Making The Field Work

May 9, 2025

BY CHARLIE SLENDER-WHITE

Note: This article was first published in Stance on Dance’s spring/summer 2025 print issue. To learn more, visit stanceondance.com/print-publication.

I started FACT/SF in 2008 as a place to make dances. I wanted to choreograph my own work, but I also knew that I couldn’t get jobs dancing for the choreographers and companies I was most excited about at the time (William Forsythe, Pina Bausch, Anouk Van Dijk, Emio Greco, DV8, etc.). So, really, FACT/SF was founded both so that I could make work and so that I could continue performing.

Prior to starting the company, I spent a few years dancing for other choreographers. While amazing in so many ways, some of these previous jobs also showed me the damage that rough work environments can do to dancers. I wanted FACT/SF to be different, and to instead function as a place where people (including me) were actually happy to work. This would become FACT/SF’s founding principle.

My hypothesis was that a supportive and fulfilling workplace would allow dancers to thrive and be happy. And, that those thriving, happy dancers would be able to work at their full potential while helping the workplace become even more supportive and fulfilling. I imagined a mutually beneficial, cyclical, and reciprocal relationship between the company and the people who worked there. I thought that the artists’ experience at work was paramount, and that everything should revolve around that. It took some time to figure out how to really do this, but the intention was there from the beginning.

In 2008, when I moved to San Francisco to start FACT/SF, the local field was thriving with energy, artists, and opportunities. I was 24 years old and amongst a large cohort of other young people making work and performing in each other’s work. There was also a sizable group of midcareer artists who were producing regularly, and more established choreographers making larger scale works. There were lots of venues to work in, numerous media outlets, and many dance writers covering the scene. San Francisco wasn’t expensive then, and housing was relatively cheap. Artists could afford to spend time making art, there were many people to make it with, a range of places to share it, incubator programs, tiered opportunities, a decent amount of funding, and an engaged public.

By 2013, FACT/SF had gained some momentum and visibility. Dancers wanted to work with the company, my choreography was generally well received, grants were coming in, individuals were making donations, and things were going well. The robust Bay Area arts environment from 2008 had allowed me to thrive, and I began to see an interconnected relationship between FACT/SF and the field, and this seemed to mirror the relationship I saw between FACT/SF dancers and FACT/SF. Maybe this idea of mutually beneficial, cyclical reciprocity could apply to the company’s outward facing goals and priorities just as it had to the inward facing ones. I began to wonder: What else could FACT/SF do? What do artists in the field need to get started? What do they need to keep going? What do I need and what am I interested in? What else is possible?

This shift from inside to outside prompted a strategic planning retreat with Jeanne Pfeffer (former company manager, current board president) so that she and I could brainstorm together. That retreat gave birth to JuMP, a commissioning program for early career choreographers. JuMP successfully launched in 2014, and this kicked off a new, more outward-facing era for me and the company.

In 2015, I met the leadership team from the LA Contemporary Dance Company. We shared a desire to tour and together designed a reciprocal touring model called PORT. In 2016, FACT/SF ran the last year of JuMP and in 2017, PORT was launched.

FACT/SF had also been producing a summer workshop since 2013, and in 2018 it occurred to me that a dance festival could happen in conjunction with the workshop. The festival could be a place for workshop teachers to share choreography, and a place for workshop students to see work. That same year, CounterPulse and Jess Curtis asked me if FACT/SF could provide monetary support for a project they were producing.  And around the same time, a colleague asked if FACT/SF could be their fiscal sponsor. I said yes to all of this because I was curious about where it could lead, and optimistic that this might be a way to have a larger and more beneficial impact on the field itself.

By 2022, it was becoming clear that each of these programs were essentially aimed at the same thing: helping the field function better by increasing opportunities and resources for fellow artists. I decided to organize this set of programs more intentionally and began calling them FACT/SF Fieldwork.

