A multi-media dance company, Deborah Slater Dance Theater does visually gorgeous, acrobatic, talking dance, dedicated to the creation of full-length works exploring social issues, science and art through original dance, text and music. Deborah Slater, Artistic Director, is an award-winning director, choreographer and performer, working in theater/dance for 30 years. Awards: the 2015 Della Davidson Prize for Innovations in Dance/Theater, 2 IZZIES (2016) for Special Achievement/Visual Design for PRIVATE LIFE, selection for Co-Lab/SF Dance Film Festival to create IN THE SPACE BETWEEN, with cinematographer Herve Cohen and a 2017 Izzie Nomination for Darren Johnston’s score for TIME’S ARROW.
John Fesenko – (Technical Designer) is a software engineer with a graduate degree in neuroscience from MIT. He is interested in using interactive technologies to evoke experiences of wonder as a way of exploring complex interpenetrating relationships between self, society, and nature. He is a founding member of the UCSF Neuroscape Lab, and was responsible for the creation of the “Glass Brain” project (http://neuroscapelab.com/projects/glass-brain), an interactive 3D model of EEG activity which bridged the gap between art and science through several collaborations. The first such collaboration was “Rhythm and the Brain” with drummer Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead.
Aaron M. Gold – (composer) Aaron M. Gold creates visceral music that moves. The resident composer for Kristin Damrow and Company, he’s been commissioned by Dance Brigade with Sara Shelton Mann, Sonoma State University and Jennifer Meek, punkkiCo, Twisted Oak Dance Theater, Fall Fast Dance, Human Creature Dance Theater, and Coventry and Kaluza. When not scoring dance, Aaron works as a sound technician at Dance Mission Theater and plays drums in Oakland based band Perhapsy.
About this Project
What does it mean that we, as a society, have gone into a behavioral retrograde at such an astonishing rate? How is it that what was inappropriate, unthinkable, cruel, ignorant, racist, and sexist… has been made acceptable, even ‘normal’ in such a short period of time? Technology has transformed the manner in which we perceive and interact with the world around us, but has it transformed us?
And yet… technology that augments an artist’s hand or a dancer’s body offers the promise of unmatched expressivity: cool blue mists fall from our forms during moments of ease, flames of red and orange shoot from our hands when we’re angered, and phosphorescent orbs of light fly to and from our hearts in moments of connection. Can we instead dance with our common humanity, enhanced by the very technology that so often is used to wedge us apart? The potential of such a technological, personal, and social transformation is what we hope to express with our performance.
Artist photo of of Heather Arnett in TIME’S ARROW by Deborah Slater Dance Theater