How do Western ways of thinking shape our social and individual perception of darkness and light?

Into The Dark, is a new ensemble work instigated by Jess Curtis in collaboration with a diverse ensemble of Blind, Low Vision and Sighted performers, addressing the physical, subconscious, and literal effects of western culture’s binary mythologizing of darkness and light.

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Jessi Barber (she/her) is a queer production manager, technical director, lighting designer and stage manager with over a decade of professional production experience in the Bay Area/Ohlone Land. She is a current member of the non-hierarchical Steering Committee that produces the Queering Dance Festival (QDF), created the performance rental program at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center (Berkeley) and managed the Joe Goode Annex as Producing Lead for Joe Goode Performance Group (SF). Credits include: lighting design for QDF’s FROLIC (annually), Clarissa Dyas/Jacob Pek (2022), the CounterPulse Edge Residency (2019); production manager for the KH FRESH Festival; technical director for Jess Curtis/Gravity; stage manager for Fresh Meat Festival, Fog Beast, Randee Paufve and many others. Jessi also serves as Interim Board Chair of Bridge Live Arts. She is a graduate of Oberlin College and is originally from Maine/Wabanaki Confederacy Land.

Gretchen Blegen is an interdisciplinary artist navigating ways of seeing and hearing space, light, sound and image. These boundaries are explored through an ongoing book practice as well as in the real and broader realm of (project–)spaces and theater. parallel to her own work and of equal importance is her involvement in collective structures supporting artistic thought and alternative forms of learning. In the last three years, these practices have found themselves intermingling. Working with visuals, installation, light and sound, her work is putting an emphasis on the creation and intention behind transforming,occupying, hosting and sharing a space with all collaborators and with an audience.

Gabriele Christian (they/them) is an american artist specializing in experimental choreography, high dramatics, social practice, and poetics. For more than ten years, their work has metabolized the vernaculars within BlaQ (Black+Queer) diaspora—futurity, afrovivalism, faggotry—through body-based live stage or public performances and digital interventions on their IG: @gabriele.mov. They are a founding member of BlaQ-led collectives: RUPTURE; OYSTERKNIFE; and blaQyard. At the heart of all of their work, they strive to excavate oral traditions and movement as conduits for equitable conversations around belonging, spirit, desirability, abundance, and care.

Jess Curtis work has 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 Jess Curtis/Gravity in 2000 to further his commitment 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. He writes and teaches about dance, performance and access internationally.

Rachael Dichter is a San Francisco-based dancer, performer, choreographer and curator. She works often with others and sometimes alone. She makes work about closeness. About the shortest distance and shortening the distance between things - between people. Having studied dance and art history at Mills College she was a Danceweb Scholar, a resident artist at the Marin Headlands, Caldera OR, the Robert Rauschenberg Residency, and her work has shown locally and internationally. She had been lucky to collaborate with a number of fierce and talented folks, and has performed with Gravity since 2014. For four years she co-curated the San Francisco based live arts festival THIS IS WHAT I WANT.

Clarissa Dyas (she/they) is a movement artist with roots in the Bay Area, Ohlone Land. She graduated from SFSU in 2017 with a B.A. in Dance and a B.S in Health Education. They have had the honor to perform in works by Robert Moses’ Kin, ka·nei·see | collective, Lenora Lee Dance, OYSTERKNIFE, and many others. Clarissa is most recently in collaboration with Flyaway Productions, Zaccho Dance Theatre and Sara Shelton Mann. They premiered a self-produced work, Something Remains, with Jakob Pek October 2022.

Samuel Hertz (he/him/his) is an interdisciplinary sound-artist/researcher working with sound-sensing networks of environmental and climate science research. His artistic research has been exhibited and performed in locations such as the Ars Electronica Festival, Palais de Tokyo, Akademie der Künste, Struer Biennial for Sound and Listening, Pioneer Works, Fylkingen, Videonale.19, IMAX theaters, as well as deep ocean light installations, lunar radio transmissions, and aboard the International Space Station among others. He is currently a PhD researcher in Geography at Royal Holloway University of London, focusing on the use of sound for uncovering obscured layers of environmental violences—particularly those enacted through extractive and industrial practices. www.samhertzsound.com

Magda Garlinska

Michiel Keuper is an interdisciplinary artist with a background in fashion design. He values collaboration, sharing, interaction. He believes in the magic of improvisation when the sum becomes greater than its parts. The moment when 1 + 1 becomes 3. A visual composer of sorts, he designs costumes and set design for contemporary dance, often in combination with photography and art direction. In these fields he has worked with Jess Curtis/ Gravity, Claire Cunningham, Sheena McGrandles, Anna Konjetsky, Meg Stuart, Martin Nachbar and Joanna Lesnierowska, among others. He shares a longtime collaboration with Peter Pleyer in which he improvises with materials on stage, interacting with the performers, developing what he calls transitional sculptures. In 2020 they founded the dance company Cranky Bodies a/company in Berlin.

Juliane Längin graduated as a Fashion Designer from Lette Verein Berlin and is continuing her studies at the Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee. For the past few years, she has been contributing to various theatre, dance and fashion projects as a costume and a stage designer. She seeks to translate abstract concepts and human feelings into material-based images and shapes that can resonate with the audience. Throughout her career, she has worked with Carola Volles, Michel Keuper, Renate Schmitzer, Marten Straßenberg, Kerem Hillel, Matthias Straub, Belize and Michalsky among others.

