after the world, a gesture\ (work-in-progess showing)

jose e. abad | Activation Stage Programs | PLEASE. STAY. TOUCH. Jess Curtis Experiments with Gravity

The exhibition PLEASE. STAY. TOUCH. Jess Curtis Experiments with Gravity includes an Activation Stage led by artists-in-residence whom Curtis mentored. Each artist serves as curator-facilitator-performers for events, performances, and happenings that engage deeply with Curtis’s legacy and archive. Each artist presents a program that also extends Curtis’s commitment to inclusive, innovative performance practice and embodied presence.

An Improvisational Performance Experiment performed by jose e abad and accompanied by the sonic landscape of Nik Kniehase - after the world, a gesture\ is an improvised solo embodying the ruins left behind and the world we build around them. 

Inspired by the writing of philosopher Frederico Campagna, abad explores Campagna’s idea that "worlds" aren't natural or given, but are held together by cosmological stories that eventually lose their ring of truth and significance for the living, at which point the worlds they sustained disintegrate, leaving ruins behind, out of which new and unrelated worlds emerge.

In the wake of the loss of Jess, Shakiri, and others dear to abad, the artist here explores the ephemerality of dance and its connection to lineage; they construct a bounded world of time, space, and possible relation for the duration of the piece, a bounded world that then dissolves the moment the performance ends.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

jose esteban abad (they/them) is an Afro-Carribean Filipinx multidisciplinary choreographer, Vertical Dancer, DJ, and curator based in unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Territory (San Francisco). Their work explores the complexities of identity at the intersection of gender, sexuality, class, race, and geography. Rooted in collaboration and improvisation as tools of resistance and liberation, abad’s work centers QTBIPOC experimental collective process-based practices of becoming and re-membering to highlight the most intelligent technologies that exist in this world—our bodies, ancestral wisdom, and nature. 

They have performed and taught nationally and internationally in the Philippines, Palestine, Mexico, and Europe, individually, and in collaboration with Ishmael Houston Jones, Alleluia Panis, Joanna Haigood, Anne Bluethenthal, Keith Hennessy, Sara Shelton Mann, Skywatchers, Jess Curtis/Gravity, RUPTURE, Bandaloop, TRY, KulArts, and are the Co-Director of Community and Curation at Bridge Live Arts. 

Nik Kniehase was willed back into existence as a necessity. Inhabiting Earth, they search for the vital noble spirits hiding in plain sight. Together, they plot meditative and ecstatic coordinates, from which the incomprehensible may be allowed to emerge.