"There is nothing else as satisfying to me in the world. I was raised in a politically conscious family and this has been my way to feel that I'm contributing back. There is a justification for being alive when I am working on a project. I've also had the luxury of never feeling bored, and that to me is the core."

How does a wordsmith convert her talent for language into a profession in the world of dance and performance art? Ask Deborah Slater and she'll come up with some surprising answers. She started taking a dance class one day at the small liberal arts college she was attending. After that first class, she was hooked. A self-proclaimed late bloomer in the field of dance, she didn't start until she was in her 20s, Ms. Slater simply fell in love with her art. However, she wanted to incorporate spoken language into the non-verbal world of dance. To accomplish this artistic leap, she eventually merged her two great passions into, for lack of a better term, performance art.

Last year, Slater performed a work called Passing as...The Mathematics of Being. She did a series of interviews, with people from all walks of life, to discover how they perceived themselves in relation to the culture. Slater used key words from the interviews as the source of movement for her dancers. She pared down the interview/stories to poems and included them in the piece as well. Is her work accessible to the uninitiated? "I have always attempted to construct layered work so that on the most obvious level there's something that you can watch. You don't have to have years of training to get some enjoyment out of my work."

Artists living in San Francisco have to fight hard to make a living. "Being an artist means poverty line living for the most part. The culture has made some decisions about how it funds people who do what I do." In addition to the work itself, she persists in the business because of her commitment to other artists. "I want to keep the older dancers going longer because they bring a kind of a maturity that I value beyond everything. The young performers who work with them learn exponentially from the experience and become much better performers." Her studio is a haven for artists at every stage of their careers. Slater is the creative force that connects the dancers together, and in turn, connects this community of dancers with the Bay Area community at large.

To find out more about Deborah's theater group and their upcoming performances, go to http://www.artofthematter.org.