Refuge; A Ballad for the Renting Class is a site-specific aerial dance that brings the urgent conversation about San Francisco’s housing crisis to the stage, questioning what it means when our city’s long established residents have been evicted. We aim to draw awareness to the psychological repercussions of losing our home, and the need for a deeper social justice approach in sheltering San Francisco’s most vulnerable citizens.

By official record 8,600 tenants across the city have received formal eviction notices over the past five years at a rate higher than any other period in over a decade. The use of the Ellis Act alone has quadrupled within that same 5-year span of time, evicting thousands of individuals who established San Francisco’s cultural, artistic and politically diverse society.

As a means of both advocacy and validation, Refuge aims to honor the experience of those who have been forced to move and to engage with our personal relationship to shelter. This production will showcase aerial rigging designs that allow the stage to shift perspective. In response to the research and personal experience of relocation, the cast will engage the audience in dance vignettes that depict various lives affected by the housing crisis.

The venue, Project Artaud’s Studio 124, offers deep significance for this production because of its 46-year legacy of providing sustainable housing to local artists. The studio's location in the Mission District and its proximity to San Francisco’s current eviction crisis adds poignancy to the production’s content while it's physical range for site specific rigging design is paramount for our aerial staging.  

El Circo Dia is a San Francisco based aerial theatre collective founded by artistic director Sandia Sexton with the mission to strengthen working relationships between local performers of various modalities, ages and abilities. By nurturing collaborations between dancers, musicians and technology-based artists, El Circo Dia aims to maximize a collective voice and create productions that act as a launching point for greater, socially relevant conversations. El Circo Dia was the 2016 recipient of Dancer's Group CA$H Grant for Sandia’s aerial theater production of "Refuge: A Ballad of the Renting Class

This collaboration featured Helen Wicks, Azraa Muhammad, Vesper Synd, Katelyn Hanes, and Conrad Chan. Set design by Sandia and Courtney Sexton

Concept and script by Sandia with Origional Sound score by Shaina Evoniuk

Rigging and lighting design by Benjy Young