Reflecting on Platform

Written by Liane Burns

As Charlie and I make the final changes to the piece, the production team perfects the intricate lighting, video, and set design for the work, and we all gear up for Platform’s world premiere, I feel fortunate to take the time to reflect on how it all began.

Photo by Kegan Marling

Since moving to San Francisco in 2012, I have been a part of FACT/SF’s many unique, creative processes and performances as both dancer and collaborator. Each of us in the company helps shape the work by generating material and providing feedback, with Charlie as the director with final veto power. Platform’s process was significantly different for both him and myself, as we agreed to equally share creative input and authority throughout the creative process. Having been on the dancer/collaborator side of the relationship for so many years, I had my own concerns for myself and Charlie. Would I feel comfortable speaking up? Would Charlie be able to loosen the reins and share the responsibility with me?  

In 2015, sitting at a bar and sipping sangria, Charlie (my boss, colleague, and someone who would become a dear friend and creative partner), asked if I had listened to Holly Herndon’s latest album, Platform. I could tell by the enthusiasm in his voice how completely stoked he was about the music. Having danced in FACT/SF’s Relief to one of Herndon’s tracks from her first album, Movement, I shared Charlie’s appreciation for Herndon’s genius. Charlie already knew I had a desire to choreograph my own work, and asked if I would be interested in co-creating a duet to Platform, the album. I was like, “Hell yes!”

Without a budget, plan, or premiere date, we both committed right then and there at the bar, not only to make a duet together, but to use every single track on the album. What seemed like two simple guidelines at the time turned out to be both a challenge, and a wonderful way of pushing us to make new choices together that we might never have made on our own. Platform’s journey has been an exciting and adventurous two years, due in large part to Charlie’s experience and knowledge as a director and dance maker, to the team of creative advisors and designers who generously agreed to help shape the work, and to FACT/SF’s supportive community. I am forever grateful to both Charlie and the Company for believing and trusting in me.

Over the last two years, iterations of Platform have been shown in San Francisco, Bulgaria, and Serbia. Platform v.1 was created and performed in San Francisco for FACT/SF’s JuMP 2016. These first three sections took the longest of all 10 tracks to make, largely because Charlie and I had to learn how to co-create a work together. This process was slow, tedious, and considerate, resulting in 2 of the most intricate and detailed sections of the work. Soon after closing JuMP 2016, Charlie and I flew to the Balkans for a creative residency in Bulgaria and to teach and perform in Serbia. I found our 5 weeks traveling, teaching, and performing in the Balkans to be the most significant part of the overall process. Not only were we given the time to focus solely on dance, but we lived, worked, ate, drank, and shared an apartment together. In this time, I got to know Charlie as a person and a friend, not just a boss or colleague. The Balkans trip provided us with a deeper and more comfortable working relationship and a completely new audience, which allowed us to make more risky and unapologetic choices for Platform v.2.

Photo by Andrew Weeks

What I love most about Platform is that it is made out of collaboration. Darl Andrew Packard and Delayne Medoff, two lighting designers with a history of working with FACT/SF, have co-designed the lighting for Platform. Monique Jenkinson (Stylist) and Keriann Egeland (Costume Designer) collaborated to give us our looks. Cara Rose DeFabio (Dramaturge), and James Fleming & Maurya Kerr (Creative Advisors), are all familiar with FACT/SF’s work and provided feedback and insight throughout the creative process. This fantastic team significantly helped me and Charlie shape Platform.

What a journey! Each iteration and performance of the work gave us the opportunity to test out ideas on a live audience, and to then learn and reflect on the choices we had made and where we wanted to go next. From its first performance in JuMP 2016 to its premiere this Friday and Saturday, Platform has developed into something I am both honored and proud to share with each of you who come to support and witness. I know I can speak for both Charlie and myself when I say we are ready and excited to share the little dance baby we made together called Platform. See you at the show!

