❊ Fundraiser ❊ — Circo Zero

Dearest friends, supporters, and fam of Circo Zero, Keith Hennessy, and our many collaborating artists,

❊ the short version ❊

We’ve been so grateful and proud of Circo Zero’s vibrant programming serving countless artists and audiences in the Bay Area and beyond… but for the first time in our 25+ years as an arts organization we have a deficit budget, a shortfall of $57K! In the longer version below, we go into detail on our successes, systemic fundraising upheavals, and our visions for the future. If you’re pressed for time, here’s the basic request: we invite you to support our lefty experimental queer dance and performance non-profit with a donation of any size.

$25 is a delight
$100 is a solid lift
$1,000 is taking flight
$10,000 is a dream
Every gift is gorgeous ♥

❊ ways you can contribute ❊

• Credit card, click here
• PayPal or Apple Pay, click here
• Venmo, click here
• Check payable to Circo Zero and mail to: 2842 Folsom Street, San Francisco, CA 94110
• If you work for an employer who offers matching grants, this is an amazing way to multiply your giving. We have a profile with Benevity here. Please contact us if you have any questions

❊ the long version ❊

Creating performances in San Francisco since 1984 and producing as Circo Zero since 2001, we create dances and artist solidarity programs responding to political crises. We nurture a laboratory of artistic and social experimentation, where the tools of dance, improvisation, somatics, collaboration, critical theories, and public gathering are activated towards more liberated and loving realities.

We are facing the most severe structural economic changes we have ever experienced. With targeted attacks on non-profits, arts organizations, and people engaged in justice work, we, and the ecosystems in which we circulate, are in the crosshairs three times over.

Many of our dance non-profit colleagues are writing similar letters to describe an industry-wide crisis. Choreographer Deborah Slater wrote, “Foundation grants to the performing arts declined by 37% in 2024, falling far below pre-pandemic levels, and government funding dropped by 26% (source: SMU DataArts). CA state funding has dropped 70% since 2023, our city funding covers only ~ 12% of our expenses, and federal arts funding is in disarray.”

Rising living expenses and job losses caused by the Trump regime are having an intensified impact on the communities we serve, the majority of whom are low-income renters in the Bay Area already facing ever-increasing wealth inequity and precarity. The call for our artist solidarity services, classes, and live performance programming has only increased.

The last time that Circo Zero asked individual donors for support was in 2017 to bring a solo work by Sara Shelton Mann to American Realness festival in NYC. All of Keith’s recent fundraising has focused on community solidarity projects including

• Two different campaigns to buy or secure permanent housing for legendary Bay Area female choreographers (2022, 2025)
• Producing a dance improvisation festival in Lviv Ukraine and supporting ongoing dancing during wartime in Lviv and Kharkiv (2025)
• Raising funds and securing loans to purchase a $10 million, 40-unit building in the Tenderloin for the SF Community Land Trust, securing permanently affordable housing for Filipinx seniors and Mayan/Mexican immigrants (2021)
• Using personal resources to support fundraisers for Bay Area dance spaces and companies, water protection in the Yucatan, Palestinian solidarity, and friends’ medical expenses or displacement costs

Support for Circo Zero also supports the individual activist and solidarity work of CZ’s core employees Keith and Alley. As low-income artist-activists who are deeply embedded in the communities we serve, we are supporting our friends through dire circumstances: receiving late night calls to coordinate legal support for evictions, mediating complex community conflicts, finding artists affordable therapists amidst mental health crises, regularly providing emergency temporary housing in Keith’s guest room, and doing unpaid frontline protest and service work for so many facets of the current crises. We provide vital support to our communities through incredibly dire circumstances, from mutual aid to Board work, while navigating our own financial struggles and depression/grief/despair.

Amidst these many boiling points, we are sustaining our core programming, expanding the impact of our artistic projects to serve more QT/BIPOC artists, and developing new models of operating that are true innovations in the field including our new collective insurance program, community residencies offering free studio/theater space, building new coalitions for community organizing, and producing live performances beyond the constraints of consumerized imaginations.

