About SLIPPAGE

SLIPPAGE:PERFORMANCE|CULTURE|TECHNOLOGY, an interdisciplinary research group led by Thomas F. DeFrantz, explores connections between performance and emergent technology in the service of theatrical storytelling and the telling of alternative histories. Founded in 2003 at MIT, SLIPPAGE produces productions, conferences, workshops, and artist exchanges that mark social progress via research in performance.

SLIPPAGE embraces diversity of identity, practice, and methodology in each of its projects. We believe that social change arrives alongside the interventions of creative practice. We focus on constructing alternative histories that value the experiences of people of color, queers, the economically-disadvantaged, and the stories of minoritarian lives lived beyond their seeming limitations. Our values as a research group are toward anti-racist, proto-feminist, queer-affirming possibilities.

SLIPPAGE performance work includes original musical composition for a ballet performed by Dance Theater of Harlem (past-carry-forward, 2015, chor. Thaddeus and Tanya Wideman Davis); a live greenscreen performance fastPASTdance commissioned by the Detroit Institute for the Arts and reperformed at Crystal Bridges Museum (2016),  “...these borders that keep me down,” an interactive design performance exploration of intersections between political gerrymandering and redlining practices, created at the invitation of the Moogfest, 2018, and Homemade Me, a tribute to Nina Simone at the North Carolina Museum of Art (2019).

About Thomas F. DeFrantz

Thomas F. DeFrantz directs SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology, a research group that explores emerging technology in live performance applications. DeFrantz received the 2017 Outstanding Research in Dance award from the Dance Studies Association. DeFrantz believes in our shared capacity to do better, and to engage our creative spirit for a collective good that is anti-racist, anti-homophobic, proto-feminist, and queer affirming. DeFrantz acted as a consultant for the Smithsonian Museum of African American Life and Culture, contributing concept and a voice-over for a permanent installation on Black Social Dance that opened with the museum in 2016.

Books include Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture (2004), Black Performance Theory, co-edited with Anita Gonzalez (2014), Choreography and Corporeality: Relay in Motion, co-edited with Philipa Rothfield (2016), the Routledge Companion to African American Theater and Performance co-edited with Kathy Perkins, Sandra Richards, and Renee Alexander Craft (2018); and the Oxford Encyclopedia of Black Dance (forthcoming 2023). Creative: Queer Theory! An Academic Travesty commissioned by the Theater Offensive of Boston and the Flynn Center for the Arts; fastDANCEpast, created for the Detroit Institute for the Arts; reVERSE-gesture-reVIEW commissioned by the Nasher Museum in response to the work of Kara Walker, January, 2017. Recent teaching: University of the Arts Mobile MFA in Dance; ImPulsTanz; New Waves Institute; faculty at Hampshire College, Stanford, Yale, MIT, NYU, University of Nice. In 2013, working with Takiyah Nur Amin, he founded the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance, a growing consortium of 300 researchers.