Liane has spent the last four years working in San Francisco as a company member and collaborator with FACT/SF and detour dance, and as a guest artist with Simpson/Stulberg Collaborations, RAWdance, LEVYdance, and Christine Bonansea. Liane is the Lead Instructor at Elevate Group Fitness, and corporate Group Fitness Instructor with City Move’n Fitness. Liane received her BFA in Dance and Performance from Chapman University, and completed her postgraduate studies in Israel at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. While living in Israel, she additionally apprenticed and performed with Amir Kolben's Kolben Dance Company. She has both performed and created work in Orange County, San Francisco, Israel, Bulgaria and Serbia.

[Editor's Note: FACT/SF invited Platform collaborators to write about their experiences witnessing rehearsals and contributing to the development of the work. In addition to the writing above by Platform Co-Choreographer, Liane Burns, FACT/SF has also shared reflections from James Fleming (Creative Advisor), Maurya Kerr (Creative Advisor), Cara Rose DeFabio (Dramaturge), and Charles Slender-White (Co-Choreographer). In offering these thoughts, questions, observations, and impressions, FACT/SF aims to provide some insight into our creative process and a bit of context for Platform's conceptual considerations.]

The Body as Machine

Written by Cara Rose DeFabio  

Platform Album Cover

When Charlie first mentioned to me that he and Liane were interested in making a dance to Holly Herndon’s album Platform, I was thrilled and excitedly asked which track they would be using.

“All of them”, he replied.

Sixty full minutes of dancing onstage sounded like a challenge to begin with, but the full ambition of the project is hard to know unless you’ve heard the album. Platform, the album, is both driving and haunting, employing the full spectrum of Herndon’s rhythmic and vocal skills to great effect. Each track chews on a different aspect of our digital lives, laced with all the hums and whirrs of machines known and unknown. The album in its entirety is a bit like a sonic puzzle, begging the listener to re-listen and sort through the debris to make sense of it all. It is controlled chaos, lush in its layering, and at times impossible to count.

These dancers have met that challenge head on and completely changed the way I hear this music. Specificity is the currency of both in ways that enliven and enrich one another. Every time I watch Platform, the dance, I hear new things in Platform, the album. Even more remarkable is that now every time I hear the music I can see the sounds as gestures, as if they were made by the grinding of metal gears, or air passing across plastic pipes. There is a mutual exchange here that is exciting to take in.

Photo by Kegan Marling

Herndon’s palette is wide, using dripping water, warped start-up sounds, and metallic clicks, as well as her skilled and filtered voice. Each of these sounds jockeys for attention and asks the listener to distinguish between natural and unnatural sounds. What is flesh and what is fiction? The choreography echoes this same question, at times by insisting on a unison so exact it brings to the foreground every minute difference in the bodies onstage - these infinite organic differences that make us so human.

Behind the scenes, the structure of the choreography is meticulous. Charlie and Liane have made movement phrases like building blocks: stacking them high, knocking them down, and turning them so the audience against each wall gets a different view like a giant Rubik's Cube twisting towards a solution. Even some of the improvisational structures use an ‘if, then’ logic that is not unfamiliar to computer programmers, creating decision trees for the dancers that retain a sense of urgency. You could even call this live processing: choices made in the moment, a trigger and a response. The more I think about the structures of formal choreography, the more dances begin to look like any human designed system, adjusting levels of order and chaos until you reach the desired outcome.

Photo by Kegan Marling

Computer logic has become THE way of understanding our world. As we try to build systems that capture the world around us, we can only capture what we can categorize; everything that doesn’t fit into the system is left out. What systems of knowledge might we be leaving behind? Where does the body fit into the digital world we are building up around ourselves? Our computers have nearly become appendages. Our hands now feel empty without their cell phones, and I can’t even imagine what a Holly Herndon track would be without the sophisticated layering and processing her machine provides.

But, what place do our physical bodies have in a world augmented by technology? This work answers by examining the body as machine, pushing towards exhaustion, and showing that work on the platform of the stage is as valuable and varied as the work hours spent running software on any computer platform.

