ICE. CAR. RAGE. @ Fort Mason Center
Celebrate the closing weekend of the exhibition PLEASE. STAY. TOUCH. Jess Curtis Experiments with GRAVITY with this re-imagining of Ice Car Cage (1997), a ground-breaking performance work by Jess Curtis, Keith Hennessey, and Jules Beckman. This new piece concludes GRAVITY’s OUT/OF|THE\FOG season foregrounding company founder Curtis’ life and legacy.
EVENT DETAILS
August 14 to 16, 2026, 8:00 p.m.
Instigated by artist and GRAVITY Co-Artistic Director Gabriele Christian, ICE. CAR. RAGE. re-imagines the actions of the 1997 Ice Car Cage – a now-legendary work made for the post-industrial city and so performed in abandoned parking lots. Artists jose e. abad, Styles Alexander, and Clarissa Rivera Dyas re-envision roles created by Jess Curtis, Keith Hennessy, and Jules Beckman and re-envision key elements from the original work: an autonomous car; an ice block; a dog cage.
Ice Car Cage saw Curtis, Hennessy, and Beckman alternately caging and releasing one another; treating the car as a partner for contact improvisation; and piling body to body onto a melting ice block.
Returning as ICE. CAR. RAGE. in 2026, abad, Alexander, and Rivera Dyas create new relationships within the piece. Old elements shift through contemporary fears.
Perhaps the cage and the ice block summon ICE the agency; spotlight deportation and state violence against Black and Brown people; or voice the rage that the title finally says out loud.
Like the PLEASE. STAY. TOUCH. exhibition, dance movements pose questions across generations – and bodies in the present raise new avenues to any answers.
ABOUT GRAVITY
GRAVITY creates liberatory performance works and expands radical, intersection-al access and services within the San Francisco Bay Area performing arts ecosystem and beyond. GRAVITY uplifts arts workers and audiences at the margins. GRAVITY center experimental artists, QTBIPOC, disabled and blind/low vision communities to further the San Francisco Bay Area’s legacy of radical collisions, queer place-making, and inclusive loud, bold, body culture. Initiated in 2000 by the late Jess Curtis, the organization now practices shared leadership with a queer, intergeneration-al, mixed-race creative team. GRAVITY-SF.org
About the Artists
Gabriele Christian (ICE. CAR. RAGE. Director) is an Oakland, CA-based conceptual artist and descendant of stolen folk experimenting within somatic practices, language, performance composition, video production, curation, and community arts facilitation – centering BlaQ (Black and Queer) experience, vernaculars, and aesthetics as wellsprings for radical futurity. They are a founding member of San Francisco Bay Area performance collectives RUPTURE, OYSTERKNIFE, and BlaQyard. Born in Harlem, NYC, they have worked for 13 years as a professional performance artist and director in San Francisco, New York City, Berlin, Amsterdam, Vienna, and beyond. Prominent residencies, performances, and roles include at: BAMPFA Black Life Guest Curator (2025-2026), Zaccho Studio Black Futures Fellow and AIR (2025-2026), Fort Mason Center For Arts & Culture (2025), Frascati (2025), Grace Cathedral (2024), Watermill Center (2024), ATLAS at ImpulsTanz (2023), Surge: Explorations In Afro-Futurism at the University Of California, Santa Cruz (2022), CounterPulse (2019), and This Will Take Time (2017). They currently serve as GRAVITY’s Co-Artistic Director. They began working with GRAVITY in 2017 as a frequent collaborator, curator, audio describer, and now as Co-Artistic Director.
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 – bodies, ancestral wisdom, and nature. They are the Co-Director of Community and Curation at Bridge Live Arts.
Styles Alexander is a trans-disciplinary performance artist working across playwriting, choreography, film, performance, and stage design. They studied choreography and contemporary performance at Boston Conservatory and have collaborated with artists including Maurya Kerr, Andrea Miller, Gerald Casel, and RUPTURE.
Styles Alexander (continued).
Alexander’s original works include dance theater shows REPOSSESSION and 50leven, as well as TarNation, a new work currently in development with support from the Zellerbach Family Foundation and the Kenneth Rainin Foundation. Rooted in mythology, American folklore, ritual, and the surreal, Styles’s work creates expansive theatrical worlds where humor and spectacle illuminate deeply human questions. Through a choreographic approach to storytelling, they explore identity, inheritance, spirituality, and the ways ordinary people become mythic.
Clarissa Rivera Dyas is a Black, Filipinx movement artist, choreographer, and arts producer rooted in the San Francisco Bay Area on Ohlone land. Her practice treats the artistic landscape as a site for optimistic, futurist world-building, upholding non-hierarchical, anti-capitalist models centering rest, collective care, play, and de-colonial art making. They are a Co-Director of ROT Festival, serve on the Queering Dance Festival Steering Committee, and perform with Flyaway Productions, Embodiment Project, Zaccho Dance Theater, Sara Shelton Mann, GRAVITY, and Keith Hennessy. Clarissa is a co-conspirator with black, queer artists in RUPTURE (2021) who premiered DIASPORADICA at Fort Mason Center For Arts & Culture in August 2025.
They have had the honor to be a company member of Robert Moses’ Kin Productions and have performed in works by Lenora Lee Dance, Megan Lowe Dances, OYSTER-KNIFE, Sarah Crowell, and many others. They have performed throughout the U.S. such as in New York, Jacob’s Pillow in MA, Seattle, Portland, New Orleans and internationally in Berlin. They have presented work in REYES Dance, Dance Thrill Fest (2021, 2026), Dresher Ensemble Artist Residency (2022), Queering Dance Festival’s FROLIC! (2023), KH FRESH Festival (2024), Dance Up Close East Bay (2025), PUSHfest (2025), NAKA Dance Theater’s LAIR – Live Arts in Resistance (2026), San Francisco Aerial Arts Festival (2026) and in the Black Choreographers’ Festival in 2020, 2025, and 2026. They were awarded Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” and received ImPulsTanz’s danceWEB Scholarship in 2024. Clarissa works as an Audio Describer for GRAVITY Access Services and is currently a Zaccho Dance Theatre Artist in Residence.