don't stop til ya get enough

Charles Slender is a San Francisco-based international dance artist who has performed, made choreography, and taught in the United States, Russia, Hong Kong, Poland, Latvia, Mexico, and France. He is the founder and Artistic Director of FACT/SF - a contemporary dance-theater company based in San Francisco. His choreography, with commissions from art galleries, universities, and dance companies, has been described as "balancing on the edge of kitsch and something more serious...paradoxical and interesting" (Natalia Kurumova, dancenet.ru) and as "sexy...vicious...bizarre" (Ariel Soto, SF Bay Guardian). In addition to his work as a choreographer, Charles teaches contemporary dance technique at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center in Berkeley, California and continues to perform, most recently in works by Jesse Hewit, Laura Arrington, and Todd Courage. He was also visiting faculty at the American Dance Festival in 2009 and 2007.

A California native, Charles has continued to work both at home and abroad with commissions by Electric Works Gallery (San Francisco), Dialogue Dance Company (Kostroma, Russia), Acid Rain (Chelyabinsk, Russia), and the Yekaterinburg University of the Humanities (YUH, Yekaterinburg, Russia). In 2007, The Fringe Club (Hong Kong) presented three new works Charles developed in collaboration with Emily Woo Zeller. In 2006 and 2007, he performed with Provincial Dances Theatre in Yekaterinburg, Russia, under the direction of Tatiana Baganova. With Provincial Dances he toured internationally, taught company and master classes, and collaborated on the creation of new works.

Charles graduated with honors from the University of California, Berkeley, with degrees in English Literature and Dance and Performance Studies. While at Berkeley, Charles received the Chancellor's Eisner Award for "highest achievement in the creative arts" and the Hickman Undergraduate Scholarship for "continued excellence and achievement in dance".