❊ what we have been up to ❊

Circo Zero maintains a very dynamic and prolific production schedule with our mighty staff of two part-time employees and multiple collaborative teams. Some recent projects and accomplishments include:

• Closer: a duet with legendary improviser Ishmael Houston-Jones and Hennessy, with sound by jose abad. Premiered in SF at CounterPulse, tours include Seattle 2026, NYC 2025, Vienna 2024
• prefigure: a June 2026 mini festival supporting 30+ artists to offer 18 distinct events (dance classes, performances, research) as part of ROT Festival at The Annex, SF
• Tell: a 2023 choreographic exploration of racial healing directed by Sarah Crowell & Hennessy at Dance Mission, SF, and archived in a full-color book published in 2026
• figure it out: a 6-week artist residency and performance festival providing over 70 artists with free rehearsal space and production support, and hosting 10 premier performances, at SPACE 124 in Project Artaud, Oct/Nov 2025
• Weird Inkling: a new collaborative improvised performance guided by Hennessy, part of figure it out
• Keith’s teaching: experimental dance on land and in water in San Pancho, Mazunte, and Bacalar MX, Boulder, Seattle, Oakland, Dublin, Ibiza, Ljubljana, Zagreb, Nuremberg, and 2024-25 tours to Lviv Ukraine to support dancers struggling to continue dancing during the ongoing Russian invasion.
• Additional 2024-25 political performances by Keith & collaborators: OCT/opus, with God’s Entertainment, Vienna; Political Witchcraft for the New Era with NDA Collective, Ljubljana; Untitled (under tyranny most words are illegal), with Ida Hiršenfelder, Ljubljana and Zagreb; Hold On, SF
• The Space Between Us: a short dance film featuring Crowell and Hennessy, which was featured at over 15 festivals worldwide, and in only 5 minutes demonstrates the life-long dancing commitments to racial and gender justice of both artists. Watch the film here

❊ artist solidarity services ❊

Over time, Alley and I recognized that we were donating a lot of personal and Circo Zero resources and creativity to supporting emerging artists to access funding, training, and career building opportunities. In 2021, we integrated this work into our programs and named it Artist Solidarity Services, which includes:

* free support with grant writing, production planning, and marketing

* fiscal sponsorship with 5% fees (50%-60% lower than industry norms)

* free artistic mentorship & professional consulting

* free lending library of lights, sound, and set/prop materials

* organizing advocacy against inequities in the field

* a collectivized insurance program for aerial and public-site performance

In addition to the numerous artists we support each year, our Artist Solidarity Services provide deeper support to a cohort of 8 entirely queer, trans, and/or BIPOC artists and projects including Snowflake Calvert ❊ B Dean/BODYSTORM ❊ Styles Alexander ❊ Annie Danger ❊ Clarissa Rivera Dyas ❊ ROT Festival (FKA FRESH Festival) ❊ Rad Mission Neighbors

❊ visions for 2027 ❊

Our major project for 2027 will be a new iteration of prefigure, a 6-week community artist residency and dance/performance festival building on the wondrous success of 2025’s figure it out. prefigure will support 60+ artists with free studio space and production support. As funding allows, prefigure will include commissioning of four new works, including:

• How Not To Be Afraid (Apr 2027): by Haitian-American composer Joel St. Julian with dancers gizeh muñiz, Saharla Vetsch, Keith Hennessy within an immersive visual environment
• Wayward (May 2027): an experimental and improvised dance by Keith Hennessy with a cast of 8 dancers/musicians/aerialists
• And two more premieres: which will be curated and commissioned by community process in late 2026
• Untitled: new solo by Hennessy (July 2027)

Additionally in 2027 and beyond we will continue our Artist Solidarity Services, our many community and activist commitments, and stay active with the grant writing and opportunity seeking needed to nurture dancers and performance makers dedicated to imagination-expanding, justice-serving, artistic and social experimentation.

Thanks so much for reading this report and request

$25 is a delight.
$100 is a solid lift.
$1000 is taking flight.
Every gift is gorgeous.

Give what you can.
Give what you want.
Together we continue…

Thank you so much,

Keith Hennessy + Alley Wilde

+ the 120 artists we’ve collaborated with and served in the past 2 years

❊ ways you can contribute ❊

Photo Credits:

• Photo 1: Pictured Ishmael Houston-Jones and Keith Hennessy; Photo by Robbie Sweeny from Closer at CounterPulse

• Photo 2: Pictured Ishmael Houston-Jones and Keith Hennessy; Photo by Karolina Miernik from Closer at mumok