spazio NU Pontedera (PI)
Taught by: Jess Curtis, assisted by Maria Francesca Scaroni

Contact Improvisation: Compositional Tool / Performance Event?

6-10 July (h. 11-17)

A course and laboratory for people with intermediate to advanced skills in Contact Improvisation, exploring the use of those skills as both a compositional tool and a performance form. We will address issues of presence, connection with a partner, dynamics, virtuosity, utilizing scores and musical accompaniment. We will also explore staging, the integration of objects and the exploration of contact-based images. We will develop movement as both virtuosic, performative action and as meaningful theatrical image. We will examine the physical actualities of touch, manipulation, counterbalance, force, resistance, and surrender, both as physical states and as metaphors for interpersonal and intercultural relations. We will examine and practice the state and quality of improvising, looking at a variety of relationships between imagination, action and time.

Jess Curtis, Director/Choreographer
Living and working in San Francisco since 1984, Jess Curtis has created a body of work ranging from the underground extremes of Mission District Warehouses with Contraband (1985-1994) to the formal refinement of European State Theaters with Jess Curtis/Gravity (2000-present). Along the way Mr. Curtis has co-created ground breaking circus works with the Franco-American Circus project Cie Cahin Caha, Cirque Batard; collaborated with the renowned FabrikCompanie in Potsdam Germany to create the award winning fallen; and been commissioned to create works for companies such as Artblau in Germany, ContactArt in Milan, Italy and Blue Eyed Soul Dance Company in England.Mr. Curtis has twice been recognized by the Irvine Foundation/Dance USA California dance initiatives having been awarded a California Dancemakers Fellowship (2001) and a Dance: Creation to Performance Award (2005). In 2005 he was the recipient of San Francisco’s prestigious CHIME (Choreographers In Mentorship Exchange) Fellowship with and was one of twenty American choreographers nominated for the extremely competitive Alpert Awards in the Arts Fellowship. In August 2002 he received a Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for “fallen”, which in 2003 was also awarded San Francisco’s Isadora Duncan Dance award for best company performance.After a youth filled with sports and musical training, Jess began making dances in the early 1980’s at California State University, Chico where he studied creative writing, theater and modern dance. Upon graduating he moved to San Francisco where he joined the Lucas Hoving Performance Group, and the San Francisco Moving Company and performed at Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival with experimental theater innovator Chris Hardman in Antenna Theater’s “Russia”.
In 1984 Jess met and began to work with choreographer Sara Shelton Mann and helped to form San Francisco’s internationally acclaimed CONTRABAND. Over the next nine years he was a primary collaborator in the creation of seven full evening dance theater works, specifically co-conceiving “The Invisible War” (1989) and “Mandala” (1990), and producing tours to the former Soviet Union, Italy and across the U.S.A. Together they received 3 Isadora Duncan Dance Awards.
In 1994, Jess co-founded the extreme performance group CORE, with Stephanie Maher, Keith Hennessy, Jules Beckman, and Stanya Kahn. CORE created two full-evening works, “Psychic Driveby”, (1994) and “entertainment for the apocalypse” (1996). In 1997/98 Curtis, Beckman, and Hennessy created the critically acclaimed “Ice/Car/Cage”, which received an SF Weekly Black Box Award for Choreography and two Isadora Duncan Dance Awards for Best Choreography and Best Visual Design.
From 1999 to 2002 he and longtime collaborators Keith Hennessy and Jules Beckman worked with with noted French circus director Gulko on a new dance-theater-circus called Cahin-Caha, Cirque Batard. The project toured extensively throughout Europe, including a two-month run at the prestigious Parc de La Villette in Paris, and in the fall of 2002 toured to the US for a sold-out four-week run at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.
“enormous physical and metaphysical risk expressed through some of the simplest means with the lightest touch.” Sima Belmar, SF Bay Guardian

Maria Francesca Scaroni is a performer and teacher from Italy.
After dancing in Italian TV productions, she trained and worked with Manuela Bondavalli Danza (1998/2004), a collaboration that rooted her dance practice in release-based contemporary technique and Contact Improvisation. Joining Jess Curtis/Gravity (2004 to present), a San Francisco/Berlin based collaboration project, her perspective on dance and dance technique was challenged by an ongoing questioning process around improvisation as a performative practice, nurturing a more critical/informed attitude around the choices and modalities of performing movement. With Gravity she extended her teaching practice to Contact Improvisation, Composition and physically inclusive workshops.In 2006 she met the San Francisco choreographers/dancers Sara Shelton Mann and Kathleen Hermesdorf, who invited her into a creative process that will premiere in 2007.
She holds a Masters degree in Contemporary Literature, with a focus on Communication and Performance Theory. She enjoys cross-training with Tango, Yoga, Aikido and Gyrotonic.