Rachael Dichter, Mary Hones & Beth MacLoed
Rachael Dichter is a dancer, performer, choreographer and curator. She works often with others and sometimes alone. She makes work about closeness. About the shortest distance and shortening the distance between things - between people. She grew up on the ocean and in the mountains and forests of Northern California, training and performing as a ballerina and majoring in Dance and Art History at Mills College. She studied performance and classical techniques in New York and Bangalore, India before dancing with the Dylan Skybrook Dance Company in Minneapolis and Fougere Dance in Brussels Belgium. She now lives and works between the San Francisco Bay Area and Berlin, and continues to be lucky to collaborate and create with a number of fierce and talented folks.
Mary Hones grew up in Ypsilanti Michigan right outside Detroit in the 1950’s. The fifth of what turned out to be eleven in an Irish Catholic family, she grew up in what she said was a boring town that she couldn’t wait to get out of. Just like the rest of her siblings, she got a suitcase from her parents for high school graduation. She moved away from home at 18 and she never went back. Her father was an accountant in the auto industry, her mother worked in the home. She lived in many places London, New York, Boston, Bangor Maine, Portland, Minneapolis, Ashland, Twin Falls Idaho working as a bus driver, a carpenter, a gardener, a secretary, and for many years a librarian. She moved to San Francisco in 1972 and currently lives with her partner Annie of twenty-five years and their dog Harry, and together they split their time between the Arts District in San Francisco and Ashland Oregon.
Beth MacLoed grew up in the 1950s, surrounded by the cornfields of Ohio. Several times a year, she went to New York City to visit a favorite Aunt. As a teen, she traveled to Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands with an international youth organization. She was the youngest of three children, and her older siblings had left home by the time she was eight. Her father, a mechanical engineer, worked for large factories; her mother was a stay-at-home Mom. Beth moved to Maine after college and worked as a journalist at a newspaper in Ellsworth, then at a college in Bar Harbor. In 1978, she moved to California, as did so many young people who chose to head out west. Settling in San Francisco, she was a freelance writer/editor for 10 years, spent a year working at the Home-Hospice providing care for People with AIDS, then went to UC Berkeley to earn a Master’s in Social Work. She spent the next 25 years specializing in providing mental health services to older adults, and educating young social workers. Now partially retired, she lives in Noe Valley with her Maine Coon Cat, Flora, and hopes to never leave San Francisco.