Dancecast

Exploring How Performance is ExperiencedIn this episode of DanceCast, Silva interviews Jess Curtis, an award-winning choreographer, performer, and scholar based in San Francisco and Berlin. Jess reflects on his entrance to dance through skiing and how he was immediately hooked to being onstage. He shares how his career took a turn when he accepted a job in an interdisciplinary nouveau cirque company in France, and how he later established himself in Berlin while still running his company Jess Curtis/Gravity in the Bay Area. A pivotal working relationship with Scottish disability dance artist Claire Cunningham turned Jess’ focus toward integrating access accommodations like sign language interpretation or audio descriptions into performance. This work also informed his PhD, which looked at phenomenologies of perception and how vision is over-utilized in performance.Text by Emmaly Wiederholt Jess Curtis is committed to an art-making practice informed by experimentation, innovation, critical discourse, and socia