El Circo Dia’s 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 when this piece was written in 2016, 8,600 tenants across the city had received formal eviction notices, at a rate higher than any other period in over a decade. The use of the Ellis Act alone had quadrupled between 2011 and 2016, 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.
El Circo Dia is an aerial theater collective that cultivates working relationships between dancers, musicians, and theater tech artists based in the San Francisco Bay Area. El Circo Dia seeks to maximize a collective voice, to create productions that serve as a launching point for meaningful, socially-relevant conversations.
Featuring an original score by Shaina Evoniuk and scenic projections by animator Buddy Giguere, aerial dancers Sandia Sexton, Azraa Muhammad, Helen Wicks and actors Katelyn Hanes, Vesper Synd, and Conrad Chen will tell a story of the unexpected loss of what many believed to be certain: Their Home.
Rigging and lighting design by Benjy Young
Project Artaud’s Studio 124, offers deep significance for this production because of its 49-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.