Movers and Shakers: The 40 Most Exciting Soulful Artists of 2003

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Joanna Haigood
Dancers in the Air
Since 1980, San Francisco?based choreographer Joanna Haigood and her company, Zaccho, have combined elements of film, theater, and installation art with an acrobatic style of dance that literally goes over the heads of its audience. In 1995, for instance, Zaccho dancers performed Haigood?s Noon, leaping and bouncing on tether lines across the massive clock face of San Francisco?s Ferry Building.
Most of Haigood?s choreography explores the features of a particular place: a trail in the woods, an old canning factory, historical building sites. Her latest and perhaps most ambitious work, Picture . . ., focuses on three inner-city neighborhoods?San Francisco?s Bayview/Hunter?s Point, Brooklyn?s Red Hook, and Minneapolis? Powderhorn. Haigood and her collaborators (including local teens) have collected stories, photographs, and video footage of the neighborhoods. But the result is a lot more exciting than most up-with-community art projects: During the performance, 100-foot collages of the collected images are projected on buildings while suspended dancers leap and float 12 stories in the air. www.zaccho.org
?JOSEPH HART

System of a Down
Heavy Metal messengers
In four years, this L.A. band has shot from obscurity to stardom as headliners on the 2002 heavy-metal uber-tour, Ozzfest. But this is metal with a twist; soad?s jagged guitar riffs and punk-rock rhythms are seasoned with strong Middle Eastern flavors (two members of the lineup were born in Lebanon, one in Armenia).
The band also stands out for its hard-core politics, which inject a refreshing dose of activism into metal?s escapist world. soad raises funds for official recognition of the Armenian genocide of 1915?1923, and its Web site features extensive ?global action? links encouraging fans to join radical causes. On tour with Ozzfest, soad co-sponsored an information booth for the Axis of Justice?a ?freedom school? that aims to counter racism among some Ozzfest metalheads and ?provide a fair balance to commercial marketing that is usually associated with any tour,? according to soad frontman Serj Tankian. Now that?s heavy. Toxicity (Sony) ?JOSEPH HART

Susan
Rawcliffe
Sound
sculptor
The pillow-shaped necklace ocarina. The polyglobular flute, with its ball-shaped swellings between tubular sections. Chamberduct howler flutes, which look like pregnant clarinets. These and many more strange and beautiful handmade ceramic wind instruments create the otherworldly soundscapes of composer-
performer Susan Rawcliffe.
The L.A.?based Rawcliffe, whose music is born of a unique combination of ceramic artistry, musical acumen, and fine-tuned knowledge of acoustics, is also a published expert on the clay wind instruments of pre-Conquest Latin America, which inspire many of her creations. She performs in venues ranging from
the folkish (Minneapolis? Cedar Cultural Center) to the avant-garde (the Audio Arts Festival in Krakow, Poland), and her eerie, buzzing, breathy music can be heard on the sound tracks for the films The Island of Doctor Moreau, Coming Home, and Drug Store Cowboy. A compelling 1999 Rawcliffe CD called Many Axes is available from her Web site, www.artawakening.com.
?JON SPAYDE

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