Aerial Arts / New Site Work at Fort Mason

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.

What “New Site Work” actually was

The 5 PM program consisted of two newly commissioned site-responsive works:

1. Veronica Blair / EleKtric Body
2. 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.

So I don't want to invent an interpretation of what you saw.

The important point is that both works were deliberately commissioned as site-responsive pieces, rather than being assembled as conventional aerial entertainment.

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Why it may have felt so disappointing

Given your reaction — “the new site show was horrible” — I think there's a pretty understandable mismatch here.

The festival's marketing uses phrases such as:

“aerial dance, circus arts, site-responsive performances”

and calls the festival a celebration of contemporary aerial arts.

That can easily lead someone to expect:

• impressive aerial tricks
• performers high in the air
• acrobatics
• dramatic apparatus work
• physical danger
• choreography that looks spectacular from the audience

But New Site Work wasn't really that kind of show.

It was much more about:

• contemporary dance
• abstract movement
• The relationship between bodies and architecture
• environmental themes
• artistic interpretation
• site-specific choreography

The festival's 8 PM Cowell Theater Main Stage was actually much closer to what I should have recommended if you wanted aerial arts as entertainment. That program featured Amelia Rudolph, Darielle Williams, Nina Sawant, Ron Oppenheimer, Cirque Vida, and Joey the Tiger, and was explicitly advertised around “daring physicality” and “innovative apparatus work.”

So I made a significant mistake earlier: I recommended the 3/5 PM New Site Work as the “most spectacular” option, when the published descriptions actually pointed toward the 8 PM Main Stage as the spectacle.

In retrospect, I'd characterize the shows this way:

Program	Artistic character	Spectacle
New Site Work	Experimental/site-specific contemporary dance	⭐⭐
Next Generation	Youth circus/aerial	⭐⭐⭐
Main Stage	Professional aerial/circus performance	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
New Experiments	Experimental contemporary work	⭐⭐