Rehearsing Others

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.

This afternoon movement workshop explores some of the tools and scores abad used to develop after the world, a gesture\, their July 29 work-in-progress performance that activated concepts around social improvisation, revolutionary imagination, and the idea that other worlds are made through practices, myths, and collective embodied acts.  

This afternoon movement workshop explores some of the tools and scores abad used to develop their WIP showing using practices activating concepts of social improvisation, revolutionary imagination, and the idea that other worlds are made through practices, myths, and collective embodied acts.  

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.