The Dance That Documents Itself

This World Premiere by Jess Curtis/Gravity is a dance of process, community, memory, and resistance. The Dance That Documents Itself is an exploration of the intertwining effects of tech on dance, from our ability to share our work with colleagues around the world to the closure of local performance spaces due to the influx of tech into SF. The Dance That Documents Itself features Jess Curtis, Rachael Dichter, Abby Crain, and Dag Andersson and incorporates a dynamic synthesis of live and pre-recorded sound and video to examine how technologies affect our lives, dancing bodies, creative processes, and the communities in which we live.

Jess Curtis, Artistic Director and choreographer says, “Digital technologies are absolutely essential to the bi-continental nature of my life and work, extending my reach and visibility beyond anything I ever imagined. I find the ongoing documentation of my work and process through these technologies extremely valuable. At the same time their implementation and popular use is completely altering (and in some ways threatening) the very existence of the live embodied work that I do. My recent collaboration with Maria Scaroni Symmetry Study #14 has now been seen by over a million viewers on YouTube, but the studio where we created it, 848 Community Space – which was essential in my development as a performance maker – has been lost to our community, renovated and rented out to recently-arrived young digital professionals who have no idea of the history of the space (or the City) they live in.”