Cara Rose DeFabio is an artist, writer, and event producer focusing on how technology is changing our lives. 
 

[Editor's Note: FACT/SF invited Platform collaborators to write about their experiences witnessing rehearsals and contributing to the development of the work. In addition to the writing above by Platform Dramaturge, Cara Rose DeFabio, FACT/SF has also shared reflections from James Fleming (Creative Advisor), Maurya Kerr (Creative Advisor), Cara Rose DeFabio (Dramaturge), Liane Burns, (Co-Choreographeand Charles Slender-White (Co-Choreographer). In offering these thoughts, questions, observations, and impressions, FACT/SF aims to provide some insight into our creative process and a bit of context for Platform's conceptual considerations.]

Platform Poems by James Fleming

These poems were written during work-in-progress showings of Platform. The poems serve as a sort of looking glass into the progression of the performance, and seek to create a linguistic lineage or record of the movements. They remain unedited to more accurately portray the unique space between language and dance. 

Poem 1
Platform WIP: Charles Slender-White and Liane Burns
Written by James Fleming

Happy caramel redwood floors
barefoot, heat sitting on the chest
life an embarrassing introduction

the dancers drink diet coke and
seem to defy the languid uncertainty
of Sundays at noon

Balkans, 5 weeks
platform V.2
so much cooler in the US
to say this, the project premise
a hand brings up the foot legs splay
out as a splash of water
the film: us doing the piece
“this is true so far?”

indoors, outdoors, the setting
all is change, that’s it
today this section is all front
is not oriented to the cardinal
proscenium and
there is no projections
but other elements, what else
is missing?

relationship to the piece, each other,
to space/desire to do the
space, the main things
and we don’t know, without force,
our relationship to each other

different times, different places
our hope, more stuff, steps,
ok

a lofty industry to the music
the wind, the frown
10 tracks, new ones the
last ones
knowledge wreathed in
the sweat and delight
of bodies in motion

the frame is a central
wetness through the shirt
the frame is an idea

a body can flow in any
direction if the heart, the hip
is willing. knee to wood.
hand up swinging, sip, the neck
as a stork in hunger, how
mechanic the doings of nature.

heel up heel down
i had more grace than a queen
a rest at throne

tap atop the crown of the foot
nodding and the right hand
a foundation for the stoic frame:
a body can be a monolith
if one slows breathing to nadir

complex motion, limbs are fans
whipping up a froth into the air
roll the shoulders back
I saw charles steal a glance at liane
did she, did she ever know?

can you snatch a glance not for you outta the blue?

fetal rest a thesis on automation
the angle of the arms to
swinging pendulum of foot

the duet is a solo is a duet
hallowed on the ground
a sopratice beat
have you ever seen a hundred
women calling for a digital spectre?
I have
how does a machine cry?

the artifice suddenly the body
and the heat turned angry
the limbs routing a precise, stolid
measurement of form in motion

god the beat!
          liane stared

and charles stared
pinser/grab the foot as one
does a rifle, a cig, a glass of cab
the scarf of the gaze sweeps behind the shoulder
rearing up the haunch//

found the rotation again both
measuring the stroke of standstill
only evidence is the breathing

honey / steel / monks and a tenor preening the plunk
of rain from out their throats to cool the room
sad spectre: sound.

the body seeks the language of action, choice
O if movement ever was so sweet
        I would die to see them float
and light is a galeful bounding thought
to wash hands across the back, face, abdomen
straight legged mewling, pucker sop and grind
ply the cotton skin off to wrack the burning floorboards in sweat
light
       if only the body could sex the beat
pulled up from the floor as
to wrest in the air poised
as bird before flight

liane grabs charles’ shirt
they don the wet-wracked
cloth of the other and
the body seeks a renewed association
with the other