Aiano Nakagawa (they/she) is an artist, educator, and event producer based in the Bay Area. They create dance-based works; produce events and performances; and facilitate classes and workshops. Currently Aiano serves as the Director of Operations & Communications at Gravity, as well as the Production Manager for Into the Dark. Aiano facilitates for CompassPoint and teaches at Flowhouse and Shawl-Anderson.

Gerald Pirner is a blind art critic, essayist, artist and photographer who studied theater studies and philosophy. In the eighties he wrote for various newspapers on the topics of factory work and social fights. In 1989 he went blind from retinitis pigmentosa.  In 1992 he made an apprenticeship as a media documentarian and worked as a lecturer. Since 2006 he has been writing for kultura-extra. Later, in 2014, he founded  "Gerald Pirner - Texte zu Kunst" (Gerald Pirner - essays on art), a web page where he publishes essays on fine arts, theater, music and film from the perspective of a blind person. In 2015 he started to work with photography and since 2017 he works mainly in the technique of light painting. He works with Gravity Access Services in Berlin as a co-author and teacher of Audio Description.

Ka Rustler creates, performs, and shares her research and teachings in an international circuit. Working with pioneers in the field of improvisation and dance at the SNDO she has been a collective member of Tanzfabrik Berlin and co-author of multi-layered productions. Her work for film and stage has been featured at dance and theatre festivals in Europe, Mexico, Russia, Japan and USA. She is a Body-Mind Centering® Practitioner and Teacher and Somatic Movement Educator advocating explorative methods of movement bridging physical and psychcological development. Ka has been one of the first german choreographers investigating how somatic practices inform performance making, creativity and movement research. Since the 80’s she profoundly influenced movement and dance education at the interface of performance-science-somatic. She is a networker and co-organizer of European Contact Improvisation Teacher Exchanges, Conferences, Festivals and Symposiums such as E³ Entfaltung Entwicklung Embodiment. Her work experience includes somatic psychotherapy, international top management trainings and its effect on group frameworks and organizations, in their ecological and social contexts theoretically situated within feminist understandings of embodied subjectivity. Currently she teaches methods and tools derived from BMC® and other somatic systems researching their application in movement and its neurobiological connection at Universities and Institutions internationally.   Since 2009 she has been curating and teaching the first german based program in Hamburg Institut für Bewegungs- und Lernentwicklung  She is co-founder of the program C.A.R.E. in Berlin, working with children and their special needs facilitating teachers, educators and parents. Ka is member of the Authentic Movement Practice Unwinding the Body and Embodiment Research Group Emergence of Form and Cranky Bodies a/ company. She is leading Board Member of the BMCAssociation, member of the glia Bundesverband and Verein Lernen. Bewegt. Entwickeln e.V. She is married and mother of two children.

Tiffany Taylor is a disabled queer dancer whose practice is informed by her blindness. She uses performance and advocacy work to educate others on the social model of disability and challenge perceptions surrounding ableist practices in performance spaces. Her training includes a Bachelor’s Degree in Theatre from Adrian College, the Access Acting Academy training for blind and low vision actors and the Axis Dance Company Choreography and Performance lab. She has been seen as a performer and collaborator in the pieces (In)Visible and Sight Unseen with Gravity. Tiffany serves on the board of directors for Gravity and works as a Visual Access Consultant for Gravity Access Services.    She can frequently be seen conducting consultations on audio description, and trainings, for venues on how to make their spaces more accessible to persons who are blind, or low vision.

Paul Trzeciok

Events, workshops, & performances

Thu-Sun October 26-29, 2023 (Thur - Sat 20:30, Sun 18:00)
WORLD Premiere @ TANzFABRIK, BERLIN

► TICKETS €10-€25

▼ ACCESS ▼

• Haptic Access Tour always one hour before the show: 26.-28.10. 19:30 / 29.10. 17h. Duration: approx. 20-30 minutes. Language: German. Haptic Access Tour + Audio Description by Jess Curtis / Gravity Access Service (Speaker: Swantje Henke / Language: German). Registration at anmeldung@tanzfabrik-berlin.de or +49 (0)30 / 200 592 70.
• TanzFabrik is a wheelchair accessible venue and there is a wheelchair accessible bathroom with grab bars.

Sat November 4, 2023, 11 AM - 2 PM
light painting workshop @ counterpulse, sf

► This workshop is taught by Gerald Pirner and hosted by Jess Curtis/Gravity and San Francisco’s LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired. To register, please email Maia Scott: MScott@lighthouse-sf.org

October 2023 - January 2024
Visions of Blindness: Out of the Dark @ CounterPulse, SF

► A photo exhibition of ‘light painting’ Photographs by Gerald Pirner, book a tour zoe@couterpulse.org

THU-SUN NOVEMBER 9-12 & 16-19, 2023 (Thur - Sat 8PM, Sun 2PM)
US PREMIERE @ COUNTERPULSE, SAN FRANCISCO

► tickets $0 - $50

▼ ACCESS ▼

• Live Audio Description will be provided every night of the performances. A pre-show haptic access tour will take place before each performance one hour before the show starts. Please register for your headset and/or for the tour: michael@jesscurtisgravity.org
• CounterPulse is a wheelchair accessible venue and there is a wheelchair accessible bathroom.