slowdanger Named 2026 Eisemann Edge Initiative Recipients with Support from Agora Artists
Introducing STORY BALLET
September 25-27 | 📍Eisemann Center
Fri 9/25 & Sat 9/26 | 7:30 PM
Sun 9/27 | 3:00 PM
dancing with the ghost of ourselves
This workshop is a STORY BALLET companion workshop, facilitated by slowdanger directors taylor knight and anna thompson.
September 19 | 📍The University of Texas at Dallas
The workshop explores the ephemerality of movement expression, how it relates to our state of being, and the ways our bodies interact with imagery, space and the question, “what holds us together?” Participants will be guided through somatic based improvisation and devised movement modalities. The goal for this workshop is to allow movement to be a key for unlocking stored and resonant memory within our flesh and bones. These memories, images, emotions will become tools for choreographic play, research and collective movement creation. This workshop is an open level practice for any level of mover but can also be made specific to advanced movement practitioners.
Agora Artists is proud to support slowdanger as 2026 Eisemann Edge Initiative recipients.
Through a fiscal sponsorship with Agora Artists, the Pittsburgh-based performance duo received the Eisemann Edge award from Communities Foundation of Texas and the Charles W. Eisemann Center.
The Eisemann Edge Initiative uplifts projects exploring the intersection of technology and the performing and visual arts. With this support, slowdanger will develop and premiere STORY BALLET in Fall 2026 in Richardson, TX.
Meet slowdanger
-
taylor knight and anna thompson are co-founding artistic directors of slowdanger, a multidisciplinary performance organism founded in Pittsburgh, PA in 2013. slowdanger uses systematic approaches to movement, technology, sound, queer world building and ontological examination to produce performance work, utilizing process based practice to delve into circular life patterning including effort, transformation, and death. From engaging a multi-channel sound installation to teaching dance at a queer rave in the woods, they transform their shape to adapt to a variety of different containers. slowdanger has performed across North America and Europe in venues ranging from proscenium theater and gallery to nightclub and dive bar. The name, slowdanger, was inspired by the Pittsburgh road construction signs that signify a demolition of old surfaces to build upon the remnants. They return to this overarching concept cyclically in performance creation; rebuilding, slowing down to examine the remains and re-imagine new futures. Recently, slowdanger was awarded a NPN Creation Fund, New Music USA’s New Music Organization Fund, the inaugural Texas A&M New Work Development Artist in Residence, and Jacob’s Pillow Pillow Lab for the creation of STORY BALLET that will premier in fall 2026. In 2026, slowdanger’s performance methods chapter “Embodying the Apocalypse: spectral strategies for creating performance at the end of the world” will be published in the Routledge Handbook for Health and Environment Humanities.