Fieldwork currently includes:

• Winter Dance Salon (a work-in-progress showing)
• Winter Dance Lab (a Countertechnique workshop)
• PORT (a reciprocal touring program)
• Fiscal Sponsorship (there are currently nine fiscal sponsees)
• Membership (members get to attend FACT/SF company class for free)
• Summer Dance Festival (two programs, two weekends, six to seven choreographers from across the US)
• Summer Dance Lab (a Countertechnique workshop)
• Production Support Grants ($1,000 grants to Bay Area artists producing their own work)

The programs are not organized in a hierarchy but rather a set of offerings that an artist can move through depending on their own interests and of-the-moment needs. Some years an artist might have a shorter work that they don’t want to self-produce, so they’re interested in sharing it via the festival. Sometimes an artist is self-producing a larger work and they need money to help make it happen. Sometimes an artist needs a fiscal sponsor and someone to chat with about their plans, budget, fundraising strategies, etc. Sometimes an artist wants to take a workshop or share a work in progress.

Overall, I’d say that what FACT/SF succeeds at via Fieldwork is putting the artist at the center. It’s about building, supporting, and sustaining community one relationship at a time, and over time. As a result, artists feel respected, seen, and connected. Fieldwork has grown into its own microecology within the larger performing arts landscape.

Something else that makes Fieldwork unique, and uniquely successful, is that artists are paid $30/hour for their time applying. I see the relationships between compensation, labor, equity, time, and respect. Paying artists to apply is one way that these relationships are recognized. FACT/SF is small and the company budget is too. That FACT/SF can run the various Fieldwork programs and pay artists for their labor applying models for larger organizations that it is, in fact, possible. While this effort does good short term, it is my larger hope that it will also cause larger positive shifts in the field beyond anything I could accomplish with FACT/SF alone.

FACT/SF, and by extension, Fieldwork, succeed because of one core operating principle: artists and artists’ needs are at the center of everything the company does and is prioritized in every financial and programming decision. I have recently had a few key realizations that sound (and are) quite simple, and that undergird all this work:

• Artists must be at the center of program design for a program to work well for an artist.
• Values, intentions, limitations, scope, etc. must be fully communicated in advance to set expectations appropriately.
• One must embrace the reality that their effort might not be successful and believe that they will have a chance to try again.
• Relationships are everything.
• Money is a means to an end and should not be a guiding principle.
• People talk to each other, and that’s a great thing. If you’re doing a great job, people talk about that. If you’re doing a horrible job, people talk about that, too. Reputation matters.
• Program design can be thought of as an iterative, responsive choreographic practice.

When I started FACT/SF 17 years ago, the performing arts scene in the Bay Area felt fecund, vibrant, and so alive, and my young generation was energetic, optimistic, prolific, and a bit wild. Those feel like the good old days!

Since then, I’ve seen a few larger cycles in the field of venues opening and closing, companies starting and folding, artists coming to town and leaving. The arts scene expands, contracts, and oscillates between fallow and abundant periods.

I know it seems to many like the Bay Area arts scene is currently in an extended period of contraction. Theaters are closing, funding is shifting, media outlets have all but vanished, housing remains expensive, and opportunities are scarcer. This reality has led some choreographers and companies to circle the wagons and adopt an austerity mindset. It has led others, though, to a place of expansive thinking about how systems and models can be totally reimagined to better serve the artists and the field. From this perspective, the current situation in the Bay Area is one of transition and potential rather than one of collapse and dismay.

The challenge, of course, is to be able to weather the current storm and to accept the potential risks that come with any significant change. More organizations will go away, and others will emerge. I remain optimistic that the future will look different and better than the past, and that sensitive, stubborn, and savvy artists will lead the way.

I want the field to function better, I want there to be more opportunities for artists, I want dancers and choreographers to have everything they need to do their work, and I want to be part of making that happen. I feel like Fieldwork is one way that this change is being realized, that new paths and possibilities are being forged, and that the future is bright.

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Charlie Slender-White is the Artistic Director of FACT/SF in San Francisco, CA. To learn more, visit factsf.org.