RUPTURE is what happens when five emerging queer Black Bay Area-based performance artists — jose e. abad, Gabriele Christian, Stephanie Hewett, Clarissa Rivera Dyas, and Styles Alexander — immerse themselves in practices of play, togetherness, and collaboration as strategies for survival and world building.

Now in our third year, RUPTURE is a multidisciplinary performance experiment. It is a genre-defying, improvisational, and process-based project that centers the improvisatory nature of Black life as a technique of future crafting and culture bearing. We draw from diverse creative practices and personal cultural lineages including Afrolatinidad, AfroIndigenous, AfroFilipinx, and AfroCaribbean, informed by African-Americanisms rooted in Harlem, the Bronx, Oakland, Los Angeles, and the Deep South.

Spanning dance, electronic music, altar installations, and ritual, our work is a somatic, theatrical, and experimental exploration of the “not yet,” of potentiality as emergence. RUPTURE lives through shared ritual practices, choreographic scores, international retreats, podcasts, gatherings, community workshops, and performance — traditional diasporic strategies that reclaim time, space, and rest as radical practices.