ARTIST
Jess Curtis (1962–2024) pioneered experimental, body-based performance centering disabled, blind and low vision, queer, and marginalized artists. He emerged from San Francisco’s radical 1980s–90s dance scene (Contraband, 848 Community Space, CORE), founded Jess Curtis/Gravity (now GRAVITY) in 2000, and over the last quarter century worked with performers between his two homes of San Francisco and Berlin.

Jess Curtis is absent. His body, his voice, his daily presence in the studio – gone. Yet he is radically present – in the dancers he trained, the access practices he pioneered, the artistic lineages he nurtured, and in the very concepts he championed throughout his work.

CURATORS
Seth Eisen is a San Francisco-based artist, writer, director, curator, archivist, and educator who engages LGBTQIA+ history as a living, breathing dialogue by researching lost legacies. His transdisciplinary aesthetic combines physical theater, dance, puppetry, drag, circus, installation, and video art. For 25 years Eisen has staged performance pieces, original plays, street spectacles, and installations, and has curated and appeared in numerous collaborative projects with San Francisco Bay Area artists. He performed with Butoh companies Harupin-Ha and Ink Boat from 1994–99 and from 2000–10 with Keith Hennessy and Circo Zero, touring the U.S. and Europe. His solo performances and installation projects have been featured at Oakland Museum of California, The Contemporary Jewish Museum, CounterPulse, and art spaces on both coasts for more than 30 years. In 2007, Eisen founded Eye Zen Presents, an ensemble-based theater company that unearths and elevates the lost and hidden histories of queer ancestors, providing space for QTBIPOC and 2SLGBTQIA+ communities to gather and be in creative relationship with each other.

Actively preserving community memory, LisaRuth Elliott co-directs Shaping San Francisco and the participatory history archive, FoundSF.org. She was engaged by Joanna Haigood as the Legacy Archivist to catalogue Zaccho Dance Theatre’s 40-year history. She led a community engagement process with the California Historical Society regarding the vision and planning for use of the Old U.S. Mint. She convenes projects under the San Francisco Department of Memory, such as producing the weekend-long San Francisco History Days at the Old U.S. Mint in 2016 and 2017, and Neighborhood Newspapers of San Francisco in which she oversees the digitization and collection of local community newspapers. She danced with two dance collectives in San Francisco, painted large scale public murals, and has done disaster recovery work in three countries. Prompted by the stories and landscape of San Francisco, of Yelamu and its creatures, she is also an urban farmer and paper and textile artist, weaving together traditions, materials, techniques, stories of place within her work.

GRAVITY creates liberatory performance works and expands radical, intersectional access and services within the Bay Area performing arts ecosystem and beyond. Initiated in 2000 by the late Jess Curtis, the organization now practices shared leadership with a queer, intergenerational, mixed-race creative team. Uplifting arts workers and audiences at the margins, GRAVITY centers experimental artists, QTBIPOC, disabled, and blind/low vision communities to further the Bay Area’s legacy of radical collisions, queer placemaking, and inclusive loud, bold, body culture.

Gabriele Christian, Co-Artistic Director, GRAVITY
Gabriele Christian (b. 1991) is an Oakland, CA-based conceptual artist and descendant of stolen folk experimenting within somatic practices, language, performance composition, video production, and community arts facilitation – centering BlaQ (Black and Queer) experience, vernaculars, and aesthetics as wellsprings for radical futurity. They are a founding member of Bay Area performance collectives RUPTURE, OYSTERKNIFE, and BlaQyard. Born in Harlem, they have worked for 10 years as a professional performance artist and director in San Francisco, New York City, Berlin, Amsterdam, and beyond, with residencies at CounterPulse, UC Santa Cruz, Watermill Center, and This Will Take Time. They began working with Jess Curtis/Gravity in 2017 as frequent collaborator, curator, audio describer, and director.

Rachael Dichter, Co-Artistic Director, GRAVITY
Rachael Dichter is a San Francisco-based dancer, performer, choreographer, and curator. 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, performing as a ballerina and attending Mills College. She studied performance and classical techniques in New York and Bangalore India and danced with Fougere Dance in Brussels Belgium. She was a Danceweb Scholar, a resident artist at the Marin Headlands, Caldera OR, the Robert Rauschenberg Residency, and her work has shown locally and internationally. She had been lucky to collaborate with a number of fierce and talented folks, and for four years she co-curated the San Francisco based live arts festival THIS IS WHAT I WANT. Since 2010 she has performed and collaborated with GRAVITY in San Francisco in roles including consulting, rehearsal directing, audio describing, and she currently serves as GRAVITY’S co-artistic director.