WELCOME to the Jess Curtis/Gravity Archive

&

please. stay. touch.
exhibition companion site

Please. Stay. Touch.

Experiments in Gravity

June 20 - August 15, 2026
Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture’s Store House

Explore Jess Curtis’s forty-year career of pioneering radical, accessible dance performance.

Come into a participatory, embodied, and multi-sensory experience.

Every body is welcome and provoked into presence.

This memorial exhibition and living laboratory activates the gallery: All it needs is you.

Learn more

Performances

Explore

About GRAVITY

Visit our new website

GRAVITY creates liberatory performance works and expands radical, intersectional access and services within the Bay Area performing arts ecosystem and beyond. 

GRAVITY uplifts arts workers and audiences at the margins. We center experimental artists, QTBIPOC, disabled, and blind/low vision communities to further the Bay Area’s legacy of radical collisions, queer placemaking, and inclusive loud, bold, body culture.

Initiated in 2000 by the late Jess Curtis, the organization now practices shared leadership with a queer, intergenerational, mixed-race creative team.

Support Gravity

  • "Walking into a dance rehearsal, one doesn’t expect to see a philosophy professor rolling on the floor doing contact improvisation. But when the choreographer is Jess Curtis, it’s best to expect the unexpected."

    — Claudia Bauer, The San Francisco Chronicle

  • "We are not just here to be entertained, there is an exchange.."

    — Catharine Caraker, A Beast in the Jungle

  • "enormous physical and metaphysical risk expressed through some of the simplest means with the lightest touch."

    — Sima Belmar, SF Bay Guardian

  • "… the kind of intelligent, evocative dance-theatre … that delights you at the time of watching, then lingers on to make you think afresh … "

    — Mary Brennan, Glasgow Herald

  • "Eine wahre Poesie eröffnete sich dem Betrachter. Wie einen Spieluhr zurückgedreht wurde er in eine andere Welt geführt, der man sich kaum entziehen konnte"

    — Die Welt

  • "Mit minimalen Details aus Schauspiel, Zirkus und Tanz schafften Curtis und seine Darsteller ein wundersam ästhetisches Tableau aus Widerstand und Hingabe, Liebe und Tod. Definitiv eine Bereicherung für Berlin."

    — Berliner Morgenpost

  • “Many have wondered, since the days of the revolutionary postmodern Judson Church movement in 1970’s New York, if there is any truly new ground to be broken in the realm of dance and performance. If there is, San Francisco's Jess Curtis/Gravity may be holding the pickax.”

    — Bonner Oddell, SF Weekly