RUPTURE: DIASPORADICA

Join RUPTURE for the premiere of DIASPORADICA, a sprawling and immersive theatrical takeover of Fort Mason’s Pier 3 Festival Pavilion. An experimental performance collective founded by Bay Area/NYC artists José E. Abad, Stephanie Hewett, Clarissa “Lars” Rivera-Dyas, Gabriele Christian, and Styles Alexander, RUPTURE brings together the multidisciplinary visions of these powerhouses within San Francisco’s arts and culture scene. Via DIASPORADICA, audiences join an interactive odyssey of mutiny and belonging. RUPTURE creates a world of shipwrecks, sirens, techno, and Spades, engulfing us in layered encounters only possible when artists assemble, converse, build something together.

Structured in three acts, Diasporadica charts a journey through Fort Mason’s Festival Pavilion that is both ethereal and explosive. The work blends contemporary dance, immersive installation, ritual, and community engagement to blur the lines between Black kinship, spectatorship, and artistic embodiment. The experience begins with a Kickback — an invitation to leisure and gameplay — before shifting the energetics of the space in Performance, a collective choreography and improvisation drawn from diasporic storytelling. The work culminates in a Function, transforming the stage into a club space we can join and so experience dance as a communal, spiritual technology.

ARTIST BIOS

jose esteban abad (they/them) jose esteban abad 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 held residencies and produced work with CounterPulse, the Joe Goode Annex, Paul Dresher Studio, Highways Performance Space, and Hope Mohr Dance; They have also performed and taught nationally and internationally in the Philippines, Palestine, Mexico, and Europe.

Styles Alexander (they/them) Movement artist/choreographer/writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Styles graduated from the Boston Conservatory, where they received a B.F.A in contemporary performance and choreography. While attending the Boston Conservatory, Styles performed and collaborated in creative processes with choreographers such as Andrea Miller, Robert Moses, Dwight Rhoden, Doug Varone and others. Styles has also had the honor of performing repertory by Idan Sharabi, Robin Aren, Joy Davis, Chuck Wilt, Nicole Von Arx. Styles is a co-founder of RUPTURE, a performance collective based in San Francisco and New York City. Styles's choreographic work is a practice of reimagining and communicating with history residing in the body through; fantasy, afro-futurism, and fugitivity. Styles's work has been featured in Urbanity NeXt, DougVarone's DEVICES program, Jess Curtis' Gravity Pop Up Performance project, and the SENSEOBJECT, residency at Berkeley Finnish Hall. Styles is a 2023 DanceWeb Impulstanz Scholarship recipient, under the mentorship of Clara Furey and Lara Kramer.

Gabriele Christian (they/them) Gabriele Christian is an Oakland-based conceptual artist and descendent of stolen folk experimenting within somatic practices, language, performance composition, video production and community arts facilitation to locate and center BlaQ (Black and Queer) experience, vernaculars and aesthetics as wellsprings for radical futurity. They are a founding member of BlaQ-led performance and land projects: RUPTURE; OYSTERKNIFE; and BlaQyard. They’ve presented and collaborated internationally (Berlin, Germany; Karachi, Pakistan; Johannesburg, South Africa; Vienna, Austria et al.) in multimedia productions and processes with artists, choreographers, and companies including jose e. abad/fugitivity labs, LXS DXS, Sherwood Chen, Lenora Lee Dance, SAMMAY, Skywatchers (ABD Productions), Kim Ip, Cornelius Sigourney/OX Productions, Robert Woodruff, Joe Goode Performance Group, Jess Curtis/Gravity, WePlayers, Larkin Street Youth Services, Destiny Arts Center, et hella al. Along with this global experience, they’ve empowered the work and stories of Blind and Visually Impaired (BVI) folk, black and brown youth, Tenderloin residents, and LGBTQ+ elders. At the heart of all of their work, they strive to excavate oral tradition and movement as conduits for urgent and equitable conversations around belonging, spirit, desirability, abundance, and care.

Clarissa Rivera Dyas (they/she/he)Clarissa Rivera Dyas is a Black, Filipinx, Bay Area, Ohlone land, based dancer, choreographer, and arts producer. Her artistic practice flows from the truthfulness of improvisation, is rooted in her communities, and centered around movement as a spiritual practice and a conduit of change. Clarissa graduated from SFSU in 2017 with a B.A in Dance and a B.S. in Health Education. They have been a company member of Zaccho Dance Theatre, Robert Moses’ Kin, and Flyaway Productions and have performed with Lenora Lee Dance, Megan Lowe Dances, OYSTERKNIFE, Sarah Crowell, Keith Hennessy and many others. She is currently in collaboration with Sara Shelton Mann (2020) and Embodiment Project (2023). They have performed throughout the U.S. such as in New York, Jacob’s Pillow, Seattle, WA and internationally in Berlin, GER. They have presented work in CounterPulse’s SEED Residency, REYES Dance, Dance Thrill Fest (2021), Dresher Ensemble Artist Residency (2022), Queering Dance Festival’s FROLIC! (2023), KH FRESH Festival (2024), Dance Up Close East Bay (2025), and in the Black Choreographers’ Festival in 2020 and 2025. They were awarded Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” in 2024. Clarissa is a member of Queering Dance Festival’s Steering Committee and is a Co-Director of ROT (KH FRESH) Festival.

Stephanie Hewett (she/they) Stephanie Hewett is a queer multidisciplinary artist working within the mediums of movement and sound. She is a graduate of Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and the Performing Arts in New York City and has studied at the Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London. She holds an MFA in Dance from Mills College and has held artist residencies at Counterpulse in San Francisco and the Paul Dresher Ensemble in West Oakland. She experiments with different sonic frequencies to uncover ancestral vestiges in the body while exploring polyrhythmic potentialities of intergenerational healing. Hewett also DJ's and produces electronic music under the moniker, Madre Guía.

Host or Publisher Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture