Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture (FMCAC or Fort Mason) presents the late-summer world premiere of DIASPORADICA, a three-hour immersive performance by experimental collective RUPTURE, running from August 22 to 30, 2025 at the Pier 3 Festival Pavilion. This theatrical experience transforms Fort Mason’s waterfront venue into a multisensory space where audiences become part of an “interactive odyssey of mutiny and belonging.” The production features five San Francisco Bay Area- and New York-based artists who have created what they describe as a world of “shipwrecks, sirens, techno, and Spades.”

Performance Details:

• Friday, August 22, 2025
• Saturday, August 23, 2025
• Friday, August 29, 2025 
• Saturday, August 30, 2025

Performances begin at 7:00 p.m. Tickets are available at EventBrite.com.

Festival Pavilion, Pier 3

A Three-Act Journey Through Contemporary Black Experience

DIASPORADICA unfolds as a journey through three distinct acts, each offering a different mode of engagement. The experience begins with “Kickback” – an invitation to leisure and gameplay that establishes intimacy between performers and audiences. The energy then shifts dramatically during “Performance,” featuring collective choreography and improvisation drawn from diasporic storytelling traditions. The evening culminates in “Function,” where the performance space transforms into a club environment, positioning dance as what the collective calls “a communal, spiritual technology.”

The work combines contemporary dance, immersive installation, ritual practices, and community engagement to explore themes of Black kinship, belonging, and artistic embodiment in ways that challenge traditional boundaries.

“DIASPORADICA represents everything we believe about the power of collective creation,” says Clarissa Rivera Dyas, RUPTURE founding member. “We’re not just presenting a performance – we’re creating a space where the audience becomes part of the ritual, where the boundaries between performer and community dissolve. This work asks: ‘What happens when we center Black joy, Black imagination, and Black futurity in ways that invite everyone into that vision?’”

Extended Programming 

Complementing the main performances, Fort Mason hosts related programming from Sunday, August 24 through Thursday, August 28, 2025, featuring conversations between RUPTURE’s creators and artists, including Beatrice Thomas, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Joanna Haigood, Maurya Kerr, and Taisha Paggett.

Transforming Immersive Theater On The Bay

DIASPORADICA offers audiences an opportunity to experience performance that is simultaneously “ethereal and explosive.” By transforming the Pier 3 Festival Pavilion into a world of their own making, RUPTURE continues the Bay Area’s tradition of experimental art while centering voices and experiences often marginalized in traditional theater spaces.

The production promises to challenge audiences’ expectations about the role of spectator versus participant, creating what the artists describe as “layered encounters only possible when artists assemble, converse, build something together.”

As Gabriele Christian, RUPTURE founding member notes, “Our times require us to go dark. Dive deep. DIASPORADICA is fundamentally tasking us all with recouping gathering as a technology for fomenting resistance.”

“Fort Mason Center has always been committed to supporting artists who push boundaries and reimagine what performance can be,” says Frank Smigiel, Chief Curator & Director of Arts Programming at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture. “RUPTURE’s vision for DIASPORADICA perfectly embodies our mission to present work that reflects the innovation and diversity of Bay Area artists. This isn’t just a show you watch – it’s a communal experience that transforms our space and everyone in it.”

Meet The Artists Behind RUPTURE

Founded by five Bay Area and New York artists, RUPTURE brings together expertise in dance, visual arts, sound design, and community engagement:

josé e. abad (they/them) is an Afro-Caribbean Filipinx interdisciplinary performance artist nesting in unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Territory (San Francisco). Their work is rooted in the embodied and sonic poetics of relations, collaboration, and improvisation, as tools of resistance and liberation across geopolitical borders. abad’s work centers QT/BIPOC experimental collective process-based practices of re-membering and be-coming to highlight the most intelligent technologies that exist in this world – our bodies, ancestral wisdom, and the environment. Their practice is shaped by mentorship and communing with artists including Alleluia Panis, Ishmael Houston Jones, Anne Bluethenthal, Joanna Haigood, Keith Hennessy, Beatrice Thomas, Jess Curtis, Sherwood Chen, Sara Shelton Mann, Meg Stuart, Florentina Holzinger, Brontez Purnell, and others. They are currently the Co-Director of Bridge Live Arts, a core company member of Bandaloop, AD of fugitivity labs, and have engaged in creative and pedagogical exchanges nationally and internationally in the Philippines, Palestine, Chilé, Mexico, and Europe.

