THE DANCE THAT DOCUMENTS ITSELF to Premiere at CounterPulse, 12/4
By: Matt Smith Oct. 28, 2014
SAN FRANCISCO, CA - OCTOBER 28, 2014 --Taking on Selfie Culture, Jess Curtis/Gravity will once again challenge and expand conceptions of performance and social context with a new production that combines performing bodies, online social networking, and video projection in an examination of the effects of the intertwining of digital and embodied experience. A dance of process, community, memory, and resistance, The Dance That Documents Itself uses social networking and digital media to examine the effects of those very technologies (and the socio-economic conditions they spawn in communities) on dancing bodies, and to expose the threads of human interaction that come together to become a live dance performance. The Dance That Documents Itself features 4 dancers and incorporates live-feed and recorded video with live and recorded music to dynamically explore how technologies affect our lives, dancing bodies, the creative process, and the communities that we live in. Eight performances of The Dance That Documents Itself will be given Thursdays through Sundays, December 4-7 and 11-14, at 8:30 pm at CounterPulse, 1310 Mission Street, San Francisco, 94103. For tickets and information, visit www.counterpulse.org andwww.jesscurtisgravity.org and participate in/follow the development of the project on Facebook at www.facebook.com/TheDanceThatDocumentsItself.
In addition to the staged performances in December, Jess Curtis/Gravity will present the following free outdoor performance/projection/installation actions tracking the gentrification-fueled history and potentially bright future of one space's negotiation of our local digital boom:
? Thursday November 20th at the former site of 848 Community Space (848 Divisadero Street, San Francisco, CA 94117). This historic underground performance venue played an integral role in the development of San Francisco's vibrant underground performance scene and was the predecessor to CounterPulse.
? Monday November 24th at CounterPulse's soon-to-be new location (80 Turk Street, San Francisco, CA 94102). This venue, a former porn theater that became abandoned, will be renovated to become CounterPulse's new and improved home in the Central Market District of San Francisco.
Jess Curtis, Artistic Director and choreographer says, "Digital technologies are absolutely essential to the bi-continental nature of my life and work, extending my reach and visibility beyond anything I ever imagined. I find the ongoing documentation of my work and process through these technologies extremely valuable. At the same time their implementation and popular use is completely altering (and in some ways threatening) the very existence of the live embodied work that I do. My recent collaboration with Maria Scaroni Symmetry Study #14 has now been seen by over a million viewers on YouTube, but the studio where we created it, 848 Community Space - which was essential in my development as a performance maker - has been lost to our community, renovated and rented out to recently-arrived young digital professionals who have no idea of the history of the space (or the City) they live in."
At the center of The Dance That Documents Itself is the concept of "documentation." Technology is a vital tool for documentation: through posts, likes, comments, and shares, Facebook serves as a record of what people ate, what they felt, what made them mad. Dancers and other performance artists rely on video to document their work and on the Internet to reach a mass audience. But what does it mean that the artist's work is being seen by people sitting in front of their computers? Despite all of the benefits of technology, people are being consumed by it every day, and communities - like San Francisco - are being overrun by its enterprises. How many moments of 'real life' are we missing while we upload/update/tag and tweet the the last one?
Leading up to the work over the past several years, Curtis and company have been following the exploding world of selfie culture and have noticed and posted stories of self-documentation on their social media platforms. A selection of posts that have caught their attentions and epitomize their range and poignancy include:The moving recording by Scott Welch of his potentially last moments on a JetBlue flight:
The recent "tech bro soccer field incident":
And the much less serious advent of the 'Donut Selfie':
These examples and many others appear on the Facebook page for The Dance That Documents Itself and are fodder for the performance itself. Curtis is collaborating closely with video/media artist David Szlasa, who specializes in projects utilizing new media and projection technology in live performance. Szlasa has worked in the past with such innovators as Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Rennie Harris, Deb Margolin, Bill Shannon, Sara Shelton Mann, and numerous others, and his expertise, inventiveness, and practical experience in digital media and its applications - online, in live performance, and in site-specific installation - will be invaluable to the technical realization of this project. The creative team also includes Bay Area performers Rachael Dichter, and Abby Crain, Swedish performer Dag Andersson, Sound Artist Sheldon Smith of Smith/Wymore productions, Social Media Consultant Cara Rose DeFabio and Gravity Producer/Program Director Alec White. Using The Dance That Documents Itself's dedicated Facebook page (and also Gravity's website and blog), the team are amassing content and conversations concerning the embodiment of the digital. This living archive is currently public and available to audiences that might be interested in the work's evolution. As Curtis has been developing embodied work. Szlasa and the team are capturing, processing, archiving, and making publicly available, glimpses of the individual "dances" as they develop and start to make up the larger dance, weaving product and process into a cross-pollinating stream.
About Jess Curtis:
Jess Curtis is an award-winning choreographer and performance artist who is committed to an art-making practice that is informed by experimentation, innovation, critical discourse, and social relevance at the intersections of fine art and popular culture. Curtis co-founded the radical performance collective CORE, and created and performed multidisciplinary dance theater throughout the U.S., Europe, and the former Soviet Union with Contraband in the 80's and 90's. In 2000, after 15 years of making dance in the Bay Area as an independent choreographer, Curtis founded his own company, Jess Curtis/Gravity. Known for his interdisciplinary and cross-genre work, Curtis has collaborated with some of the most innovative artists working today, including Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Jules Beckman, Keith Hennessy, Angela Schubot, Ingo Reulecke, Jochen Roller, Sommer Ulrickson, Maria Francesca Scaroni, Jörg Müller, Claire Cunningham, and many others.
