Taylor Knight, top right, and Anna Thomoson, bottom left, of slowdanger explore what it means to be haunted by yourself in Story Ballet
RICH LOPEZ | A&E Writer
Rich@DallasVoice.com
The juxtaposition of 200-year-old classical music against a futuristic landscape of lasers and holograms is a compelling idea. Then the collective slowdanger throws in a whole other layer of queerness and introspection to make it even more beyond. Tie it all together through movement and dance, and that might just summarize Story Ballet.
slowdanger premieres the multidisciplinary performance Sept. 25-27 at the Eisemann Center as part of the venue’s Eisemann Edge Initiative.
“Story Ballet asks what it means to be haunted by yourself,” Taylor Knight and Anna Thompson, co-founders of slowdanger, explained in the press release announcing the show. “We’re interested in the ways our bodies carry memory, identity, obsession, labor and transformation. Technology gives us a way to make some of those invisible experiences visible.”
The work is the 2026 recipient of the Eisemann Edge Initiative Grant, which supports projects that take the intersection of technology and the performing and visual arts into new pathways. The initiative, managed by Communities Foundation of Texas, selected Story Ballet for its ambitious integration of technology, performance and immersive storytelling.
This has been a long journey for Knight and Thompson.
“This piece actually entered our brains over 10 years ago. In addition to being dancers and choreographers, we also perform as musicians and DJs,” Thompson explained. “A friend of ours who was managing our music is also a classically trained pianist and we were talking with him about really wanting to do a slowdanger narrative ballet.”
What they didn’t want to do was use the usual signatures of the art form. So no Swan Lake or Giselle for these two.
Thompson continued, “Those have been reinvented many times. We still wanted the classical music connotation, though. So he suggested Symphony Fantastique.”
Written by French composer Hector Berlioz, the 1830 symphony is an autobiographical piece that details his self-destruction through passion, hallucinations and unrequited love for a woman.
Not wanting to stick to the exact storyline, slowdanger gave it a glow-up for today’s audiences — or perhaps for themselves.
“We had this desire to queer the canon, so we asked ourselves, how can we use accessible entry points such as a famous symphony to offer people a door into a familiar world so that they feel comfortable going on a journey that might be unfamiliar to them,” Thompson said.
Instead of chasing a woman as in the original, Story Ballet reimagines the narrative as dancing with the ghost of one’s self.
Five performers including Knight and Thompson move through the symphony’s five sections as they confront obsession, memory, identity, fragmentation and their past selves.
Thompson and Knight identify as queer and nonbinary, and they opted to bring those aspects of themselves to the piece for an entirely different take on Berlioz while still maintaining its parallels. And the majority of the other performers are queer, too. For Knight, this automatically makes for a queering of traditional gender roles.
But as the piece explores past selves that haunt the current form, the queer parallel hints at the notion of a closeted persona.
“What is our own relationship to our own ghosts and the things that are haunting us?” Knight posited. “This piece has a lot of individual connection for each dancer to their own stories and their queerness, but there’s also this sort of shared collective story within the piece and that also feels very queer to me — of finding space for individuality.”
Performing in North Texas has an added purpose for Knight who grew up in Dallas.
“This really reminds me of my life. I grew up in the area until I was 18,” they said. “I didn’t really have the language or discover what my queerness was until I was an adult, so I’m also discovering there’s a lot of my history coming up and a lot of what it means to connect with family.
“I was masked as a young person, and this piece really showed me that because we dove back into those masks and those histories.”
That’s just one of two full circle moments for slowdanger’s piece and these Eisemann performances.
This work was developed during their 2024 residency at Texas A&M.
“Developing this work specifically in Texas and especially in such a tumultuous political climate, I think it’s just a testament to how incredibly resilient queer communities are inside of Texas inside of spaces,” Thompson said. “I think that’s so meaningful for us and has felt serendipitous, and, yeah, this is almost a full-circle moment.”
As part of the engagement, slowdanger is partnering with Dallas-based arts organization Agora Artists to listen to the experiences of local dancers in Dallas and Richardson.
Together, the organizations are conducting interviews with members of the North Texas dance community about their experiences with mental health, identity, perception, physical labor and the emotional realities of being a dancer.
slowdanger is also hosting Dancing with the Ghosts of One’s Self, a series of community workshops for dancers to explore the relationship between movement, memory and identity.
For tickets, visit EisemannCenter.com. To register for the dance workshops, visit slowdangerslowdanger.com.