Dance Review : ‘Sex and Gravity’ Explores a Dead-End in Western Art

Hanging by his wrists and ankles high above the stage of Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica Thursday night, Jess Curtis speaks about feeling “alone in space”--though it takes four people pulling on ropes with all their might to keep him aloft, plus a lighting technician to give his alienation the proper glow. This is not the kind of aloneness that one can manage alone.

A former member of the San Francisco performance collective Contraband, Curtis wrote, directed and is the central figure in “Sex and Gravity,” a multidisciplinary, 70-minute showpiece filled with endearing foolishness and splashy special effects.

Consider the big Relationship duet, in which Curtis and Stephanie Maher wear nothing but matching nipple-rings and explore very, very preliminary textual, sexual and contact-improvisational gambits. Just when you think they’re ready to break through the games to genuine intimacy, they play with fire instead: a burning rope that may symbolize their passion but in fact keeps them physically distant from each other. Some symbol.

What “Sex and Gravity” does best is express the pervasive sense that Western art has reached a dead-end in the final days of the 20th Century. “There really is nothing left to say,” Curtis confesses early in the piece. “The ideas I have are old ideas. . . . I really have nothing new to offer you.” Later he mourns the loss of “a sense of wholeness” and tries to regain it through engulfing and often bruising dance sequences with Maher and others to deafening rock music.

Soon after, he’s piercing his chest with needles, over and over, because he believes he’s been unable to reach his audience through less drastic acts of communication.

Some of us suspect, however, that it’s wholeness-through-pain he’s reaching for: an authenticity as man and artist that can’t be achieved through shortcuts, no matter how daring or picturesque.

The piece ends with yearnings for change, transformation, “a clean slate,” the millennium. But Curtis wants it now , while he’s still got an athlete’s muscle-tone and a cute haircut. In that, he may be as doomed to disappointment as those who approach “Sex and Gravity” with high expectations.

* “Sex and Gravity” continues at 8:30 p.m. tonight and Sunday at Highways Performance Space, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica. Tickets: $10. (310) 453-1755.