A former cheerleader and UC Berkeley competitive diver, choreographer Charles Slender-White began checking out dance classes on campus. Gradually dance took over while his diving career wound down. “Dance has in it all of the rigor, effort, and training, but I also liked that it was more expansive than diving. There’s really only six types of dives you can do. No points for a flourish, innovation, or a point of view,” he says. Slender-White began discovering that as a dancer he could be himself.
“In diving, you’re essentially naked all the time. Your body and form are assessed constantly, and prioritized above all else,” he reflects. “I like thinking a lot, but in sports like diving it’s advantageous to clear your brain and just do the training. Dancing was the first environment I found where high physical activity and complex thinking were both valued.”
Since finding dance at Berkeley, Slender-White has been choreographing and producing work with his own company, FACT/SF, which presents the 5th Annual FACT/SF Summer Dance Festival over the next two weeks (August 16-25 at ODC Theater, SF). For the Festival, FACT/SF will bring together an array of contemporary dance works by Bay Area choreographers Maxine Flasher-Düzgüneş, Zoe Huey, and Erin Yen, and visiting artists Jenna Riegel from Amherst, Sophie Allen from Chicago and Summation Dance/LA from Los Angeles.
Launched in 2018 the FACT/SF Summer Dance Festival is part of FACT/SF’s Fieldwork, a set of programs that provide resources and opportunities to contemporary dance artists from the Bay Area and beyond. All artists on the second weekend of the Festival were curated by an eight-person panel via an open application process. FACT/SF received applications from 50 artists, and all were paid to apply.
While dance festivals are wonderfully ubiquitous in the Bay Area, and can be a great opportunity for audiences to be introduced to new artists and for artists to build new audiences, FACT/SF has created a platform that compensates artists for the labor required just to apply for the opportunity to be seen.
“We don’t curate the work, we curate the artist,” says Slender-White. “This means, we don’t book the work specifically, but instead we book the artist. I believe in the artists and their integrity.” His enthusiasm for community and bringing people together predates the inception of the festival, which was devised with the intention to lessen the distance between Bay Area artists and those from out of town
“I love San Francisco so much, but in some ways we’re pretty isolated and we don’t often get to dialogue with our colleagues in Portland or LA, for example,” Slender-White says. “I benefit from seeing other people’s work. Perhaps others would benefit from this, too. The festival has become a mini conference experience for us, and the community piece is deep. It’s wonderful to see artists who meet at our Festival become friends for years.”
The Festival also serves as a platform for Slender-White’s latest work, Half Time, Full Out, a non-stop dance routine inspired by halftime shows, aerobic gymnastics competitions, cheerleading, pop music, and sparkles. Half Time, Full Out is the culmination of Slender-White’s larger project, QAF (Queer Athletic Futurity), which imagines athletic spaces that celebrate queer identity.
As the premiere approaches, Slender-White says he is realizing his fantasy of a queer event that is all half-time show, no actual sports, and no competition. “It’s just a game and the point is to play rather than win,” he explains. “I’ve never liked the binary that if someone wins, somebody else loses. I think the reason I landed on this—no competition, just dancing—is because I can be who I want to be, with the people I want to be with and dancing to the music I choose.”
For Half Time, Full Out Slender-White is intentional about the high energy content minus the commentary and competition. “It’s not contending with larger socio-political issues. It’s just giving smiles and optimism. And I love half-time shows.”
An earlier iteration of Half Time was performed in June 2023 in a very public, very populated outdoor space, the Presidio Tunnel Tops, where FACT/SF had gone all out to deliver a spectacle. There were ribbons, tennis balls, a balance beam routine, Cheer SF performed, California State Senator Scott Weiner gave a speech, community agreements for fair and equitable participation were posted, and queer athletes offered tutorials on different sports. “People learned how to do cartwheels. I played rugby for the first time! The event became the fantasy of what a radically inclusive queer sports environment could be,” recalls Slender-White.
Half Time is a boisterous departure from FACT/SF’s last major project in 2021, Split, about queer identity formation. By contrast, Split was performed by one performer at a time for one audience member at a time. The company gave 248 performances in a constructed environment in the basement of CounterPulse.
Split‘s one-on-one format was intentional for probing the deep intimacy between one performer and one audience member. The performers each made their own solos with text pulled from the Picture of Dorian Gray, Angels in America, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, and postures from Edvard Munch’s paintings about death. The dancers had 15 minutes to keep talking and moving.
“We had a ton of flexibility. We could speed up, slow down, repeat, or remove. There was definitely an energetic dynamic between performer and audience. It was private, very intimate, away from phones and other people,” says Slender-White. He adds, “Conceptually we were exploring dissociation as something productive or useful, asking ourselves, ‘what if it’s helpful for imaging a future self that doesn’t exist yet, for a someone you may yet become? For queer people who don’t grow up with people who understand their identity and for adolescents particularly, could it be helpful?’”
Slender-White reflects that after Split, he was craving something different, hence Half Time, Full Out. “Sometimes it’s great to dive deep into the nuances of an individual experience and the minutiae of self-conception, like in Split. And, sometimes we just need to come together to have some fun and celebrate. It’s an Olympic year, it’s Brat Summer. With Half Time, Full Out, I want to turn on the tunes and invite people to the party.”
5TH FACT/SF FESTIVAL runs August 16-25 at ODC, SF. More info here.
