Dance
Jess Curtis/Gravity: A Profile

January 19, 2011 Interrogating the gravitational imperative. Finding and losing ground in a swinging duet. Falling in love. Unfinishing the body. Touching in public, in private, in a way that makes us human. Forging symmetry that un-genders and de-eroticizes even the naked body. Roller skating in a fat suit. Arcing prosthetics, bodies both organic and inorganic. The virtuosic, the banal. Just a sampling from Jess Curtis/Gravity’s oeuvre from the past several years — not only is this the stuff of dance and theater, but of bodily life. It gravitates to Miami next week, for several performances and workshops as well. Founded by performer and choreographer Jess Curtis in 2000, Jess Curtis/Gravity is a mixed-ability, interdisciplinary, cross-genre performance company committed to body-based art that explores issues of substance, while remaining relevant to a broad popular audience. With award-winning work that ranges from more traditional dance to dance-theater, cabaret-like performance, and movement experiments that resemble visual art installations, Curtis, who splits his time between San Francisco and Berlin, is not only committed to aesthetic innovation, but also to art education and an intervention in critical discourses on social life. Fallen, one of Curtis’ early evening-length works, which received the Fringe First Award (in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival) in 2002 and the Isadora Duncan Award for Best Ensemble Performance in 2003, employed dance, theater, and acrobatics to play with the body’s relationship with gravity and falling, both literally and figuratively. In 2005, Curtis choreographed Levels of Perception and Catch, two aerial pieces created with mixed-ability dancers for Blue Eyed Soul Dance Company in Shrewsbury, England. That same year, utilizing an eclectic performance vocabulary similar to Fallen, Curtis explored tactility, “one of the most basic of human experiences,” in his international production of Touched: Symptoms of Being Human. Joined by Italian dancer Maria Francesca Scaroni, one of Curtis’ chief collaborators since 2004, Jess Curtis/Gravity embarked on a series of movement experiments from 2007-2010 in The Symmetry Project. Presented as mixed media installations in a variety of settings, including gallery spaces and site-specific locations, The Symmetry Project is a highly structured duet with an improvisational score. Performed by the naked Curtis and Scaroni, this series examined notions of strength, vulnerability, balance, and the symbiotic relationship between bodies that, much like in everyday life, are in constant negotiation. Another notable mixed-ability work is Curtis’ 2007 Under the Radar, which received Isadora Duncan awards for Choreography, Music/Text, and Ensemble Performance in 2008. An exploration of virtuosity, Under the Radar featured an international cast portraying a motley crew of characters that co-mingle in a dingy cabaret called “Lost and Found.” A particularly breathtaking section of Under the Radar includes an intricately choreographed trio of dancers with crutches, whose prosthetics are utilized as inorganic bodily extensions that enhance each performer’s dancerly capacities. While this brief list only mentions a few of Jess Curtis/Gravity’s highlights from the past decade, one cannot help but be impressed by the range of performance techniques employed by a single company.
Jörg Müller and Jess Curtis; Photo credit: www.hagolani.com