slowdanger is a multidisciplinary performance entity founded in Pittsburgh, PA (2013) by co-artistic directors and life partners, anna thompson and taylor knight. Creating work at the intersection of dance, sound, and technology, the name, slowdanger, was inspired by the Pittsburgh road signs that signify a demolition of old surfaces to build upon the remnants. We return to this overarching concept cyclically in performance creation; rebuilding, slowing down to examine the remains and reimagine new futures.
Crawling out of the fractured infrastructure of Appalachian and Mid-Atlantic Rust belts, slowdanger collides sound, body, and media to generate a multidisciplinary continuum. In sound, the body exists live and in memory through the recording and amplification of noise, beats and ephemera captured from a bodily enmeshment with technology. In dance, the body and its somatic technology is the meeting ground for metabolizing politics into form, feeling, and archetype. In visual and scenic, the space is a body, an extension of flesh rendered visible in its absence. As a queer non-binary entity, we challenge fixed understandings of the body, performance, identity, virtuosity, and embodiment, reframing performance as a method for grappling with uncertainty, failure, absence, and the unknown. Through actively reorienting the body and its relationship to power structures, architecture, conflict, emotion and sound we deconstruct gendered binaries in how audiences view and engage with performance and performers. This queer world-building practice creates form and instigates movement through situating work in a defined sense of place, sensation and embodied action.
slowdanger’s foundational goal is to cultivate further embodied intelligence within a largely disembodied society caused by the dominance of white supremacy and patriarchal systems. Our process emphasizes interdisciplinary exchange as a method for complicating social relations. Through collaborative devising processes, interdisciplinary dramaturgy, advisory committees, and open-level workshops we invite audiences into active engagement and decentralize hierarchical authorship. We create experimental and unexpected entry points for audiences to connect with themselves, and question how their body overlaps with broader social, energetic, systemic and environmental spheres.
Our performance work has been shared internationally in venues ranging from proscenium theaters and galleries to nightclubs and dive bars. From engaging a multi-channel sound installation to teaching dance at a queer rave in the woods, we transform our shape to adapt to a variety of different containers. In addition to creating performance works, we compose sound scores for theater, dance, film, and virtual reality projects; perform and tour as musicians and DJs; and act as interdisciplinary embodiment consultants for artists and researchers across disciplines. Spanning these contexts, slowdanger approaches performance as a practice of asking questions rather than seeking answers, embracing experimentation, instability, and the imagining of worlds not yet fully possible.