About Us

SLIPPAGE: PERFORMANCE | CULTURE | TECHNOLOGY

SLIPPAGE is a think-tank, an interdisciplinary performance research group that explores connections between performance, history, theater, and emergent technology. Under the direction of professor Thomas F. DeFrantz, SLIPPAGE builds on the urgent need for intentional, critical, and timely interaction among artists, researchers, audiences, engineers, faculty, students, and general publics in the arts. Located on the Evanston campus of Northwestern University, SLIPPAGE has a special imperative to organize cultural events that help us all imagine how creativity and expression operate at the core of artistry, humanity, technology, and social possibilities. SLIPPAGE produces conferences, symposia, workshops, and artist exchanges in events that mark social progress via research in performance. Recognized globally, SLIPPAGE remains at the forefront of innovative thinking.

SLIPPAGE collaborates with leading artists drawn from a wealth of creative practices: polymedia artists, choreographers, performers, theorists, historians, directors, technologists. Highlights of the first seven years include a “Best of the New” award from the Boston Globe (2005); grants for new creation from the National Performance Network for Project Development and Touring; Collaboration with the University of Texas at Dallas to develop wearable technologies for dance theater applications; and commissions from Gibney Dance (2020). 
 
SLIPPAGE embraces diversity of identity, practice, and methodology in each of its projects. We believe that we are the strongest group when we each bring particular skills to the table and to the stage. Our projects have engaged global audiences in productions and performances staged in India, France, Japan, South Africa; workshops in Botswana and Canada; and academic presentations in Australia, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Peru, Poland, Portugal, South Korea, South Africa, and Sweden. In all of this work, we intend to enlarge the way that creative communications and our global environment interact.