Beyond Gravity PDX is an evening of three contemporary experimental works by San Francisco–based artists Gabriele Christian with Styles Alexander, Aiano Nakagawa with ainsley elizabeth tharp, and Rachael Dichter with Portland artist Allie Hankins.
November 20–22, 2025
Thursday–Saturday at 7:30p
—photo by Hillary Goidell
Originally performed in the Beyond Gravity Festival at CounterPulse in San Francisco in November 2024, this program carries special significance. It emerged in the wake of Gravity’s founder, Jess Curtis, whose passing left a profound impact on the international performance community. Each of the featured works was created by artists Jess mentored in the final years of his life, reflecting the legacy of his generous support and the spirit of artistic exchange he championed.
The pieces grapple with vulnerability, rage, transformation, Queer desire, and the fragile yet resilient webs we weave with lovers, community, and intimate friends. By presenting Beyond Gravity PDX, Performance Works NW honors Jess Curtis’ enduring legacy and deepens connections between artistic communities in San Francisco and Portland—strengthening the bonds of mentorship, memory, and shared creative practice across regions.
RAGE ROOM, by Aiano Nakagawa in collaboration with ainsley tharp
A performance, a lecture, a meditation, a catharsis, a spell on femme rage.
DDF, by Gabriele Christian in collaboration with Styles Alexander
A Duet between choice cuts in a refuge out of real time. No matter how you look at us, we’re cooked.
Chariot, by Allie Hankins & Rachael Dichter
Horses, a storm, a haunting. Allie and Rachael play with form, rigor and slippage to look at methods of control and ways of breaking (through?).
Co-produced by Gravity & Performance Works NW
This project is supported in part by Creative West, which receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Gabriele Christian with Styles Alexander
Gabriele Christian (b. 1991) is a San Francisco-based movement artist, director, curator, dramaturg, and descendent of stolen folk. Experimenting within somatic practices, language, performance composition, video production and community arts facilitation, they locate and center BlaQ (Black and Queer) experience, vernacular, and aesthetics as wellsprings for radical futurity. They perform original work and collaborate trans- and inter-nationally, most recently in Berlin, New York City, Vienna, and Amsterdam. They are a founding member of multiple Bay Area born performance collectives and land projects including: RUPTURE; OYSTERKNIFE; LXS DXS; and BlaQyard. As co-director of OYSTERKNIFE, they were granted a competitive Creative Work Fund grant and a special citation Izzie Award for mouf//full, presented at Grace Cathedral in 2024. They currently serve as Executive Director and Co-Artistic Director of Jess Curtis/Gravity, a body-based arts and accessibility non-profit living on in the wake of Jess Curtis’ transition in March 2024. At the heart of all their work: exhaustive research into belonging, spirit, and desirability while living in the fangs of dehumanizing times.
Styles Alexander (they/them) is an Afro-Indigenous transdisciplinary artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Styles graduated from the Boston Conservatory At Berklee, where they received a BFA in Contemporary Performance and Choreography. While attending the Boston Conservatory, Styles performed and collaborated in creative processes with choreographers such as Andrea Miller, Robert Moses, Dwight Rhoden, Doug Varone and others. Styles has collaborated with artists including Maurya Kerr, Robin Aren, Joy Davis, and many others. Styles’s choreographic work is a practice of reimagining and communicating with history through speculative future-crafting, hauntological investigation, ancestral mediumship, and their own punk epistemology. Styles’s work has been featured in Urbanity NeXt, DougVarone’s DEVICES program, Jess Curtis’ Gravity PPP, ROT Festival, and the SENSEOBJECT residency. In 2023 Styles was a DanceWeb Impulstanz Scholarship recipient, under the mentorship of Clara Furey and Lara Kramer. Styles is currently a recipient of the Zellerbach Family Foundation award and Kenneth Rainin Foundation’s NEW award for the creation of their new work TarNation – premiering Summer 2026.
Aiano Nakagawa with ainsley tharp
Aiano Nakagawa is a multidisciplinary artist, producer, and educator whose work explores the intersection of art, queer homemaking, and power analysis. Aiano is deeply curious about the role of art-making, curation, and design in the act of new world building. Their practice is rooted in the belief that we must practice liberatory ways of existing on a small scale in order to create radical change on a larger scale. She is a founder member of the Bay Area Queer art collective, Asian Babe Gang and is a facilitator at CompassPoint Non-Profit Services. Aiano joined Gravity in 2022 as a Production Manager and helped produce dark/lessons/rupture in San Francisco in 2022 and the rolling world premiere of “Into the Dark” in Berlin and San Francisco in 2023. Aiano joined Gravity as Director of Operations and Communications in January 2023. Aiano’s work envisions and embodies the possibilities of the new world that is being born through collective imagination, organizing, creative disruption, and a commitment to creating the futures we need to exist.
ainsley elizabeth tharp is a Bay Area (Ohlone territory) based alchemist + artist + activist. She grew up in a Texas town called Victoria(Karankawas territory), she carries with her influence from catholic school, celtic folklore, mexican/tijuana culture, and white southern trailer trash. She creates visual landscapes as performance using various modes and media, such as movement, magic, ritual, video, projection, lighting, and the sculpting of readymade objects. ainsley is a University of Iowa Graduate with a BFA in choreography and movement practices. She has performed internationally in the Bay Area, Berlin, Brussels, Iowa City, and Austin Texas. Her work is queer, transcends boundaries and norms, and surpasses the conventional yes and no. Her work is femme. Her work is a part of the future.
Rachael Dichter & Allie Hankins
Rachael Dichter is a San Francisco based dancer, choreographer, curator, and the co-artistic director of Jess Curtis/Gravity. She makes work about closeness. About the shortest distance and shortening the distance between things – between people. She studied dance and art history at Mills College and her work has shown locally and internationally. She has been lucky to collaborate with a number of fierce and talented folks, and for four years she co-curated the San Francisco based live arts festival THIS IS WHAT I WANT.
Allie Hankins is a dancer, choreographer, and sound artist who has been producing and performing experimental works in Portland since 2013. She has self-produced eight original works and toured her productions to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York, Berlin, Minneapolis, Albuquerque, and Cork. In the Pacific Northwest, her works have been commissioned by Portland Institute for Contemporary Art and On the Boards in Seattle. Allie’s interdisciplinary practice has led to her professional engagements with choreographers Milka Djordjevich (LA), Morgan Thorson (Minneapolis), Julien Previeux (Paris), and Ruairi Donovan (Cork); and Portland artists Linda Austin, Tahni Holt, Danielle Ross, Emma Lutz-Higgins, and claire barrera. In 2013, Allie co-initiated the ongoing Queer performance cooperative Physical Education (PE) with keyon gaskin, Takahiro Yamamoto, and Lu Yim. PE produces festivals, hosts reading groups, and teaches workshops nationally, promoting accessibility and critical engagement with performance in Portland and beyond. She’s been awarded residencies at Base, Centrum, Ucross, Headlands Center for the Arts, Caldera, Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and the Robert Rauschenberg Residency. Her work has been funded by The Regional Arts & Culture Council, the Oregon Arts Commission, the National Performance Network, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and she is a recipient of the 2025 Miller Foundation Spark Award for Performance.
Performance Works NW || Linda Austin Dance 