I begin to fall I begin to fall
belong - repeats and a mimicry
of semiotics, a semiotics of the body
seeks a shared motion
as each dancer
grabs at neck held, head
pressed to hand, bent
turned swept up to thigh
cheek breaking against the fist

liane smiles to a tune
turning about more quietly
I would wrack my body to speak to them
finding the pure sources
of meat at talk

charles follows suit, a moment
behind till his feet
slide out and he is gone

she is speaking
now to the comparative silence
we have all known this silence

of cement walls and the ambient
track of life outside passing

exits and I shudder
do I take up the mouth of the dancer
in flee

back to land through

an earlier choreography
of fans, swinging petals, rotating
through the root of the foot
to roll, spread, wire and spin
an entire room in the chordant
sweeping flush of wind

if i were to stay alive
if I were to stay
back back into you
raining a circle, and charles
sees her, liane standing ahead

a dancer breathes with their eyes
a look beginning in the base of the spine
to inform an entire ecosystem of musculature,
the skeleton, poised into the wild-toothed shot
or a blade of green reposed in morning frost

can you be, in dance, everything you wanted

how does meat mimic industrial clamour?
moments of great precision
are shared through a look
eyes searing the dialogue
of the body at work
      the body
hand over hand
the squeak at sweatpants on floor
water breaks
                   no diet coke
                  that’s it.

Poem 2
Platform Practice: Charles Slender-White and Liane Burns
Written by James Fleming

I.
when do I drop out

home:
white skin on grape silk
movement is clockwise, a round
a flow, precision
as it were the body a mechanism

monastic quality of cloth
tabard tabard
poses repeated perhaps why
open shoulder is it seductive
or ill-fitting, negligent

II.
motion continues between songs
which gives the impression the body
is not a mechanism to/of the song

the twirling is exact (thoughtful)
an immense equality (subsuming, like a pitched fall or a bed sheet lost to the wind)
the rotations
attend to the limbs
and mostly I am in awe.

they begin to respond,
bodies at talk
tka tka tka go birds of paradise
or clops of a heel on repeat
over gravel, a crunch or call
universally satisfying.

III.
adjacent seeming unison
repercussive
focus, an animal at performance

my attention drifts
and the music turns to mush
after all, synthetic clamor on repeat

regained my eye when they flushed out their limbs onto the floor
dashed as a loosed armful of wood or stones thrown down a shoot,
fetal, all was a reprieve. and suddenly silence.

IV.
movements between constant sounds useful -
babies sigh in silence between sobs, susurrations must
slip away if they are to remain a lure -
a certain physical solidity, no gravity to
dance prone as a lip of water lapping the shore

so heavy your body, charles.
they are sweating.

refrain - most noteworthy song?
silk wrinkles across wet skin
molting into primordial red

undertones of the skin, pink beneath
the skin is a compliment to purple.

complicated talk
when on the ground
on your back.

I thought momentarily on the project of sex

stillness almost always is welcome
love it on the chest.

V.
hymn - high, formalist
poses to pupa
a human form

all this humming
harmonies apparent
as they are in good food, sceneries, conversation

flapping of wind into calls,
scratching a terrible gasp
birth, language, la!

sticky slip about the ground
as skins is purged
the wind is a boiling, adolescent crush
ripping across my ear

a pain, things hurt (often, most places you go)
a penance, likely considering
a chrysalis left to the uplift
of a new body, limbs breathing
through a gentle extension to be
thrashed in rain, silence.

VI.
put into exact reflection
leaning is discovering
as in to a mirror, the self

hard gaze in the morning sun
the skin the skin
a bugle calls

kneeling prostrate, prim
chins turn toward chins
exchange of soaked shirts back onto the body

VII.
who casts glass casts
grass
far more particular exchange
of motions of language, sophisticated

I am thinking of whenever we (humans) decided
enough of grass huts it is time to sow seeds and
stroke metal

more and more words adjacent to rhyming, meaningless almost
but closeness
returns to unison.

who casts longest?
articulation of the face
skinned fruit, after all.
pound the belly, claimed
paws clapping walks in circles
liane's hair all down - what a sight!

