Charles Slender-White is a dancer, choreographer, organizer, Countertechnique Teacher, and the Artistic Director of FACT/SF, a San Francisco-based contemporary dance company. He has worked across North America, Europe, and Russia, and in Hong Kong and Australia, with significant support from both national and local funders. FACT/SF produces Slender-White’s work, and also engages with the field by offering fiscal sponsorship, distributing grants, hosting Countertechnique classes and workshops throughout the year, and producing an annual summer dance festival. In 2022, FACT/SF became the first dance company in the US to pay artists to apply for its programs, and one of the only dance companies to elect an active Company Member to its Board of Directors. As a choreographer and educator, Slender-White is primarily interested in dance technique as a psycho-physical practice, speaking while dancing, metacognition, dance as a communal act, and queer identity formation and performance. His current large scale project, QAF (Queer Athletic Futurity), is about LGBTQ+ people in sports. As an organizer, he advocates for pay equity for artists, healthy working environments, recognition of labor, dynamic communication styles, transparency, representation, and field-wide systemic change. Slender-White grew up in San Diego, CA, graduated with honors from UC Berkeley with undergraduate degrees in Dance & Performance Studies and English Literature, spent three summers studying at ADF as a scholarship student, and started his career with Provincial Dances Theatre in Yekaterinburg, Russia. He began studying Countertechnique in 2005, and started teaching it in 2012. There are currently 44 Countertechnique Teachers worldwide.
@factsf
@cslenderwhite
Classes: Countertechnique® & Free Voice/Free Body
Photo by Pippa Samaya