SPLIT to be Presented by SF Dance Company FACT/SF This Fall

Charles Slender-White and his dance corporation, Fact/SF will present Break up, a collection of 300 1-on-just one performances this autumn in San Francisco. Every show will be 15 minutes and will be performed by a single dancer for an audience of 1.

Break up leverages the privacy of a peep present conceit even though searching past the erotic mother nature of the kind in purchase to supply a general performance that is intimate, considerate, and provocative. As a timed working experience in just a meticulously crafted and enclosed house, the Break up natural environment is not unlike that of an escape space.

In contemplating about Break up and how it would be presented, Slender-White knew early on that he preferred it to be together the lines of an interpersonal scenario: a person performer and 1 viewers member at a time. “In chatting about the construction, a colleague commented that it sounded like a variation on a peep show, which I imagined was apt. But as I assumed about that, I also recognized that audiences would most likely also experience an elevated perception of consciousness in our closed and contained overall performance area – a thing extra warn and lively than a conventional show, anything engaging on several amounts.

Aesthetically and experientially, Slender-White would like the audience users to sense wrapped in the performance and its sounds, textures, smells, and visuals, as anything 3D and with its individual volume and body weight.

“We are performing with Emmy Award-profitable composer Dan Cantrell on the rating, architect Maryam Rostami on the set, and fauxqueen Monique Jenkinson on the styling. Collectively, we’re building a multisensory surroundings to envelop the audience – anything they can settle into and be surrounded by. We want the audience to come to feel that they are an engaged component of the experience alone, but not in a way that is actively participatory. They are not getting asked to ‘perform’. Instead, we might like them to get pleasure from the show as 1 may possibly take pleasure in an exceptional, chilled martini. Entirely dealing with that full hurry of ice chilly gin and its gentle aromatic punch.”

Split takes inspiration from a amount of resources like, Angels in The us by Tony Kushner and To The Moon, by Laurie Anderson, and the question it wrestles with is how id is fashioned-how do we become who we are and how does that deviate from who we ended up?

“In Angels in The united states, Kushner is so deft at mixing the liminal space involving reality and fantasy,” states Slender-White. “Which lets for the play’s characters to slip in and out of identities as they approach their new, radical, and fully realized selves the fantasies in the perform are genuine to the people in the exact same way dissociative episodes are actual when a single encounters them. I’m seriously interested in this strategy of disassociation currently being a little something productive and beneficial that leads to an enlightenment of self. This is at the crux of Break up.”

Slender-White is of the thoughts that artists owe their audiences quite a great deal, and that they need to want to give them a great deal.

In January of 2020 Slender-White was in New York for the Laurie Anderson collaboration To the Moon, her third piece in a digital fact trilogy at The General public Theater. “While the piece by itself was exciting, what definitely fascinated me was the way they had arranged the “entrance of the dwelling choreography,” in that as before long as a person arrived at the theater, your coats were being taken, you ended up beckoned into an elevator and whisked to the right floor and then accompanied to your seat. You had been being cued to surrender to it in the identical way you could possibly expertise at a high-finish restaurant or spa. In a pretty serious way even your arrival was portion of the over-all practical experience. It was interesting and set the tone for the evening.”Audiences for Break up can anticipate to experience one thing together those strains as component of their non-public 15 minutes. This will contain the option of taking pleasure in a cocktail or cup of tea as a prelude to currently being guided into the effectiveness.

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Break up is designed around the idea of disassociation and the job it performs in identification formation. Slender-White’s specific and personalized desire in the make any difference is about the essential and productive purpose it plays in queer identification development, but as a new homosexual dad, also of id formation as a total.

“I’ve been struck by all the performance anticipations for parenting. The purchasing of a ton of outfits and toys, the displaying/sharing/carrying out for peers and family an abnormal and hyperbolic enjoy and affection together with existential angst and exhaustion while also exhibiting grit or toughness. ‘It’s the most difficult matter I’ve ever performed, but so worthy of it!” is a thing I have listened to on repeat for the past yr. So then, when which is not your experience (boosting my infant has been hard do the job but not at all complex or intricate), one particular pauses and wonders why?

In other phrases, I assume that staying queer has helped make getting a dad a full ton a lot easier. Possibly since I grew up in an aggressively straight context and had to determine out how to generate/sustain a complicated identity that incorporated plenty of unique factors, it experienced me to be a parent, an artist, a gardener, a husband, a pet owner, a close friend, a son, etc., and many others., with out sensation like these things are in conflict or competitiveness with each individual other.

Making Break up potentially even much more well timed is all the shape shifting becoming performed these times throughout various social media platforms and amongst digital and physical spaces as society reopens. The times when one identifies with by themselves, and then morphs into a distinctive (but comparable) self, can be impressive and successful times of catharsis that in the long run beginning and synthesize a new id entirely.”

***Break up follows intently on the heels of Slender-White’s commission with the American Dance Pageant with Tatiana Baganova, the creative director of Yekaterinburg’s Provincial Dances Theatre in Russia in June of 2021. Summertime of 2021 also sees Slender-White demonstrating function at ChoreoFest (a fee by the Yerba Buena Gardens Pageant) on a shared afternoon with Margaret Jenkins and Shinichi Iova-Koga. In August Point/SF produces its annual summertime dance competition with area choreographers Nicole Peisl, former dancer for William Forsythe and jose e abad, and traveling to choreographer Zaquia Salinas.

Particulars:

What: Split

When: September 9 – Oct 30

Where by: CounterPulse, 80 Turk Avenue, San Francisco

Periods: Specific periods TBA in mid-August

Tickets: $30-40 and can be reserved/acquired at FactSF.org beginning in mid-August.

Make sure you Take note: Break up opens as part of the Counterpulse Festvial that runs via the month of September, and then proceeds on its personal by way of Oct.