FACT/SF Hunts for Relief at San Francisco's Joe Goode Annex

It's no use trying to guess what Charles Slender-White will come up with next. Since its founding in 2008, his agile contemporary dance troupe, FACT/SF, has defied pigeon-holing. "Maddening" and "thought-provoking" are words that crop up often, both in reference to his dance theatre pieces and his more abstract work.Slender-White's background in dance is unusual even by the eclectic standards of the Bay Area, which is fertile ground for makers of contemporary dance and dance theatre, and whose audiences are sympathetic to experiments.

Trained as a gymnast and a springboard diver through his teens (he lettered at Cal), he started taking dance seriously at age 19, as a sophomore in UC Berkeley's dance program, under Marni Thomas Wood, distinguished alumna of the Martha Graham Dance Company. While the program gave him a rigorous grounding in Graham and Cunningham technique, he got his ballet fix at Berkeley Ballet Theater.

Summers at the American Dance Festival in North Carolina brought him in contact with Tatiana Baganova, who whisked him off to dance with her Provincial Dances Theatre, a pioneering modern dance company in Russia. So, straight out of college, the inexperienced Slender-White found himself in the industrial city of Yekaterinburg the first and only American dancer in a company that was heroically fusillading centuries-old traditions of classical dance in Russia. He recalls his two years with the company as inspiring and grueling, surrounded by the highest caliber dancers and immersed in the revolutionary repertoire that Baganova was introducing to Russian audiences.

He was particularly proud of having danced in Baganova's updating of the 1923 Nijinska-Stravinsky classic, Les Noces, and in her surrealist Wings at Tea, inspired by a Chagall painting. The latter involved flying pigs, women made up like dolls, with massive coiffures, men in business suits, both sexes smoking cigarettes like chimneys. They danced the samba with buckets of water, into which the women dipped their hair, then flung their wet hair around. Which all made for treacherous partnering.

Lured back to California's sunnier climes, Slender-White formed his own company, and in 2012, in a fitting nod to his Russian influences, he took FACT/SF on tour to eight cities across Russia, with the support of the U.S. State Department.