Overview

How NEA funding policies have shaped the field of dance Funding Bodies is the first scholarly study of NEA to focus specifically on dance. It departs from a choreographic question: How have federal grant guidelines rewarded specific patterns of dance practice and production? Drawing upon archival documentation of NEA narratives, program eligibility guidelines, and standards of evaluation as well as testimony from past and present insiders, Wilbur's work theorizes endowment as an economic and practical struggle by people with differential power and competing investments in the production and professionalization of dance. With a wealth of detail and previously untold stories, this institutional history brings clarity to the complex processes that underlie the continuing struggle to achieve equitable resource distribution and parity of opportunity in American dance. An online teaching guide is available.

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9780819580528

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Reviews

Funding Bodies is essential reading for scholars of dance and performance studies, the history of US arts funding, and US arts policy. Wilbur productively complicates extant histories of the NEA using impeccable archival and ethnographic research, exemplary theorizing of policy making as choreography, and engaging prose. --Judith Hamera, professor of dance and American studies, Princeton University For those wanting to understand how dance moves from the studio into public consciousness, this book is indispensable. Funding Bodies offers a compelling assessment, showing how dance bureaucrats and philanthropists have choregraphed the U.S. dance infrastructure, affecting the dancers we see on stage and how we value them. --Paul Bonin-Rodriguez, Ph.D, associate professor, performance as public practice, Co-Editor, Artivate: a Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts

Funding Bodies is essential reading for scholars of dance and performance studies, the history of US arts funding, and US arts policy. Wilbur productively complicates extant histories of the NEA using impeccable archival and ethnographic research, exemplary theorizing of policy making as choreography, and engaging prose.--Judith Hamera, professor of dance and American studies, Princeton University For those wanting to understand how dance moves from the studio into public consciousness, this book is indispensable. Funding Bodies offers a compelling assessment, showing how dance bureaucrats and philanthropists have choregraphed the U.S. dance infrastructure, affecting the dancers we see on stage and how we value them.--Paul Bonin-Rodriguez, Ph.D, associate professor, performance as public practice, Co-Editor, Artivate: a Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts

Author Information

SARAH WILBUR (Durham, NC) is assistant professor of the practice/dance at Duke University and visiting assistant professor of curatorial practice in performance at Wesleyan University.

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