PLEASE. STAY. TOUCH. Jess Curtis Experiments With GRAVITY – Closing Weekend Performances

TICKETS ICE. CAR. RAGE. CLOSING WEEKEND PERFORMANCES FOR PLEASE. STAY. TOUCH. JESS CURTIS EXPERIMENTS WITH GRAVITY –PRESENTED BY FORT MASON ART & GRAVITY Celebrate the closing weekend of the exhibition PLEASE. STAY. TOUCH. Jess Curtis Experiments with GRAVITY with this reimagining of Ice Car Cage (1997), a ground-breaking performance work by Jess Curtis, Keith Hennessey, and Jules Beckman. This new piece concludes GRAVITY’s OUT/OF • THE\FOG season foregrounding company founder Curtis’ life and legacy. EVENT DETAILS August 14 to 16, 2026 [See “Plan Your Visit” below for dates, times, details, and tickets.] Instigated by artist and GRAVITY co-Artistic Director Gabriele Christian, ICE. CAR. RAGE. reimagines the actions of the 1997 Ice Car Cage – a now-legendary work made for the post-industrial city and so performed in abandoned parking lots. Artists jose e. abad, Styles Alexander, and Clarissa Rivera Dyas reinhabit roles created by Jess Curtis, Keith Hennessy, and Jules Beckman and use key elements from the original work: an autonomous car; an ice block; a gilded cage. Ice Car Cage saw Curtis, Hennessy, and Beckman alternately caging and releasing one another; treating the car as a partner for contact improvisation; and piling body to body onto a melting ice block. The scholar Thomas F. DeFrantz, writing for the Please. Stay. Touch. exhibition, reads the ice as the chill of HIV in the 1990s and the car as a platform for queer physical risk. Returning as ICE. CAR. RAGE. in 2026, abad, Alexander, and Rivera Dyas create new relationships within the piece. Old elements shift through contemporary fears. Perhaps the cage and the ice block summon ICE the agency; spotlight deportation and state violence against Black and Brown people; or voice the rage that the title finally says out loud. Like the Please. Stay. Touch. exhibition, dance movements pose questions across generations – and our bodies in the present raise new avenues to any answers.   ABOUT THE ARTISTS jose esteban abad (they/them) is an Afro-Carribean Filipinx multidisciplinary choreographer, Vertical Dancer, DJ, and curator based in unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Territory (San Francisco). Their work explores the complexities of identity at the intersection of gender, sexuality, class, race, and geography. Rooted in collaboration and improvisation as tools of resistance and liberation, abad’s work centers QTBIPOC experimental collective process-based practices of becoming and re-membering to highlight the most intelligent technologies that exist in this world – our bodies, ancestral wisdom, and nature.  Styles Alexander (they/them), a Boston Conservatory graduate and movement artist, creates choreographic work that reimagines and communicates with history through fantasy, afro-futurism, and fugitivity. Alexander’s work has been featured in Urbanity NeXt, DougVarone’s DEVICES program, Jess Curtis’ Gravity PPP, and ROT Festival. They have performed and taught nationally and internationally in the Philippines, Palestine, Mexico, and Europe; individually, and in collaboration with Ishmael Houston Jones, Alleluia Panis, Joanna Haigood, Anne Bluethenthal, Keith Hennessy, Sara Shelton Mann, Skywatchers, Jess Curtis/GRAVITY, RUPTURE, Bandaloop, TRY, and KulArts. They are the Co-Director of Community and Curation at the Bridge Live Arts SENSE-OBJECT 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. Clarissa Rivera Dyas (they/she/he) is a Black, Filipinx, San Francisco Bay Area-, and 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 Rivera Dyas (co…