Gestural Economies and Production Pedagogies in Deaf West’s Spring Awakening

Sarah Wilbur is an Associate Professor of the Practice in Dance with a secondary appointment in Theater Studies.

She is a cross-sector dance artist and dance and performance scholar whose research translates the complex embodied and economic entanglements at play in sustaining enabling environments for dance and embodied performance. Combining structural and discourse analysis of the institutional policies that artists inherit with on-the-ground ethnographic observations and testimonials from those who animate local dance work worlds, her contributions reveal "how money motivates the movement" of artists, and the armies of people who organize on dance's behalf. Sarah's research, teaching and creative work together highlight the relationship between art that gets performed and dimensions of artmaking that remain hidden, suppressed, or ignored. And it is her primary goal to credit arts labor and laborers in all aspects of her professional work.

Sarah's first book, entitled: Funding Bodies: Five Decades of Dance Making at the National Endowment for the Arts was a historical account of the shaping influence of US federal arts funding policies on the aesthetic and organizational practices of generations of US dance artists and organizers. Funding Bodies was a finalist for three book prizes from the Dance Studies Association (the de la Torre Bueno Award, de la Torre Bueno First Book Award and Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize) and was a finalist for the Freedly Award from the Theatre Library Association in 2022. She was recently awarded EXPLORE! seed funding from Duke's Office of Research and Innovation to undertake ethnographic field work for her second book project, Prescribing Dance, which looks at the shaping influence of the US health industry on the working lives of dance artists in three "secondary" US cities.

She has published ethnographic accounts of arts labor and infrastructure in theater, dance, and performance studies including the Journal of Emerging Dance Scholarship, Performance Research, TDR/The Drama Review, Oxford Handbook of Dance and Competition, and the Futures of Dance Studies edited collection. After completing two terms as a Director on the Board of the Dance Studies Association (DSA), Sarah continues to serve the fields of theater, dance, and performance studies as co-editor a book series from the University of Texas Press entitled Arts in Context: Critical Performance Infrastructures, which encourages historical and ethnographic re-tellings of performing arts ecologies rom humanistic and intersectional perspectives.

Sarah's research is strongly informed by her ongoing work as a dance artist and collaborator working across the  contexts of concert dance, theatre, musical theater, opera, K-12 education, social services, health care and veterans’ affairs. Her graduate and undergraduate courses at Duke center embodied knowledge as a powerful force that both creates and reflects cultural values. Current offerings include: Theories of Corporeality (G), Movement in Question: Introduction to Dance Studies (UG), Art as Work: Valuing Labor in the Arts (UG/G), Artists in Healthcare: Collaborations and Complexities (UG-Service Learning), Research Methods in Dance (G), Capstone Seminar: Research Methods in Dance Studies and Choreographic Performance (UG), Pedagogies of Dance (UG/G), MFA Proseminar: Professional Practices (G); Sarah's creative practice/production courses include: Critique (G), Interdisciplinary Performance (UG/G), Improvisation (UG), and Modern Dance (UG). Sarah's pedagogical approach invites students to entertain the irreconciliable gaps that exist between textuality/language and embodiment; across these offerings, student knowledge takes written and enacted forms to demonstrate a honed awareness of each student's embodied, histories, experiences, values and daily choice making. 

Sarah's service to academic arts research and community cultural engagement is alive and ongoing. In addition to crafting an ethnographic catalogue of arts and health interventions, Sarah presently facilitates participatory dance programs in community health contexts and serves as the Arts Sector Lead for Dementia Inclusive, Inc., where she works alongside professional and community elder abuse advocates to embedd lifelong lifelines to cultural expression with Durham-area artists and adults living with cognitive decline. She is a proud particicpant on a Faculty Advisory Board currently developing a Disability Studies and Health Humanities Minor, and affiliated faculty for the ReImagining Medicine (ReMed) program at the Kenan Institute of Ethics. From 2021-2024, she represented arts-based knowledge as a member of the Trinity Curriculum Development Committee charged with overhauling the Trinity core undergraduate curriculum. She also works closely with Dean Bennett and Dean Ching on strategies to expand undergraduate arts and humanities recruitment at Duke.

Research Interests:
1. Dance, theater, performance, and cultural studies
2. Histories of US arts policy, funding, patronage, and economic forces that shape the arts
3. Workplace ethnography/cultural labor studies
4. Theories of institutionality, intersectionality, and corporeality
5. Arts and health, health humanities, critical medical humanities and disability arts