Styles Alexander (they/them) is an Afro-Indigenous transdisciplinary artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Styles graduated from the Boston Conservatory At Berklee, where they received a BFA in Contemporary Performance and Choreography. While attending the Boston Conservatory, Styles performed and collaborated in creative processes with choreographers such as Andrea Miller, Robert Moses, Dwight Rhoden, Doug Varone and others. Styles has collaborated with artists including Maurya Kerr, Robin Aren, Joy Davis, and many others. Styles’s choreographic work is a practice of reimagining and communicating with history through speculative future-crafting, hauntological investigation, ancestral mediumship, and their own punk epistemology. Styles’s work has been featured in Urbanity NeXt, DougVarone’s DEVICES program, Jess Curtis’ Gravity PPP, ROT Festival, and the SENSEOBJECT residency. In 2023 Styles was a DanceWeb Impulstanz Scholarship recipient, under the mentorship of Clara Furey and Lara Kramer. Styles is currently a recipient of the Zellerbach Family Foundation award and Kenneth Rainin Foundation’s NEW award for the creation of their new work TarNation – premiering Summer 2026.

Gabriele Christian (b. 1991) is a San Francisco-based movement artist, director, curator, dramaturg, and descendent of stolen folk. Experimenting within somatic practices, language, performance composition, video production and community arts facilitation, they locate and center BlaQ (Black and Queer) experience, vernacular, and aesthetics as wellsprings for radical futurity. They perform original work and collaborate trans- and inter-nationally, most recently in Berlin, New York City, Vienna, and Amsterdam. They are a founding member of multiple Bay Area born performance collectives and land projects including: RUPTURE; OYSTERKNIFE; LXS DXS; and BlaQyard. As co-director of OYSTERKNIFE, they were granted a competitive Creative Work Fund grant and a special citation Izzie Award for mouf//full, presented at Grace Cathedral in 2024. They currently serve as Executive Director and Co-Artistic Director of Jess Curtis/Gravity, a body-based arts and accessibility non-profit living on in the wake of Jess Curtis’ transition in March 2024. At the heart of all their work: exhaustive research into belonging, spirit, and desirability while living in the fangs of dehumanizing times.

Clarissa Rivera Dyas (they/she/he) is a Black, Filipinx, Bay Area, Ohlone land, -based dancer, choreographer, and arts producer. Her artistic practice flows from the truthfulness of improvisation, is rooted in her communities, and centered around movement as a spiritual practice and a conduit of change. Clarissa graduated from San Francisco State University in 2017 with a BA in Dance and a BS in Health Education. They have been a company member of Zaccho Dance Theatre, Robert Moses’ Kin, and Flyaway Productions and have performed with Lenora Lee Dance, Megan Lowe Dances, OYSTERKNIFE, Sarah Crowell, Keith Hennessy, and many others. She is currently in collaboration with Sara Shelton Mann (2020) and Embodiment Project (2023). They have performed throughout the U.S. such as in New York, Jacob’s Pillow, Seattle, and internationally in Berlin. They have presented work in CounterPulse’s SEED Residency, REYES Dance, Dance Thrill Fest (2021), Dresher Ensemble Artist Residency (2022), Queering Dance Festival’s FROLIC! (2023), KH FRESH Festival (2024), Dance Up Close East Bay (2025), and in the Black Choreographers’ Festival in 2020 and 2025. They were awarded Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” in 2024. Clarissa is a member of Queering Dance Festival’s Steering Committee and is a Co-Director of the ROT (KH FRESH) Festival.

Stephanie Hewett (she/they) is a queer multidisciplinary artist working within the mediums of movement and sound. She is a graduate of Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and the Performing Arts in New York City and has studied at the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London. She holds an MFA in Dance from Mills College and has held artist residencies at CounterPulse in San Francisco and the Paul Dresher Ensemble in West Oakland. She experiments with different sonic frequencies to uncover ancestral vestiges in the body while exploring polyrhythmic potentialities for intergenerational healing. Hewett also DJs and produces electronic music under the moniker, Madre Guía.

About Fort Mason Center For Arts & Culture (FMCAC)

A decommissioned military installation converted into a nonprofit cultural center, FMCAC hosts a lively mix of arts, educational, and cultural programming. Each year, FMCAC provides more than $2 million to support local arts organizations, enabling groups to produce diverse and innovative artworks at the historic waterfront campus. With a four-decade history as an arts and culture destination, FMCAC is now focused on reinvigorating its programming and amenities to better engage the evolving Bay Area creative community. Central to this new vision is the commissioning and presentation of adventurous and unconventional artworks best realized in nontraditional or historical settings.