Please. Stay. Touch.
Jess Curtis Experiments with Gravity
Presented By Fort Mason Art
June 20 - August 15, 2026
Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture and GRAVITY present PLEASE. STAY. TOUCH. Jess Curtis Experiments with Gravity. More than a memorial, this is an invitation: to come closer, to feel more, to let the body lead. A living laboratory of sensation and movement, the exhibition unfolds through immersive, multi-sensory environments that echo Curtis’s 40-year practice of radical, accessible, and unapologetically physical dance. Stay. Touch. Be moved.
EVENT DETAILS
The exhibition traces Jess Curtis’s early days as a soloist to becoming a contemporary dance leader on the West Coast and internationally, all the while creating community and inspiring new generations of dancers. Curators Seth Eisen and LisaRuth Elliott explore how Curtis pursued key questions in his work: What happens when we pay attention? When we touch? When we are touched? When we see and allow ourselves to be witnessed? And further, the exhibition asks: How do we hold radical collisions, queer placemaking, and loud bold body culture in a gallery context?
Curtis spent his career investigating what it means to be present in a body. We honor Curtis’s experimental practice not by displaying it, but by doing it. Visitors are invited to be participants, observers to be dancers – his archive transforms into an activated experience. Audio description, use of Braille, tactile walking surfaces, and other interpretive haptic tools are integrated from the ground up. Fully Tactile Art SF is integrated in the production team. Accessibility here is not supplemental; it is the exhibition’s aesthetic philosophy made spatial, an expression of Curtis’s lifelong commitment to an accessible future for all.
All summer, please, stay, touch. Experience the worlds he created and experiment at the edge of a city loved by Jess. Every body is welcome and provoked into presence. All it needs is you.
ABOUT JESS CURTIS (1961-2024)
Jess Curtis work ranged from the underground extremes of San Francisco warehouse performances with such iconic companies as Contraband and CORE in the 1980s, to the exuberance of French circus tents with Compagnie Cahin-Caha and the formal refinement of European state theaters in Berlin, London, Glasgow, and other major cultural centers. He founded his own company, Jess Curtis/GRAVITY, in 2000 to further his commitment to an art-making practice that was informed by experimentation, innovation, critical discourse, and social relevance at the intersections of fine art and popular culture.
Curtis creative work was known for its originality and inclusiveness; in 2011, he was honored with the Alpert Award for Choreography and the Homer Avila Award for innovation in physically inclusive dance. Additionally, GRAVITY has been recognized with six Isadora Duncan Dance Awards and a Fringe First' at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Curtis' innovative, accessible, and experimental work consistently engaged with issues of embodied diversity, including gender, sexuality, and disability. He premiered 13 full-length productions and numerous shorter works with co-producers in the U.S. and Europe, performing in over 70 cities in 15 countries. These works include The Symmetry Project (2006-2014); Under the Radar (2007); Dances for Non/Fictional Bodies (2011); The Way You Look (at me) Tonight (2016); Sight Unseen (2017); (in)Visible (2019) and Into the Dark (2023).
He was deeply rooted in San Francisco's LGBTQ+ artistic community, dating back to his co-direction of 848 Community Space, collaborations and training with West Coast queer elders including, Remy Charlip, Keith Hennessy, Jack Davis, and others.
Curtis was active as a writer, advocate, and community organizer, and taught Accessible Dance, Contact Improvisation, and Interdisciplinary Performance courses throughout the US and Europe. He was a visiting professor at UC Berkeley and the University of the Arts in Berlin, and held an MFA in Choreography and a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from UC Davis.
In 2018, Curtis founded GRAVITY Access Services to provide audio description and access consultation to other artists and venues in the SF Bay Area and beyond, making live and video performances accessible to Blind and Low Vision audiences
“My work crosses boundaries between contemporary dance, critical theory, physical theatre, live art, performance theory, and circus. I am committed to experimentation, engagement, and producing usable knowledge through my artistic products and practices. I hope to inspire people to look differently at, and engage more consequently with the world. My process is based in prompting, filtering, and situating movements, physical states, and actions in and from my body and the bodies of my collaborators. We practice listening deeply to the myriad sensations filtered out of daily life-subtle, reflexive shifts maintaining balance, the movement of ribs as we breathe, our hearts' beating-and expand from these sensations, amplifying movement impulses, redirecting instinctual responses into territories at the extremes of our ranges of motion.
My experience of access accommodation practices and past collaborations in the UK and Ireland – especially working on “The Way You Look at Me Tonight (2016) made it clear to me that much more is possible and needs to be developed in the US. In response, / conceived two subsequent performances Sight Unseen (2017), and (in)Visible (2019) engaging Blind and low vision performers and collaborators to create performance works that were accessible and engaging to Blind and low vision audiences-in the process creating works that more fully address all the senses of all audience members. These collaborations have been far reher for their coauthoring by artists with diverse physicalities and artistic interests as each of us brings our own unique lived experience to bear on the material.
An important part of this project is the initiation of avenues for training a more diverse range of performers than currently exist in the contemporary dance/performance milieu in the US. Beyond the simple justness of increasing access, the lived experience of diverse individuals offers unique insights into the nature of living in the world.”