He has been commissioned or co-commissioned to create works for Artblau, the LOFT Theater, Schloss Bröllin, Berlin Senat, and Fabrik Potsdam (Germany); ContactArt (Italy); Theatre de Cachan and Chien Cru (France); Blue Eyed Soul Dance Company and DaDa Fest (England); Croi Glan Integrated Dance (Ireland); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the San Francisco Edge Festival, the Florida Dance Association/ Tigertail Productions, the National Performance Network, and ODC Theater (U.S.) A recent winner of the prestigious Alpert Award in the Arts for choreography, Curtis's other honors include six Isadora Duncan Dance awards, a Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and two SF Weekly Black Box Awards. Curtis is active as an advocate and community organizer in the field of dance and disability, and teaches Dance, Contact Improvisation, and Interdisciplinary Performance for individuals of all abilities throughout the US and Europe. He has been a visiting professor at UC Berkeley and the University of the Arts in Berlin, and holds an MFA in Choreography from UC Davis.
About David Szlasa:
Szlasa's work specializes in projects utilizing new media and projection technology for theater, dance, music, museums, industrial spaces, and site-specific outdoor installation. Projects span public art, social practice, and immersive concert design. He has particular expertise in the integration of touch sensitive and live video triggering for multi-screen arrays to provide a dynamic, responsive aesthetic in live performance settings. His work has been exhibited in theaters and galleries worldwide including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Walker Arts Center, Chicago MCA, the de Young Museum, The Humana Festival, Sydney Opera House, Oakland Art Gallery, Harare International Festival of the Arts Zimbabwe, TSeKh Moscow, PS 122, The Culture Project, and Brooklyn Academy of Music.
About Sheldon Smith:
Sheldon B. Smith has been making dances, music and video art for close to thirty years in both the Midwest and California. He is the co-artistic director (with Lisa Wymore) of Smith/Wymore Disappearing Acts, an award winning dance/theater/multimedia company based in Berkeley, CA. But he also likes to make work on his own and with collaborators such as Scott Wells, Kathleen Hermesdorf, Bob Eisen and others. He is currently a fulltime Assistant Professor in the Mills College Dance Department where he teaches various composition, music, technology and theory related courses. He has a BA in Dance from Colorado College and an MFA from the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. Originally trained in ballet and french horn his interests have since shifted. A lot.
About Rachael Dichter:
Rachael Dichter is a San Francisco-based dancer, performer and curator. She grew up on the ocean and in the mountains and forests of Northern California, training and performing as a ballerina and majoring in Dance and Art History at Mills College. She studied performance and classical techniques in New York and India before dancing with the Dylan Skybrook Dance Company in Minneapolis and Fougere Dance in Brussels Belgium. Since returning stateside she has been lucky to work with a number of fierce and talented folks including Laura Arrington, Mica Sigourney, Sara Kraft, Jesse Hewit, Keith Hennessy and Jess Curtis.
About Abby Crain:
Abby Crain is an Oakland based artist who constructs dances and other structures for performance. She creates visually minimalist, process based pieces which draw heavily from forms and organisms of the natural world. She additionally works in the field as a curator, teacher, writer, and these days, as a very occasional performer. Her writing and interviews have been published in numerous performance based publications, and her performance work has been presented at Show BOX LA, Pieter (LA), FRESH Festival (SF), Berkeley Art Museum, Z Space, and Movement Research (NYC). She performed as a member of Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People from 2001-2009, David Dorfman (2001-2004) and has worked extensively with Sara Shelton Mann. She serves on the curatorial committee of FRESH 2015 and collaborates under the moniker ART Workouts with Margit Galanter. She is currently working towards the premiere of a new evening length work Creature Human Creature Human Creature Human which will premiere in March of 2015. www.abbycrain.net.
About Dag Anderson:
Dag Andersson is a Sweden born and based actor, dancer and performance maker.
He´s been working with performance art since 1996 and has over the years started and been part of several independent companies as well as participated in others works. Since 2012 he is one out of two creators/performers of Shake it Collaborations. Tove Sahlin and Dag have toured their piece Roses & Beans in China, USA and through out Europe. More info: http://www.shakeitlab.com/about/--dag-andersson/
About Jess Curtis/Gravity:
Gravity was founded in 2000 by choreographer and performance artist Jess Curtis, whose distinctive body of work ranges from the underground extremes of Mission District warehouses with Contraband, to the formal refinement and exuberance of European state theaters and circus tents with Compagnie Cahin-Caha. Gravity functions as a research and development vehicle for very live performance; the company aspires to the creation of exceptionally engaging body-based art that physically explores and addresses issues and ideas of substance and relevance to a broad popular public. Under Curtis' ongoing artistic direction, Gravity has premiered nine full-evening works and numerous shorter pieces in collaboration with co-producers in the U.S. and Europe. In addition to our San Francisco home season, Gravity's work has been seen in over 50 cities in 13 countries. In 2011, Curtis was honored with the Alpert Award for Choreography and the Homer Avila Award for innovation in physically inclusive dance; Gravity has been honored with six Isadora Duncan Dance Awards and a 'Fringe First' at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Gravity tours widely, with our work being presented most recently in Eastern Europe, Scotland, Germany, and Latin America.
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