VIII.
rain, breaks of matter
a whipping, a creaking.

I could be grieving.

why then to the neck,
core movements.

lost attention thought of sara's work

arms spread, legs spread

out and circular
I need other words than circular
to describe the ways a dancer can
inspire the cusp
of oranges, cherries, slices.

I had forgotten their clothes
there seems to be a great
deal of looking going on these days.

wild as the willow; as the
whicker in mom's hand on a mare;
as a sister's eye.

IX.
hi hi welcome
papers shuffling
they feel lucky

yes yes yes

affirmations abject rambling
agreeableness is rarely a quality worth its salt

so much hollow noise.
I'm going to touch you now

compulsive thought:
is the losing of virginity always like this?

susurrations of the phrase
you are great repeating
almost as if sand paper on the wind

what is happening - so many
between noises of the body
I am sickened with
this excitement of new movement.

X.
ululations of limbs in spin, howling
their breath louder:
eye contact leaves me exhausted, hungry.

motion drag between synchronicity
and complete breakage

how many times I felt that way
thank you charles, thank you
liane.

dance in silence
the breathing, slapping
brought me to the sounds
the speakers, love really,
growing so apart.

-
James Fleming is a poet and curator. He is particularly interested in the intersection of semiotics, performance, and digital art. James currently leads artistic partnerships across creative teams at Facebook, while curating new works with collaborator Kelly Lovemonster. 

[Editor's Note: Choreographers Liane Burns and Charles Slender-White invited Platform collaborators to write about their experiences witnessing rehearsals and contributing to the development of the work. These two poems, written by Creative Advisor, James Fleming, are in response to the Platform creative process. In addition to the poems above, FACT/SF has previously shared reflections from Slender-White and Maurya Kerr (Creative Advisor), and will be sharing writings from Cara Rose DeFabio (Dramaturge) and Liane Burns. In offering these thoughts, questions, observations, and impressions, FACT/SF aims to provide some insight into our creative process and a bit of context for Platform's conceptual considerations. ]

Critical Questions for Platform

Written by Maurya Kerr

I am a fan of meaning, coming into an understanding of essence. Questions, wondering. 

platform
noun

1 she spoke her brilliance from the platform: a raised level surface on which people can stand, a stage.

2 the left’s platform of compassion: policy, program, party line, manifesto, plan, principles, objectives, aims.

I stand on a platform to express my platform… of otherness? From the stage I pronounce a manifesto of difference?

Photo by Kegan Marling

Most of my observations of rehearsal were about what I perceived as otherness, honing in on its presence, wanting further exaggeration and exaltation. To become (not do) that other with specificity, to become that specific other so thoroughly and deeply as to leave no question, only confirmation.

So my overarching note is: “even more other.” Encourage the alien. How timely. (All of us, we who believe in freedom, are fundamentally other to the thuggishness of the great white right.)

Some questions:
How does otherness manifest into thoughts into body into life onto the platform of Platform?

How to not perform otherness, but instead be, in the performative space of the stage?

Does be-ing other evince in the gaze, the hold of the fingers, exemption from gravity or fatigue?

Am I noiseless?

Do I preempt music?

What do I see, and how do I see it?

Is my discernment haptic, sensate, visual, aural?

Am I quicksilver shape-shifter, able to experience and reveal centuries of textures in a second?

What is my connection to the other other beside me? Is it like an invisible umbilical cord?

Can our bodies reveal that cord thickening, waning, even disappearing?

Does that potential disappearance result in our loosening or fusion?

Photo by Kegan Marling

Are we similar or dissimilar in our otherness? (Is ‘similar otherness’ oxymoronic?)

How to foretell independence (separation) versus connectedness (unison)?

Are we already one, but just in ways the non-others can’t recognize?  

Is departure from unison revolutionary? Or is commitment to connectedness even more radical?

As a woman-gendered other, what does it mean to be in simultaneity with a male-gendered other?

(And although not the case here, as a black-raced other, what is simultaneity with whiteness? Is it even possible?)

As a woman-gendered other, can my witnessing of those witnessing my nakedness be subversive? (Do animals in a zoo gaze upon our flabby, unadorned skin with pity?)

