STORY BALLET to Premiere at Eisemann Center
slowdanger's Eisemann Edge Initiative grant recipient fuses technology and contemporary dance with a surreal 65-minute performance.
What happens when a nearly 200-year-old musical masterpiece collides with holograms, motion capture, laser walls, and contemporary dance? Audiences will find out this September when the multidisciplinary performance entity slowdanger presents the world premiere of STORY BALLET at the Charles W. Eisemann Center for Performing Arts in Richardson, Texas, September 25 - 27, 2026.
The surreal 65-minute dance theater work is the 2026 recipient of the Eisemann Edge Initiative grant, which supports projects exploring the intersection of technology and the performing and visual arts. The initiative, managed by Communities Foundation of Texas, selected slowdanger for STORY BALLET because of its ambitious integration of technology, contemporary performance, and immersive storytelling.
STORY BALLET takes inspiration from Hector Berlioz’s landmark 1830 composition, Symphonie Fantastique, but audiences won't encounter the familiar story in quite the way they might expect.
Where the original work centers on an artist haunted by an obsessive love for a woman, STORY BALLET reimagines the narrative as “dancing with the ghost of one’s self.” Five performers embody different facets of a central character, moving through the symphony's five movements as they confront obsession, memory, identity, fragmentation, and their past selves.
“STORY BALLET asks what it means to be haunted by yourself,” said Taylor Knight and Anna Thompson, co-founders of slowdanger. “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.”
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. STORY BALLET’s dramaturgy is also informed by the dancers’ experience and these conversations create a direct exchange between the artists onstage and the artists who call North Texas home.
slowdanger is also hosting a series of community workshops for dancers titled “Dancing with the Ghosts of One's Self.” The workshops invite participants to explore the relationship between movement, memory, identity, and the parts of ourselves that remain with us long after an experience has passed.
Through movement-based practices, conversation, and improvisation, participants will be invited to consider their own “ghosts”—the memories, identities, expectations, relationships, and experiences that shape how they inhabit their bodies.
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