Gestural Economies and Production Pedagogies in Deaf West’s Spring Awakening
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2016-06
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In Deaf West’s Broadway revival of Spring Awakening, embodied gestures expose and challenge representational and infrastructural norms that drive commercial musical theatre. The company’s blend of ASL and spoken text extends the overarching message about failed sociocultural ideals to the realm of deaf culture. Micro-practical actions and interactions function tacitly to denaturalize audio-centric standards that guide theatrical reception, internal cueing, and technical production.
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Wilbur, Sarah (2016). Gestural Economies and Production Pedagogies in Deaf West’s Spring Awakening. TDR/The Drama Review, 60(2). pp. 145–153. 10.1162/DRAM_a_00553 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/17247.
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Sarah Wilbur
Sarah Wilbur is an Associate Professor of the Practice jointly appointed in Dance and Theater Studies, and she is currently the Director of Graduate Studies in Dance at Duke University.
Sarah's research is shaped by her longstanding work as a cross-sector 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. As an artist and humanist who studies arts labor through the lens of performance, Sarah's scholarship highlights the relationship between economic incentives and artists' wellbeing and daily choice making or, as she is fond of saying, "how money motivates movement" in the arts. Sarah's research, teaching and creative work highlight infrastructural enactments --the hidden or ignored supportive practices that sustain enabling environments for the performing arts.
It is her primary goal to credit arts labor and laborers in all aspects of her professional work.
Sarah's interdisciplinary approach theorizes US arts infrastructures as dynamic economic, physical, and kinesthetic (embodied) support systems. Her first book, Funding Bodies: Five Decades of Dance Making at the National Endowment for the Arts offered a historical account of the shaping influence of US federal dance funding mechanisms on the aesthetic and organizational practices of generations of US dance makers (1965-2016). Published in 2021, 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. Sarah was recently awarded EXPLORE! seed funding from Duke's Office of Research and Innovation to undertake ethnographic field work for her second book, which looks ethnographically at the shaping influence of the US health industry on the working lives of dance artists.
Sarah has published local cultural labor studies--ethnographic accounts of arts labor and infrastructure--in peer reviewed journals in theater, dance, and performance studies such as the Journal of Emerging Dance Scholarship, Performance Research, TDR/The Drama Review. She has featured essays in the Oxford Handbook of Dance and Competition, the Futures of Dance Studies edited collection and a forthcoming chapter on economic and kinesthetic accountability in the multi-volume Oxford Handbook of Dance Praxis (Oxford University Press, 2027).
In service to dance, theater, and performance studies, Sarah completed a two-term appointment as a Director on the Board of the Dance Studies Association (DSA). She founded an inter-campus, multi-disciplinary working group entitled the Cross Campus Consortium on Equitable Arts Infrastructures at Duke in 2022 with support from the Franklin Humanities Institute. 2025 marks the group's fifth year of operation (renamed Equitable Arts Infrastructures Research Group), and has yielded two exciting offshoots: Sarah is now one of four proud co-editors of Arts in Context: Critical Performance Infrastructures, a book series inviting historical and interpretive accounts of local arts ecologies, published by the University of Texas Press. She also serves as a co-PI (alongside Drs. Paul Bonin-Rodriguez and Charlotte Canning) on a Collaborative Research Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities supporting an inter-professional roster of artists, funders, and public humanists conversation about the practical manifestation of infrastructural equity in the performing arts, and an allied publication.
Sarah's graduate (G) and undergraduate (UG) teaching in centers the priimacy of embodied knowledge and expression across a range of topics. Current course offerings include: Theories of Corporeality (G), Movement in Question: Introduction to Dance Studies (UG/G), 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); Choreographic Praxis (G), Critique (G), Interdisciplinary Performance (UG/G), Improvisation (UG), and Modern Dance (UG).
Sarah's pedagogical approach invites students to reflect on the tensions between knowledge that is textual (verbal, spoken, written, symbolic) and enacted (fleshy, felt, sensorial, kinesthetic). Linked to her firm belief that knowledge is fundamentally embodied, student knowledge takes written and enacted forms in all courses that she facilitates. And while dance or performance are often the central course topic, choreography and performance play a key role as methods of understanding the micro-practical dynamics of human behavior, expression and patiicpation. While Sarah prides herself in avoiding staging the classroom or studio as a competitive environment, her bespoke approach to tailored final research projects insures that students "succeed," in departing arts-based learning spaces with a honed ability to recognize and reflect on the the embodied wisdom held within their ebmodied choice making.
In Durham, Sarah's creative work as a dance/movement facilitator spans community and conventional performing arts contexts. Building on 25+ years of work as an arts facilitator with clinical, community, and congregate care professionals, she facilitates an adaptive and participatory dance program in the Adult Day Health Program at the Durham Center for Senior life. Sarah also serves on the Board and as the Arts Sector Lead for Dementia Inclusive, Inc., co-operating with elder abuse advocates and medical/social service professionals to expand equitable opportunities for cultural expression for adults living with cognitive decline in Durham County. Sarah is a co-convener of a FHI Working Group in Disability Studies for the 2024-2025 academic year seeking to formalize the campus commitment to disability studies, health humanities, and disability access/justice within Duke's campus culture. Each summer, Sarah serves as affiliated faculty for the Reimagining Medicine (ReMed) program at the Kenan Institute of Ethics, as an extension of her longstanding work as an artists in health and care contexts.
These creative and scholarly experiences reinforce Sarah's faith in artists as arbiters of hope and imagination, and also workers worthy of basic wages, optimal working conditions, and secure employment contracts. By asking historical and humanistic questions of economic phenomena that impact artmaking, Sarah hopes to keep contributing to research-driven action that manifests both economic and cultural justice in the US.
Research Interests:
1. Dance, theater, performance, and cultural studies
2. Economic humanities, histories of US arts policy, funding, and philanthropy
3. Cultural labor studies, workplace ethnography in the arts
4. Theories of institutionality, intersectionality, and corporeality
5. Arts and health, health humanities, critical medical humanities, and disability arts
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