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WEEK ONE
MAY 18 - MAY 24
Community Conversation: LEGACY
For Anyone with a Body: The Lineage and Legacy of Jess Curtis
Tuesday, May 19
7-9pm
@ RED POPPY
Come join Keith Hennessy, Steph Maher, Maria Scaroni, Michael Whitson, Rachael Dichter and Gabriele Christian at Red Poppy Art House for an intimate conversation around the lineages and legacy of Jess Curtis’ work including 848 Community Space, the 90’s SF and Berlin underground art scenes, and the cross-pollination of dance, disability, accessibility, and creative risk.
Crip Ecstasy
ROT x CRIP x THE STUD
Thursday, May 21
9pm-12am
@ THE STUD
Are you ready to ROT???
We’ve been slowly decomposing on the forest floor… ready to emerge as brighter and more powerful DIVAS for thee second epic collaboration between ROT Festival and Crip Ecstasy at the STUD SF!
Performances by:
Mudd the Two Spirit // @muddthetwospirit
Maya Mer Morya Selkie // @mayamerbabe
PerryYay Seltxer // @perryyayseltxer
Angelica de Fuego // @angelicadefuego
Moonyeka // @m00nyeka
King LOTUS BOY // @kinglotusboy
Music by Crip Ecstasy resident DJ Fridge / @djfridge_
Hosted by Mx Octaviana Rosé / @octavio__rose
ACCESS INFO:
The Stud is fully wheelchair accessible, with accessible gender-neutral restrooms with grab bars.
Multiple seating options available, including wide-legged chairs.
ASL Interpretation for all drag performances.
Ambient chillout room.
Audio Description provided by @gravity_access_services , with pre-show haptic touch tour at 8:00pm. Please register for tour through the ticket link or by emailing crip.ecstasy@gmail.com
Bar with non-alcoholic options. Narcan on site.
This is a disability-centered space; all are welcome.
Please come with the intention to create a supportive environment for one another and our access needs. At times these needs may conflict; please approach these moments with care and compassion. Access coordinators on site to assist.
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COVID SAFETY:
KN95 or similar masks (without valves) will be required by attendees and STUD staff for this indoor event. Drag artists may perform unmasked, but will test prior to the event for covid on the day of. Please note that this performance is at a historic queer bar which depends on income from drink sales. For this reason, drinks will be available for purchase. When taking a sip of your drink, please put your mask back on. We understand if this event isn’t accessible for everyone, and we apologize –– we are working within the constraints of the space and our budget, and want to be transparent so that guests can make an informed decision on whether or not to attend.
Air filtration provided by @clean_air_network
Support for Crip Ecstasy is provided by Southern Exposure’s Alternative Exposure Grant Program.
Any questions? Please DM or email us at crip.ecstasy@gmail.com / freshinfo753@gmail.com
keyon gaskin
uncty: a mid life ex(pectancy/istential) performance
an experimental sound and movement in-process solo.
keyon gaskin is…Saturday, May 23
8-9:30 pm
@ THE LAB
WEEK TWO
MAY 25 - MAY 31
DUETROSPECTIVE
duetrospective
Thursday-Saturday, May 28-30
7:30-10pm
@ JOE GOODE ANNEX
Not a Prayer
Miguel Gutierrez, Dylan Skybrook, Vong Phrommala, Mark Growden
Not a Prayer was created for the Men Dancing Festival in 1995 here at Theater Artaud. It was choreographed by Jess, and is performed now by the original cast of three men (previously four as Jess performed as well). The movement is an example of the San Francisco 90’s style of release, emphasizing a surrender to gravity, with dancers moving fluidly in and out of the floor in simple movement phrases that are repeated and reconfigured in solos, duets, trios, and quartets.
It examines male partnering in ways that are both virtuosic and tender, challenging traditional representations of masculinity.
The dance also incorporates a live performance of Mark Growden’s music and soundscape, which not only supports the dancers but acts as an additional “character” in the evolving relationship among the five performers.
See What You Say
Sherwood Chen
Say What You See: Drawing elements from Jess Curtis's ensemble works Touched : Symptom of Being Human (2005) and Fallen (2001) this stitch incoming solo exploits the subjectivity of words and of interpretation, building from colliding, iterative loops.
After Symmetry
Maria Scaroni, Stephanie Maher
“The Symmetry Project is a journey through perception.
Two naked bodies interact through a structured improvisational score, that of moving symmetrically, relative to themselves or to each other.
Limbs entangle and intertwine creating an inter-corporeal kaleidoscope of flesh.
A kind of über-intimacy develops, going far beyond sexuality into a kind of communal biology, a symbiotic sensory field.”
The Symmetry Project was first developed in its variations between 2007 and 2011 by Jess Curtis and Maria F. Scaroni and it lives on as an embodied contemplative practice.
After Symmetry is a reprise of the original work in collision with an older work from 1995 called Sex and Gravity, where Stephanie Maher and Jess Curtis collaborated to render in the form of songs and dances their intimate life transformed by the radical collective sexual (and political) exploration of those years around 848 Community Space. Sex and Gravity’ soundtrack has been reworked via a VHS recording by sound designer Anton Tkachuk. The whispers and echoes of the recording are the tapestry upon which the symmetry score unfolds.
As the two (ex) partners in crime collide artworks, they conjure a ritual of gratitude for having influenced each other’s lives and art practices for over 20 years.
A legacy, a friendship, several ghosts.
After Symmetry might be a ritual of belonging or it might be the queer spectacle of two aging women divining their bulges or someone else’s expired wet dream. Maybe it’s about the peculiar beauty of what time regurgitates back when art works are left to its currents.
Another strange flower at the altar.
The Point Between Flying and Falling
Claire Cunningham
An audio work that steps and speaks softly on/of past dances from the show The Way You Look (at me) Tonight (2018), drawn from voice recordings from the piece, rehearsal notes/writings and the sound world created by composer Matthias Herrmann. The work is also shaped by an attendance to audio description practices used by Claire and Jess that were a key element of the show and both artists practice.
When I think of you you’re naked
Rachael Dichter
This will be a solo now, based on the duet Jess and I made in 2013 that he had asked me to perform again with him recently - When I think of you you’re naked, where we stood next to each other facing the audience (me dressed up and wearing heels, him naked) and improvised a conversation always starting each new sentence with - “I want you to…”
Now in revisiting it on the two year marker of his passing, it’s become more about that. About passing, about transition, about the deep unknowability of death, and what comes after.
WEEK THREE
JUNE 1 - JUNE 3
Gravity x ROT x Circo Zero presents
prefigure
Circo Zero offers a three day anti-capitalist studio experiment building on the practices of our 2025 project figure it out. The premise is simple: rent a studio and make it available to artists for free. It's community residency, invitation to just be together irl, live art research, and creative resistance against the atrocity economies (which includes arts nonprofits). There will be dance labs, political discussions, performance experiments, and whatever else you might make happen.
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Do you want to teach or lab something? Try something? Perform? Host a talk? Instigate a wild experiment? Email Alley and Keith at info@circozero.org with a couple sentences and some date/time options in the window of Mon-Wed June 1-3 from 10am-10pm. The space is free and you keep 100% of coins from sliding scale tickets or donations.
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“What anarchists did demand from art, by and large, was what they demanded from all the forms and moments of their political lives: i.e., that it should, as much as possible, embody the idea in the act, the principle in the practice, the end in the means. If anarchism is ‘prefigurative politics,' striving to make the desired future visible in and through one's actions in the present, then anarchist resistance culture had to somehow prefigure a world of freedom and equality.” - Jesse Cohn Underground Passages: Anarchist Resistance Culture, 1848–2011