Dances for Non-Fictional Bodies and Jointedness, new choreographies from Master of Fine Arts candidates Jess Curtis and Nina Galin, represent the heart of the Department of Theatre and Dance curriculum, says the department chair, Professor David Grenke.

“As mid-career professionals, Jess and Nina bring vast experience that becomes the catalyst for artistic questions,” Grenke said. “We value their new interdisciplinary works based on the nature of the questions that they prompt.”

Dances for Non-Fictional Bodies (excerpt) and Jointedness are being presented as a double bill, with five performances scheduled from Feb. 12 to 21.

‘Difference as a virtue’

Curtis said Dances for Non-Fictional Bodies “examines difference as a virtue in and of itself, finding the unique beauty in the idiosyncrasy of each individual performer.”

“The synergistic and aesthetic necessity of difference is highlighted, and thus proposes that the audience reconsider their own definitions and limitations of beauty and empowerment.”

Curtis developed the piece in collaboration with dramaturge-provocateur Guillermo Gomez-Peña (San Francisco-Mexico), and performers Maria Francesca Scaroni (Berlin-Italy), Claire Cunningham (Glasgow, Scotland), David Toole (United Kingdom) and Jörg Müller (France).

Curtis’ dance performance company, Gravity, is due to present the complete Dances for Non-Fictional Bodies at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco in 2011.

Aesthetic articulation

Jointedness explores sustained moments of aesthetic articulation in movement, singing, spoken text, visual design and philosophy, with elegant costumes, 23 chairs, a swinging, 50-foot extension cord and a suspended swath of cargo netting.

Galin has divided the work into two solos and a quartet, with each segment pursuing a dream of full presence in the moment of exchange between performers and audience.

Shakespeare’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet launches segments I and III, while Segment II creates a body-mind dialogue between Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry and American Public Media’s Marketplace.

“I'm playing with the notion of a joint as a point of clear articulation where two things meet and interact—bones, ideas, images, texts, artistic disciplines,” Galin said.

Jointedness, she said, delves more deeply into concepts at the heart of her recent work, Each/Other, performed in a working Starbucks store in southern California.

Theater at Starbucks

Galin, her dancers and a trio of alternative jazz musicians transformed the coffeehouse from a site of “to go” culture into a polyrhythmic utopia. The dance-theatre-music work addressed the complex “jointedness” between personal autonomy and collectivity within the Starbucks culture of corporate mass production and consumption.

In Jointedness, Galin, MFA candidate James Marchbanks, and undergraduates Joshua Harrelson, Andrea Kubisch and Maggie Steinmann will similarly transform Vanderhoef Studio Theatre into a haunting yet playful world of piercing queries.

Three more UC Davis MFA candidates are involved in the production: Josh Steadman, scenic designer; Jake Nelson, lighting designer; and E. “Kaino” Hopper, costume designer, who calls herself a “costume listener” for these edgy pieces that require nontraditional dance garb.

Rounding out the concept artist team are composers Mark Growden (Jointedness) and Matthias Herrmann (Dances for Non-Fictional Bodies). Growden is a singer-songwriter whose credits include two live albums and several film soundtracks. Herrmann’s credits include numerous award-winning scores for international dance theater companies.

The stage manager is undergraduate Rosamund Grimshaw, an international exchange student from the University of Glasgow and co-artistic director of Glasgow’s Flatrate Theatre Company.

THE CHOREOGRAPHERS

Jess Curtis, who lives and works in San Francisco and Berlin, has created a body of work ranging from the underground extremes of SF Mission District warehouses with Contraband and CORE (1985-1994) to the formal refinement of European state theaters with Jess Curtis/Gravity (2000-present).

Along the way he has co-created ground breaking circus works; and has been commissioned to create works for companies such as FabrikCompanie in Germany, the English Blue Eyed Soul Dance Company, ContactArt in Italy and Croi Glan Integrated Dance Company in Ireland.

He founded Jess Curtis/Gravity in 2000 as a research and development vehicle for very live performance. Gravity aspires to the creation of exceptionally engaging body-based art that explores and addresses issues and ideas of substance and relevance to a broad popular public. In addition to the creation of live performances, Gravity also produces and facilitates educational experiences for both professionals and lay people in movement and performing arts.

At Gravity, he has created four full-evening performance works—No Place Like Home (2000), fallen (2001), Touched: Symptoms of Being Human (2005) and Under the Radar (2007)—and a variety of smaller repertory works and site specific installations.

Curtis' fallen garnered him a Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2002, and Gravity is the recipient of six Izzies (Isadora Duncan Dance Awards).

He teaches dance, contact improv and interdisciplinary performance throughout the United States and Europe, and has been a guest lecturer at UC Berkeley and the University of the Arts in Berlin.

More information: jesscurtisgravity.org

Nina Galin is a dance-theatre artist, somatic educator and body-mind philosopher. She is interested in the notion of “categories,” perhaps because she cannot seem to fit into one. She generates and disseminates her interdisciplinary work using movement, talking, singing, touch, writing, breathing and listening. From 1991 to 2002, she was based in San Francisco, directing her company, Nina Galin Music & Dance, and maintaining a private body-work practice based in Alexander technique, pilates, connective tissue massage and other modalities. During this time she also performed in the work of other artists, including Deborah Slater, Ney Fonseca, Ellie Herman, Tracy Rhodes and A Travelling Jewish Theatre.

Reporting by Janice Bisgaard, publicity manager for the Department of Theatre and Dance.

AT A GLANCE

WHAT: Master of Fine Arts candidates present choreographic theses, back to back at each performance.

• Dances for Non-Fictional Bodies (excerpt), by Jess Curtis

• Jointedness, by Nina Galin

WHEN: 8 p.m. Feb. 12-13 and 19-20, and 2 p.m. Feb. 21

WHERE: Vanderhoef Studio Theatre, Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts

TICKETS: (530) 754-2787 or (866) 754-2787, or mondaviarts.org.

ADVISORY: This production may contain full or partial nudity.