Aug 22nd Through Aug 30th
Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture (FMCAC or Fort Mason) presents the late-summer world premiere of DIASPORADICA, a three-hour immersive performance by experimental collective RUPTURE, running from August 22 to 30, 2025 at the Pier 3 Festival Pavilion. This theatrical experience transforms Fort Mason’s waterfront venue into a multisensory space where audiences become part of an “interactive odyssey of mutiny and belonging.” The production features five San Francisco Bay Area- and New York-based artists who have created what they describe as a world of “shipwrecks, sirens, techno, and Spades.”
Performance Details:
Friday, August 22, 2025
Saturday, August 23, 2025
Friday, August 29, 2025
Saturday, August 30, 2025
Performances begin at 7:00 p.m. Tickets are available at EventBrite.com.
Festival Pavilion, Pier 3
A Three-Act Journey Through Contemporary Black Experience
DIASPORADICA unfolds as a journey through three distinct acts, each offering a different mode of engagement. The experience begins with “Kickback” – an invitation to leisure and gameplay that establishes intimacy between performers and audiences. The energy then shifts dramatically during “Performance,” featuring collective choreography and improvisation drawn from diasporic storytelling traditions. The evening culminates in “Function,” where the performance space transforms into a club environment, positioning dance as what the collective calls “a communal, spiritual technology.”
The work combines contemporary dance, immersive installation, ritual practices, and community engagement to explore themes of Black kinship, belonging, and artistic embodiment in ways that challenge traditional boundaries.
“DIASPORADICA represents everything we believe about the power of collective creation,” says Clarissa Rivera Dyas, RUPTURE founding member. “We’re not just presenting a performance – we’re creating a space where the audience becomes part of the ritual, where the boundaries between performer and community dissolve. This work asks: ‘What happens when we center Black joy, Black imagination, and Black futurity in ways that invite everyone into that vision?’”
Extended Programming
Complementing the main performances, Fort Mason hosts related programming from Sunday, August 24 through Thursday, August 28, 2025, featuring conversations between RUPTURE’s creators and artists, including Beatrice Thomas, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Joanna Haigood, Maurya Kerr, and Taisha Paggett.
Transforming Immersive Theater On The Bay
DIASPORADICA offers audiences an opportunity to experience performance that is simultaneously “ethereal and explosive.” By transforming the Pier 3 Festival Pavilion into a world of their own making, RUPTURE continues the Bay Area’s tradition of experimental art while centering voices and experiences often marginalized in traditional theater spaces.
The production promises to challenge audiences’ expectations about the role of spectator versus participant, creating what the artists describe as “layered encounters only possible when artists assemble, converse, build something together.”
As Gabriele Christian, RUPTURE founding member notes, “Our times require us to go dark. Dive deep. DIASPORADICA is fundamentally tasking us all with recouping gathering as a technology for fomenting resistance.”
“Fort Mason Center has always been committed to supporting artists who push boundaries and reimagine what performance can be,” says Frank Smigiel, Chief Curator & Director of Arts Programming at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture. “RUPTURE’s vision for DIASPORADICA perfectly embodies our mission to present work that reflects the innovation and diversity of Bay Area artists. This isn’t just a show you watch – it’s a communal experience that transforms our space and everyone in it.”