AUG 19 - 21, 2022
San Francisco Aerial Arts Festival
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Zaccho Dance Theatre and Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture proudly co-present the 5th biennial San Francisco Aerial Arts Festival. Our festival is San Francisco’s premiere aerial arts event featuring internationally recognized aerial artists and exciting newcomers breaking into the field. This biennial festival brings together spectacle, daring athleticism, aerial dance, and circus to create a dynamic multi-day performance event.

The 2022 festival on August 19 to 21, 2022, will be a dynamic event featuring the RESURGE evening group performance at the Cowell Theater, Youth Revelry Matinee, and the premiere of a new site-specific aerial performance by world renowned choreographer Robert Moses’ KIN at the Festival Pavilion. New for 2022, we are excited to present New Experiments in partnership with CounterPulse - a mixed performance opportunity for aerial artists to come together to build community, share ideas, and present short new works.

Thanks to the Gerbode Foundation’s Special Choreographer Award, the RESURGE performance will feature Zaccho Dance Theatre’s commissioning of Bay Area choreographer Veronica Blair’s original new work The Rainbow is Enuf, a contemporary circus reimaging inspired by playwright/poet Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf.

RESURGE will also screen the short film The Routes of Vertical Dance: Moon and the Movement by Italian choreographer Wanda Moretti.

Other artists will include Terry Crane of Seattle’s Acrobatic Conundrum, international performing artist Pamela Donohoo, the Bay Area’s own Shannon Gray, among others. The Youth Revelry Matinee will feature brilliant young aerialists from the Circus Center’s San Francisco Youth Circus, Kinetic Arts Center's Circus Spire, Mendocino Center for Circus Arts' Circus Mecca, Zaccho Youth Company, and Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company in collaboration with BANDALOOP.

UPDATE: The RESURGE performances on Friday 8/19 and Saturday 8/20 will now include an optional pre-show screening at 7:00 pm of the new film Love, a state of grace by Bryan Gibel and Joanna Haigood. All RESURGE ticket holders are invited to attend the film screening with seating beginning at 6:45 pm. The in-person RESURGE performance will still begin at 8:00pm with doors opening at 7:40 pm. The film screening is optional for no extra cost.

Featured artists for New Experiments at CounterPulse include Ciarra D’Onofrio, Faith Elder, Meléa Emunah, Kelsey Keitges, Meche Perez, and Nina Sawant.

The San Francisco Bay Area is home to some of the most important pioneers in aerial dance and award winning circus aerial artists. We will bring together many of the finest performers and practitioners working today and showcase their artistry as it is rarely seen; side-by-side in a multi-faceted, site-specific celebration presented against the backdrop of a major historic & cultural facility. Join us in celebrating these unconventional and innovative artists along with their national and international counterparts in a thrilling weekend of performances on the Bay.
August 19 to 21, 2022

Venue: Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture