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 re-imagining 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. TOP OF PAGE: “Numbing Agent” from Ice Car Cage (1997) Photo: Greg Bridges EVENT DETAILS August 14 to 16, 2026, 8:00 p.m. [See “Plan Your Visit” below for dates, times, details, tickets, and ASL and audio intepretation services.] Instigated by artist and GRAVITY Co-Artistic Director Gabriele Christian, ICE. CAR. RAGE. re-imagines 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 re-envision roles created by Jess Curtis, Keith Hennessy, and Jules Beckman and re-envision key elements from the original work: an autonomous car; an ice block; a dog 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. 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 bodies in the present raise new avenues to any answers. ABOUT GRAVITY GRAVITY creates liberatory performance works and expands radical, intersection-al access and services within the San Francisco Bay Area performing arts ecosystem and beyond. GRAVITY uplifts arts workers and audiences at the margins. GRAVITY center experimental artists, QTBIPOC, disabled and blind/low vision communities to further the San Francisco Bay Area’s legacy of radical collisions, queer place-making, and inclusive loud, bold, body culture. Initiated in 2000 by the late Jess Curtis, the organization now practices shared leadership with a queer, intergeneration-al, mixed-race creative team. GRAVITY-SF.org  ABOUT THE ARTISTS Gabriele Christian (ICE. CAR. RAGE. Director) is an Oakland, CA-based conceptual artist and descendant of stolen folk experimenting within somatic practices, language, performance composition, video production, curation, and community arts facilitation – centering BlaQ (Black and Queer) experience, vernaculars, and aesthetics as wellsprings for radical futurity. They are a founding member of San Francisco Bay Area performance collectives RUPTURE, OYSTERKNIFE, and BlaQyard. Born in Harlem, NYC, they have worked for 13 years as a professional performance artist and director in San Francisco, New York City, Berlin, Amsterdam, Vienna, and beyond. Prominent residencies, performances, and roles include at: BAMPFA Black Life Guest Curator (2025-2026), Zaccho Studio Black Futures Fellow and AIR (2025-2026), Fort Mason Center For Arts & Culture (2025), Frascati (2025), Grace Cathedral (2024), Watermill Center (2024), ATLAS at ImpulsTanz (2023), Surge: Explorations In Afro-Futurism at the University Of California, Santa Cruz (2022), CounterPulse (2019), and This Will Take Time (2017). They currently serve as GRAVITY’s Co-Artistic Director. They began working with GRAVITY in 2017 as a frequent collaborator, curator, audio describer, and now as Co-Artistic Director. jose esteban abad (they/them) is an Afro-Carribean Filipinx multidisciplinary choreographer,vertical dancer, DJ, and curator based in uncede…