PLEASE.STAY.TOUCH. Jess Curtis Experiments with Gravity

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 including the collectives Contraband and CORE before founding Jess Curtis/Gravity in 2000. For more than two decades, he worked with performers between his two homes of San Francisco and Berlin, earning recognition as a contemporary dance leader on the West Coast and internationally while building a community defined by mutual support, mentorship, and sustained collaboration.

Jess was part of a web of artists, activists, thinkers, circus makers, disabled performers, feminist pagans, modern primitive body modification, and scientists who made his work possible. His earliest dance mentors were Sara Shelton Mann, Lucas Hoving, Anna Halprin, Steve Paxton, David Zambrano, Carol Swan, the Roy Heart School, Fakir Musafar, Cleo Dubois, Aaron Osbourne, and Remy Charlip.

848 Divisadero Community Space, which he co-founded with Michael Whitson and Keith Hennessy, evolved into the now-thriving Counterpulse in San Francisco. Jess was a long-time collaborator with the Ponderosa Arts and Cultural Center created by Stephanie Maher out of an East German ruin outside Berlin, and other German dance projects K77 and Fabrik Potsdam. For several years he was part of the French circus Cahin-Caha directed by Gulko.

His passionate curiosities took him into body-based experimentation with Annie Sprinkle and the Body Electric School. He collaborated with Claire Cunningham, Della Davidson, Jörg Müller, Maria Francesca Scaroni, Anise Smith, Rinde Eckert, and Lauren Elder. He mentored closely those carrying GRAVITY into its next iteration: Rachael Dichter, Gabriele Christian, Rebecca Fitton, Aiano Nakagawa, Tiffany Taylor, jose e. abad, Abby Crain, and Maia Scott.

CURATORS

Seth Eisen is a San Francisco Bay Area artist, curator, archivist, writer, director, and educator who treats every archive as a living dialogue – one that belongs not in storage, but in community. His practice, spanning three decades, is rooted in bringing artists’ legacies to life: through digitization, oral history, immersive installation, and performance.

His path into this work began at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he catalogued artist and collector Jerome Goodman’s remarkable collection – discovering, alongside his fine arts training, a profound love for preserving precious objects and the stories they carry. That calling deepened in 2006 when his dear friend and mentor, dancer and illustrator Remy Charlip, suffered a stroke. What followed were years of devoted work: conducting oral histories with Charlip’s collaborators, building and stewarding his digital archive, and placing his collections at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and The Eric Carle Museum – and creating a performance work about his life.

Through Eye Zen Archival Services – his legacy stewardship practice for arts and culture – Eisen has curated Fierce as Death / Queering the Song of Songs at The Contemporary Jewish Museum, honoring musician Jewlia Eisenberg through her own archives; built a digital platform for calligrapher William Stewart; and is currently guiding the preservation of conceptual performer Paul Cotton/Adam II’s life’s work. For the past year, he has served as archivist for the complete Jess Curtis/Gravity Archive – work that gave rise to PLEASE. STAY. TOUCH.

As founder of Eye Zen Presents, Eisen has staged original theater productions and immersive installations for moe than 25 years, performing with Harupin-Ha, Ink Boat, and Keith Hennessy/Circo Zero. His solo performances and installation projects have been featured at the Oakland Museum of California, The Contemporary Jewish Museum, CounterPulse, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and art spaces on both coasts. In 2023 he was named a YBCA 100 Honoree for his work creating FabLab and its community practice of archival storytelling.

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 for the purpose of an online digital archive. 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 twice and overseeing the digitization of collections of local community newspapers in the Neighborhood Newspapers of San Francisco.

LisaRuth Elliott danced with two dance collectives in San Francisco, assisted Mona Caron in painting large-scale public murals, and has done disaster recovery work in three countries. She is also an urban farmer and paper and textile artist, weaving together traditions, materials, techniques, and stories of place within her work. Jess Curtis was a close personal friend, and it is extremely meaningful to honor and remember him through the creation of this exhibition.

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.