Please. Stay. Touch
memorial exhibition of Jess Curtis - a living laboratory activates the gallery: All it needs is you.
Please. Stay. Touch.
Explore Jess Curtis’s forty-year career of pioneering radical, accessible dance performance. Come into a participatory, embodied, and multi-sensory experience. Every body is welcome and provoked into presence. This memorial exhibition and living laboratory activates the gallery: All it needs is you.
FORT MASON CENTER OF ARTS AND CULTURE
STORE HOUSE, BUILDING D
JUNE 20 - AUGUST 16, 2026
ACTIVATIONS
all activations take place in the Store House Building D at Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture unless listed otherwise.
WEDNESDAY July 1, 7 PM
Bodies of Work: A Conversation with Xandra Ibarra, Annie Sprinkle, and Beth Stephens
Xandra Ibarra, Annie Sprinkle, and Beth Stephens will have a conversation on their own practices as well as the rich history of experiments in sexuality, performance, and art in the Bay Area. This event is curated by Maria Silk, who will also moderate the conversation. This conversation is presented within the frame of the exhibition PLEASE. STAY. TOUCH. Jess Curtis Experiments with GRAVITY at Fort Mason.
Seth Eisen and LisaRuth Elliott will host a curators' walk-through of the exhibition in the Store House gallery (on the ground floor of Building D at Fort Mason, right next to the Firehouse) at 6 pm, just before the conversation.
This is a free event (RSVP encouraged).
6 PM Gallery walk-through
7 PM Talk in The Fire House
SATURDAY July 11, 3 PM
Screwball (work-in-progress showing) featuring Maria Silk
Maria Silk will perform a work-in-progress version of her new solo Screwball. Inspired by the 1973 text The Screwball Asses by Christian Maurel (originally published anonymously as Les culs énergumènes), the piece explores the relationship of sexuality and desire to systems of domination.
This event is presented within the frame of the exhibition PLEASE. STAY. TOUCH. Jess Curtis Experiments with GRAVITY at Fort Mason. This is a free event (RSVP encouraged).
Capacity of 40 people
This is a free event (RSVP encouraged).
SATURDAY July 18, 4 PM
Pitched Rendering
Live sonic/vocal transcription and singing of the Please. Stay. Touch. Exhibition with Tiffany Taylor and Abby Crain
FRIDAY July 24, 7 PM
sublunary, sublunary, sublime, sublime
From Abby Crain: “The body is thinking this through – both muddy and astral. Durational performance collaboration.”
Featuring Abby Crain and Styles Alexander
→ Audio Description by Rachael Dichter
SATURDAY July 25, 4:30 PM
gravity is a field; i move beside you
moving / the archive / being moved / the group / sifting / panning for gold / transmutation / incipience
Hosted by Abby Crain, other performers TBA
Come together to explore themes of loss and healing
score for eight performers // this unfolds over time // particulate matter // this is not a reduction // we are on the edge of the ocean // the day becomes night // the night opens up
WEDNESDAY July 29, 5 PM
after the world, a gesture\
Work in Progress showing featuring jose e. abad and Nik Kniehase
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, they explore the ephemorality of dance, connection to lineage, construct a bounded world of time, space, and possible relation for the duration of the piece, which then dissolves the moment the performance ends.
FRIDAY July 31, 4-6 PM
Rehearsing Others
Hosted by jose e. Abad;
26 person capacity, registration link coming soon
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.
July 12 - August 9, time TBA
Sunday Screenings
Enjoy videos of full length works by Jess Curtis and collaborators
+ Levels of Perception and The Way You Look (at me) Tonight
+ Cahin-Caha and Fallen (if we have the full show for both)
+ Under the Radar
+ Constricting Binds-Constructing Bonds
+ Sight Unseen and (in)Visible and Into the Dark
+ The Dance That Documents Itself
+ Sex and Gravity
+ Ice. Car. Cage.
SUNDAY July 19, 1-5 PM
The Book of Apparitions: navigating absence through objects with Lorena Marín and Erasmo Pantoja
Free public workshop hosted by Abby Crain
Mourn the loss of loved ones by making a special book to honor them
“The language of the dead”, writes Haytham El-Wardany, “is that of the tiniest imperishable life forms, persistently sending signals, even from beneath the earth”. Writing can be an extension of the body, and also a form of reading, finding ways to connect with what is missing, to invoke apparitions. What objects around us can help us read the signals from these "imperishable life forms"? How can we connect with what is no longer present? We invite participants to bring an object through which they feel the presence or signals of someone or something missing from this world. In bringing our attention to these objects we will create writings and drawings that explore our relationship with absence. These objects will find their way into a collaborative constellation in the form of a book, using photocopy, collage and artisanal bookmaking techniques.