How can I perform coupling and avoid sentimentality? How to gaze upon my chosen without falling into the trap of romance?

Why leave the space?

Why stay?

Why move when I could be still?

How to show departure from the small into expansiveness? Is that break violent, welcome, or both?

What does silence mean to me, the work? Is it loud, meaning does it effect, produce affect, alter? Does my otherness become more pronounced, profound in that quiet vastness?

When do I settle my gaze upon the witnesses? Is it only when I myself become witness (to them [witnessing me])?

Can I offer an otherness so deeply embodied that its witnesses become more emboldened in their own distinctiveness, so that otherness becomes the norm and a comfort, instead of a technique of distancing?

Am I ever no longer other?

How does my privilege inform that possibility of un-other-ing?

Maurya Kerr founded tinypistol after a twelve-year career with Alonzo King LINES Ballet. Her choreography has been honored by numerous awards, grants, and commissions, including a 2011 Hubbard Street National Choreographic Competition award, a 2012 CHIME grant, a 2014 University of Minnesota Cowles Visiting Artist grant, and selection to Whim W’Him’s 2015 Choreographic Shindig. She is an ODC artist-in-residence, on faculty with the LINES Ballet Education Programs, and recently completed her MFA through Hollins University.

[Editor's Note: Choreographers Liane Burns and Charles Slender-White invited Platform collaborators to write about their experiences witnessing rehearsals and contributing to the development of the work. In addition to the writing above by Creative Advisor, Maurya Kerr, FACT/SF will also be sharing reflections from James Fleming (Creative Advisor), Cara Rose DeFabio (Dramaturge), and Liane Burns. In offering these thoughts, questions, observations, and impressions, FACT/SF aims to provide some insight into our creative process and a bit of context for Platform's conceptual considerations.]

Platform is coming

Photo by Andrew Weeks

Written by Charles Slender-White

It’s time, good people, for another premiere!

Platform is coming your way June 2-3 as part of the 2017 Walking Distance Dance Festival at ODC! A contemporary dance duet that Liane Burns and I co-choreographed, Platform is inspired by and in response to Holly Herndon’s 2015 album of the same name. Over the two-year arc, from initial concept to premiere - Platform will have taken the efforts of more than 20 contributors, 5 community partners, 5 funders, thousands of hours of work, 9 work-in-progress showings, 1 international residency, and more than $35,000.

Platform is FACT/SF’s 31st work in 9 years, and the 36th work I’ve made since I started off on this crazy career. It’s also one of only two dances I’ve ever truly co-choreographed. The first one, The tents past tense, was created with Emily Woo Zeller in 2007 for The Fringe Club in Hong Kong.

Reflecting on more than a decade of dancing and dance making, I’m yet again struck by the enormous amount of work, time, talent, faith, energy, and support that goes into the creation of every dance. It’s always a wild ride, it always takes a lot of people, and embedded within every project is the hope that we’ll do something meaningful for the audience, for those people who courageously choose to spend an evening with us.

As we head into the Platform premiere, I thought it could be useful to provide some context around the work. Like every piece we’ve produced, this one has its own special backstory.

Liane and I began brainstorming about this duet right after Holly’s album came out, in May 2015. FACT/SF had just premiered Relief, I knew that Liane was interested in making choreography, and I had become increasingly desirous of working alongside another choreographer in the creation of a new work. I also wanted to perform more. I asked Liane if she wanted to make a duet together, and confessed that my proposal came with no secured funding, venue, or premiere date. Despite the circumstances, she was game.

In summer 2015, I went to Bulgaria and Serbia to do on-the-ground research for (dis)integration. While there, I made some significant connections with the local dance communities, and the wonderful folks at Derida Dance Center in Sofia invited me for a three week residency in fall 2016. I accepted the offer on the condition that I could bring a collaborator, confirmed with Liane that she was interested in going, and just like that, we had a creative residency to look forward to.

