Jess Curtis: Performance experiment

Jörg Müller (left) and Jess Curtis in
"Performance Research Experiment #2:
Paradox of the Heart (Phase 1)." Photo: Sven Hugolani

Jess Curtis: Performance experiment:

Jess Curtis wants to know what's going on inside you. Literally.

In his latest "Performance Research Experiment #2: Paradox of the Heart (Phase 1)," which debuts at CounterPulse this weekend, Curtis and collaborator Jorg Muller team up with multimedia artist Yoann Trellu, dramaturge Mira Moschalski and neuroscientist Ida Momennejad for an evening-long event that is part performance and part scientific experiment.

It began with Curtis' 2003 "Performance Research Experiment #1," which CounterPulse presented in 2006. In that piece, Curtis and Muller based the length of each dance segment on the audience's reactions - when five watchers shouted out that they were bored, they would move on to another scene.

"It was an interesting survey," says Curtis of the piece, which his 13-year-old company Gravity has since performed throughout Europe. "I had the fantasy of controlling it and doing it in a much more systematic way where we might be able to capture data about attention spans in different performances, but we never really got that far with that."

Curtis, who has taught at UC Berkeley and is pursuing a doctorate in performance studies at UC Davis, notes that this second "Performance Research Experiment" is a somewhat different animal.

"I wanted to do something that pushed the science side a little farther," he says. "Always my work has a research base to it. I'm curious about questions like how does this kind of image affect an audience, or how do I bring together images that provoke certain kinds of conversations? How does a performance affect how we see things?"

Feedback from the audience this time comes in the shape of devices that will monitor the heart rates and skin conductivity of 10 performance viewers. Trellu will then take that digital information and play it out on screens in real time as the performance progresses.

Curtis - whose highly charged and yet often playful pieces blend theater, movement and aerial work - goes on to reference German author Erika Fischer-Lichte's writings on the transformative power of performance.

"She moves the discussion of performance away from 'What does it mean and how do you read it?' and asks, 'What is its impact on the world and how does it do that?' " he says. "Does watching a dance or performance have physical consequences on your body? These are all questions that are very interesting to me."