena Gardens, even the skin of our dancers are all surfaces that are informing the movement we create. The physical underpinnings of all these structures consist of the foundation. But the foundation in our sense is also our belief system - what we hold to be real and true. How does the ground that supports us feel like it gives way when we suddenly realize our “truths” may be more shared illusion than actual truth?
The surface of the idyllic-looking Gardens is a complete illusion. It feels like you’re standing on grassy, solid earth, but really that grass is just the top of a series of layers of rubber, styrofoam, and cement. And beneath all of that is the North Wing of the Moscone Center, housing thousands of conference goers. There’s essentially a giant hole in the earth beneath the site. Does that change the way you feel when you walk around the Gardens, or sit on the ground? Or do you block it out and just focus on the pretty grass?
Similarly, do you block out the history of the Gardens, which was constructed only a few dozen years ago by demolishing and/or relocating the homes of the many workers that lived there? As we, together with so many of our artist counterparts, live with a constant fear of eviction from our homes, that history is pretty hard to block out. So in turn, how does this fear shape how we perceive the landscape of the Gardens? How much does an understanding of the “foundation” affect the way we interact with the surface?

JH: What is at the center of your movement research? 
R & W: It varies somewhat from piece to piece, but we always start with questions, and usually a lot of reading. The questions described above started us off with this piece exploring images of constant rumbling, building and tearing down, illusions, and unstable ground. Since it’s a site-specific work, we’re also using a lot of the topography of the site itself to derive the movement.
 
RAWdance,  photo: Charline Formenty



JH: Who are your dance collaborators? Company Members?
R & W: For this project, we are working with six amazing dancers, who are all very much active collaborators in the creative process: Tristan Ching Hartmann, Kerry Demme, Amy Foley, Kelly Del Rosario, Maggie Stack, and Katerina Wong. We’ll be bringing in several more dancers in another few weeks, to help with audience flow and transitions from site to site


Monday, June 1, 2015

Pay What you Can Ballet Classes with Amy Seiwert's Imagery




 Brandon Freeman and Katherine Wells at Zaccho Studio, photo by David DeSilva

During her 5-week Residency at Zaccho Studio, Amy Seiwert will be providing a "Pay What You Can" ballet class, for professional and pre-professional dancers, Mondays through Saturdays from June 15th thru July 10th.

In practice of her strong belief that "professional dancers should be able to continually train, and that training shouldn't be cost-prohibitive", Amy will be opening the doors to her professional dance company's morning rehearsals.

Please join us at Zaccho Studio for this wonderful opportunity to train at an affordable price with master teachers and Amy Seiwert’s Imagery dancers.

WHERE: 
Zaccho Studio, 1777 Yosemite Ave, Studio 330, 
San Francisco, CA, 94124

WHEN:
June 15th thru July 10th
Monday thru Friday 10am to 11:15
Saturday 11am - 12:15

Please follow this link to view Imagery's Class Calender 
See who is teaching and stay up to date on any time changes.
(click on clock icon in left column and click on Company Class with Imagery)

Rachel Furst at Zaccho Studio, photo by David DeSilva



Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Residency Announcement: RAWdance


We are pleased to announce RAWdance as Zaccho’s spring Resident Company!


RAWdance’s Ryan T. Smith and Wendy Rein. Photo Credit, RJ Muna

During their residency period, RAWdance Co-Artistic Directors Ryan T. Smith and Wendy Rein, in collaboration with Scenic Designer Sean Riley and Composer Joel St. Julien, will be developing material for a new site-specific work commissioned by the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival. Titled Through My Fingers Deep, this dance will draw inspiration not just from the architecture of the Gardens, but also from the layers beneath the feet of the dancers and audiences. The landscape brings up questions that are intensely personal and emotional, as well as geographic. What happens when the ground beneath your feet is not what you think it is? Where does the surface end and the foundation begin? Do we follow the clearly constructed paths designed for us, or invent our own?

In their own words, “Our primary interest in Zaccho’s residency program is to establish a home for the creation of a new work for the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival in July. Being able to create the work at Zaccho would have an unquestionably positive impact on the work; A consistent home for rehearsals, space to work with and store sets, and a studio large enough to create work on the scale of the performance site. We are also interested in connecting to a different community. Our hope is that working at Zaccho would offer more than just space, but also the opportunity to interact with other artists, and reach out to the surrounding audience through an open rehearsal.”

Ryan T. Smith and Wendy Rein formed RAWdance in 2004 with the mission to reveal an intimate core of our relationships and identities through collaboration and performance. The company makes visually striking, athletic works driven by human interactions, and presents them in unexpected public spaces as well as the theater. SF Weekly dubbed their work “edgy, sexy inventive fare designed to speak to audiences.” Criticaldance hailed it as “experimental work done brilliantly.” The SF Bay Guardian honored RAWdance with a 2014 Goldie Award.