Inna and I purchased tickets to the New Site Work show, scheduled for 17:00, at Fort Mason, as part of the Aerial Arts festival.
The show was initially recommended to me by ChatGPT but turned out to be highly disappointing. I found the stunts a bit amateurish.
AI-assisted background on the program
Program details: Fort Mason’s official festival listing.
The 5 PM program consisted of two newly commissioned site-responsive works:
- Veronica Blair / EleKtric Body
- Megan Lowe Dances — Meandering Urbanite, choreographed and performed by Megan Lowe and Roel Seeber
The organizers presented these as works that would “activate” Fort Mason's architecture and landscape rather than as conventional aerial performances.
That distinction is important because “aerial arts” is somewhat misleading if you were expecting aerial acrobatics. The program was much closer to experimental contemporary dance, with some aerial/vertical dance elements.
1. Meandering Urbanite
This was the Megan Lowe/Roel Seeber piece.
The artists describe the work as inspired by the wilderness that existed before the urban landscape of Fort Mason. The central idea is to contrast:
- the frantic pace and “scramble” of modern urban life
- with a slower contemplation of the natural landscape that existed there before the present-day structures.
The artists specifically describe the piece as “listening for what still echoes” beneath Fort Mason. It also had an original live music score by Ben Juodvalkis.
So the conceptual structure was essentially:
urban environment → imagined natural past → human movement → remnants/echoes of nature
Rather than telling a conventional story, the dancers used movement, the physical environment, and the aerial apparatus to suggest those ideas.
Why the Fort Mason location mattered
This is what makes it a site-responsive work.
Instead of placing the dancers on a stage and pretending it was somewhere else, the choreography was developed around Fort Mason itself. The architecture, open space, and waterfront environment were supposed to become part of the performance.
Megan Lowe and Roel Seeber specialize in vertical dance, so their work can involve dancers moving on or against architectural structures rather than simply performing on a floor.
The idea is that the audience sees the building/space differently because dancers are interacting with it.
That is artistically interesting—but it also means the physical spectacle can be considerably less impressive than a conventional aerial show.
2. Veronica Blair / EleKtric Body
The other work was by Veronica Blair's EleKtric Body.
Unfortunately, this is where the publicly available material is surprisingly thin. The festival's official ticket description identifies the company and says that the work was one of the two site-responsive pieces, but it doesn't provide a detailed synopsis comparable to the one for Meandering Urbanite.
The available program information does not support a more detailed synopsis.
The important point is that both works were deliberately commissioned as site-responsive pieces, rather than being assembled as conventional aerial entertainment.
I had expected a conventional aerial show with impressive acrobatics. The site-responsive dance format was not what I was looking for, and I found this performance disappointing.
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