By the end of 2015, I had casually talked with a few people about the project. Christy Bolingbroke, who at the time was responsible for curating performances at ODC Theater, offered to include Platform in the 2017 Walking Distance Dance Festival and to formally commission the work from us. At this point in our timeline, about six months after the project was initially conceived, we had secured performance dates, a venue, and some financial support. Over the next 9 months, we would go on to gain further support from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Movement Research, the Trust for Mutual Understanding, CounterPulse, LEVYdance, and the Zellerbach Family Foundation. About a year after we had first talked about making Platform, we found ourselves with a fully-funded project, a production timeline, and a lot of work to do.

Platform .v1 - Photo by Kegan Marling

We decided to roll out Platform in a few different iterations, so that we could try out ideas, get feedback, and make edits. We decided to perform sections from Platform, billed as Platform v.1, in August 2016 as part of FACT/SF’s JuMP Program. In January 2016 we started working on the first section, and debuted it at a LEVYdance Salon. I spent February 2016 in Canada teaching, and after I got back we built the second section. Then I went to Australia for a month-long Countertechnique intensive, and just before the JuMP 2016 performances we finished the third section. That August, Platform v.1 premiered at CounterPulse in JuMP 2016, alongside Katerina Wong’s Speck.

At the end of September 2016, Liane and I flew to Bulgaria for what would become five weeks of living and working together. We lived in the same apartment, shared meals together, and discussed and worked on Platform every day from about 8a until 10p. These long working sessions were punctuated by larger conversations about life, art, love, and politics, hangouts with the local dancers and our new friends, and short trips to go hike a mountain or see a nearby city. Liane and I finally got to know each other as people, after working together as colleagues for the previous 4 years. While in Sofia, we also taught 15 classes and made a new work on local dancers, traveled to the Black Sea, to Hungary, and to Greece, and picked up additional work teaching and performing in Serbia as part of Belgrade’s annual Kondenz Festival. We premiered Platform v.2 in Sofia at the end of October.

Upon returning from the Balkans in November 2016, we had a working rough draft for about 70% of Platform.

In December 2016, we held a work-in-progress showing at ODC, and invited numerous colleagues to check it out - this was the first time we really engaged our larger creative team. Since then, the production elements have really started to come together. We have our gorgeous costumes in hand, we completed an 8-location video shoot, we finished choreographing the work this past Wednesday, we’ve started installing our set, and I’m currently in the process of editing together our video footage which will accompany the live performances. This upcoming Sunday, we’ll start hanging our projectors and lights.

From the beginning, we knew that making a duet on ourselves would bring with it the significant challenge of not being able to ‘see’ the work from the outside. So, we invited a veritable dream team of collaborators to help us make Platform.

Cara Rose DeFabio is our dramaturge, we’ve got styling by Monique Jenkinson and costumes by Keriann Egeland, Mark McBeth did our videography, and Darl Andrew Packard and Delayne Medoff are collaborating together on lights and the show’s technical components. We’ve had helpful feedback from more than a dozen of our colleagues, and Maurya Kerr and James Fleming, our Creative Advisors, have seen the work throughout its development and have offered key insights and suggestions along the way. Both Maurya and James have crafted written responses to our work, and we’ll be posting them over the next two weeks alongside perspectives and commentary from Cara and Liane. And, on May 24th at 6p, FACT/SF will be doing its first ever Facebook live - an interview between Jeanne Pfeffer, Liane, and myself.

Two weeks out from the premiere, we hope that these writings, thoughts, and conversations about Platform help to provide a bit of useful context and information about this project, which has been a major part of FACT/SF’s work since 2015.

I’ll see you soon,
~Charlie
Artistic Director, FACT/SF

Charles Slender-White is the Artistic Director of FACT/SF. He has created dozens of original dance works, is a Certified Countertechnique Teacher, and has performed and taught across North America, Europe, Russia, and in Hong Kong and Australia. Slender-White started his career with Provincial Dances Theatre (Yekaterinburg, Russia), and received his BA in English Literature and Dance & Performance Studies from UC Berkeley.