Review: Ciarra D’Onofrio + Dancers performing "Heart String," Zaccho Studio, San Francisco, CA, May 30-June 1, 2025
- Jen Norris
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 19 hours ago
The loss of a loved one is an utterly personal and yet universal experience. With Heart String, a reflection on Grief + Love + Death, choreographer and dancer Ciarra D’Onofrio invites us into the hallowed space where souls transit and humans mourn, demonstrating both metaphorically and physically how grief flows in cool persistent waves, while clinging like a tenacious spider’s web.
This performance project brings together Ciarra D’Onofrio + Dancers, an ensemble of six talented aerial and contemporary dancers, and the lullaby-like harmonies of the Threshold Choir, led by Kate Munger. The 16 female choristers are making their public performance debut. More typically, they sing their original compositions in trios at the bedsides of the dying, offering comfort and honoring those on the threshold of death.
The stagefloor is bathed in blue. The warm flicker of candles draws entering patrons across the expansive Zaccho Studio to a corner altar. Each stoops to write a remembrance and clip it to one of the strings spoking out amid the offerings of flowers and photos. Soothing music plays as we settle in our seats facing the high-ceilings and exposed girders of this aerial-dance rehearsal and performance space in an industrial warehouse in San Francisco’s Bayview District.
The pacing and transitions of Heart String are refreshingly pedestrian, reminding us that death often comes both too quickly and painstakingly slowly. No hurrying, or performative sleights of hand are used to move through the performance. To begin, the singers walk downstage in front of the audience, each bare footfall a necessary piece of the process of assembling.
“If no other misses you, I will, I will sense the emptiness where once you breathed,” a lone woman sings. With the addition of a second voice, a body is revealed. Dead, or helpless, it hangs arched gently above the floor, belly to the ceiling, limbs splayed. Coming slowly to life, folding upward pod-like to grasp the rope and rise to their feet, head bowed, they carry the weight of the world. A struggle to control trembling fists, the manifestation of anger, frustration, or sorrow, the dancer reaches, pulling against the cord which tethers them to the ceiling. Relinquishing control, they swing, gliding over the floor, dusting its surface with a palm.
Others enter. Catching the swinging form, a quartet of comfort and support plays out. With a palpable weightiness, bodies lean and drape inelegantly across one another, rocking as one. Fresh harmonies of “I will be lifted, I will be comforted, I will be held,” resound. The earthbound dancers may provide respite care, but the soloist swings alone. What a brilliant metaphor for both the one who is dying and the one who is grieving, as life’s journeys are ultimately individual.
In darkness, a soloist repeats the verse “Nothing can shake my love.” D'Onofrio, who has witnessed the loss of both her parents to cancer, is revealed at the microphone, altar-side. They speak poetically of the physical manifestations of their bodies’ transformations: the soles of feet turning purple as if filled with blackberry juice, cheeks sinking inward like velvet curtains.
Unison movement sequences always please me, offering an orderliness and a community mindedness that I find uplifting. For the song “Let It Blow Through,” five dancers float over the floor, swinging together, bodies and limbs yearningly extended. Landing on a foot, each pauses in graceful arabesque before letting go to fly again, or cartwheeling over arm extensions in perfect synchrony. A final tableau finds each person folded in fetal position spinning at the end of their own rope as the lights fade.
Heart String intersperses the calming incantations of the choir with aerial and floor-based dances and spoken word remembrances, written and offered by the performers. The unfettered emotional truths offered by the music, the poetry, and the dancers gliding through space, create an immersive sanctity. D’Onofrio and her partners craft a world away from time where details matter. Deploying lingering silences, allowing apparitions to emerge ever-so-gradually from darkness to brighter clarity, and using repetition effectively, they make room for us to contemplate, to feel, and to be fully present.
Memorable sequences include Ciarra D'Onofrio and Kriss Rulifson’s “Floating,” in which the duo swoops in parallel, super heroes on a mission. Later, working in opposition, their bodies cross pendulum-like in long flying arcs. Out of this, Rulifson takes centerstage, circling a small circle of light, dancing around the edges, roiling with emotion as she recounts, and reckons with, the day her mother told her she had chosen her death date.
Devon Chen and Hannah Westbrook perform their “Grasping” duet while hanging against the stage’s stark-white sidewall. Tangling and untangling, it isn’t clear where one begins and another ends. Suspended head-high, pushing away from her partner, Chen’s feet kick in desperate flight. The distinction between comfort and confinement blurs.
Near the show’s end, Munger and two colleagues conduct the audience in a sustained chorus of “We are all just walking each other home.” I am typically a reluctant audience participant, but find this verse particularly touching.
What is the condition of being be tied to, guided through, and restrained by, our grief? Our memories are threads to the past, but also sustaining lifelines. What remains, what is fleeting? What paths must be traveled alone and when can others share the burden of the absence of another and the enduring heartache. These are the questions that come forward for me during the emotional and searching 75-minute performance.
Review by Jen Norris, published June 1, 2025
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Production Credits
Ciarra D'Onofrio + Dancers
Presents
Heart String: an Aerial Dance on Death, Grief, & Love
May 30-June 1, 2025
Zaccho Studio
Director, Producer, Choreographer: Ciarra D'Onofrio
Dance Collaborators: Devon Chen, Derek DiMartini, Olallie Lackler, Kriss Rulifson, Liv Schaffer, Hannah Westbrook
Music Director & Founder of The Threshold Choir: Kate Munger
The Threshold Choir:
Amanda Newstetter, Beth Kenny, Brenna Olivier, Cindy Smith, Colleen Donovan, Helen Greenspan, Janet Hohbach, JoAnne Saxe, Kri Schlafer, Leah Reitz, Leone Neal, Mary Patt, Nadia Mufti, Sandy Wilson, Sadie Black
Costume Design: Lauren Jade Szabo
Lighting Design: Sam Miller
Production Stage Manager: Jax Blaska
Promotional Photography: Kristyn Stroble
Heart String Program
Music: “If No Other”
1. Lifted
Ciarra D'Onofrio, Devon Chen, Derek DiMartini, Hannah Westbrook
Music: “I Will Be Lifted"
Blackberry
Ciarra D'Onofrio
Music: "Equanimity"
2. Falling
Ciarra D'Onofrio, Devon Chen, Derek DiMartini, Kriss Rulifson, Hannah Westbrook
Music: “Let It Blow Through”
Hollow
Olallie Lackler
Music: "Love Come"
3. Fog
Ciarra D'Onofrio, Derek DiMartini, Hannah Westbrook
Music: “Beyond Weeping”
Music: "Come To The Quiet"
4. Floating
Ciarra D'Onofrio, Kriss Rulifson
Music: “Clear Bead”
Green Light, Lattice Body
Kriss Rulifson
Music: "Let It Blow Through"
5. Grasping
Devon Chen, Hannah Westbrook
Music: “How To Hold On”
6. Release
Ciarra D'Onofrio, Devon Chen, Derek DiMartini, Kriss Rulifson, Liv Schaffer, Hannah Westbrook
Music: “Walking Each Other Home”
Horse Powered
Liv Schaffer
Music: "Turning Into Gold"
7. Return
Ciarra D'Onofrio, Liv Schaffer
Music: “All Things Return”
Music: "My Grateful Heart"
Artistic Team
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