Photo credit: Cathie Opie (2014)
Hometown: Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Current city: Los Angeles, California
Age: 41
College and degree: B.F.A. (dance), University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; graduated in 1996 at age 22
Graduate school and degree: M.F.A. (dance) UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance; graduated in 2012 at age 35
PhD (current doctoral candidate), UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance (culture and performance studies); estimated graduation is June 2016 at age 41
Website: www.swilburdance.com
How you pay the bills: Academic fellowships, graduate research assistantships, freelance employment as a choreographer/teaching artist/facilitator (independent contractor), adjunct dance faculty teaching at various institutions in SoCal, and guest lecturer/blabbermouth at various academic dance programs and arts in health care contexts in and around Los Angeles, where I’ve lived since 2007.
All of the dance hats you wear: At present, I am less than a year shy of finishing my doctorate in culture and performance studies in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA, so I am a doctoral candidate who continues to work as a cross-sector dance maker. I define dance “making” broadly to include these past and present (adequately paid, underpaid, and sometimes unpaid) roles and responsibilities:
1) Co-Founder/Artistic Director--modern dance collective (Danceworks, Inc., Milwaukee, Wisconsin)
2) Production Director (Danceworks Studio Theatre, Milwaukee, Wisconsin)
3) Choreographer (concert dance, community based dance, opera, musical theater, theater, and film)
4) Dancer/performer (concert dance, theater, musical theater, opera)
5) Teaching artist (k-12 education, health care, community-based dance)
6) Adjunct dance faculty (UW-Milwaukee, Marquette University, and California State University Long Beach)
7) Teaching Assistant/Associate/Fellow (UCLA)
8) Departmental TA Coordinator (UCLA)
9) Graduate student researcher (UCLA)
10) Facilitator of pre and post show discussions (various artists)
11) Arts administrator (plural projects, organizations, and occasions)
12) Grant writer (“ “)
13) Webmaster (not fancy---I just happen to manage my own free web domain)
14) Public speaker/arts advocate
15) Conference presenter at academic conferences in dance, theater, performance studies, and education
16) Dance Residency Coordinator (K-12 education and health care contexts)
17) Curriculum developer/pedagogue, Greater Los Angeles VA Healthcare System (I currently co-facilitate a dance program that I designed in 2011 designed for veterans living with Severe Mental Illness at the Greater Los Angeles VA Medical Center)
18) Dance researcher/writer studying the the US dance infrastructure as a living infrastructure, fueled by the committed enactments of a whole lot of people who are presently escaping the historical record
19) Amateur psychologist, sociologist, tax consultant, stage manager, bartender, parent, valet, floor installer, painter, plummer, the list is long and does not align necessarily with my skill set.
Non-dance work you do or have done:
After earning my BFA in dance in 1996, I waited tables for 2 years at a 1950s style diner in Milwaukee (called Ed Debevic’s), where servers would intermittently jump up on the tables and dance or sing to specific songs. I was also a DJ there --- working three shifts per week so that I could qualify for health insurance. The tips and friends were pretty great, and the food was pretty terrible. In 1997 I left Ed Debevic’s to join Danceworks, Inc. and I am proud to say that, outside of lending an occasional hand at my mom’s longstanding flower shop (A New Leaf Floral in Brookfield, Wisconsin---look it up!) waiting tables was the only non-dance “gig” I’ve held down in my almost 20-year professional career. I am also an unapologetic workaholic. I live to work, so there’s that.
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"Disclosure Tactics" (2012); choreography by Sarah Wilbur Photo credit: Da Xu
As a cross-sector dance maker, I entered the dance field as part of a cohort of mid1990s choreographers who inherited a climate of public funding for the arts that was being radically restructured (1996) at the federal level, at a time when models of career sustainability were even further decentralized and thrown asunder. Luckily, I made the lucky choice to “plug in” to a dance ecosystem in a relatively small market that allowed me space, time, and income to run a modern dance collective and studio theatre dedicated exclusively to dance, starting at age 23! I learned to counterbalance a career in dance in the “trade school” of the nonprofit arts sector in my hometown of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where I worked for ten years as Artistic/Production Director for a community based dance organization (Danceworks, Inc: http://danceworksmke.org/). At Danceworks, I performed, produced my own work, taught damce in an array of institutional contexts, and presented the work of dance artists at all stages of the career continuum. Most importantly to my current research and scholarship, I saw firsthand how dance matters to diverse people in its many cultural traditions and institutional contexts. It is important to admit that I have remained closely tied to academic dance programs throughout my life; I earned a living by splitting my time with one foot in the nonprofit dance field and one in university dance contexts as an adjunct dance faculty at UW Milwaukee and Marquette Universities. This split focus suits my present drive to question the marginalization of certain dance works, workers and ways of working. Since leaving Milwaukee for Los Angeles in 2007, I have maintained the “hub” mentality--as much as the geographic dispersion of LA rejects it(!). I am now busy turning the corner from an artistic career to an academic one dedicated to exposing and challenging the production and career contingencies that dance artists face in the United States. That’s WAY more than a just a few sentences from me, but I find it hard to stop contextualizing once I step on my soapbox. My experience is just mine, I'm not speaking for anyone else, here.
5 years after college:
I never really left college, but I received my BFA in dance in 1996 and began working in academia as an adjunct dance faculty member in 1997, counterbalancing work for Danceworks, Inc. (see above).
10 years after college:
I left Milwaukee for Los Angeles in 2007, roughly ten years after completing my BFA degree. In LA I free-lanced for about a year, working at LA and Burbank Unified School Districts, as a teaching artist for local nonprofit dance organizations like City Ballet of Los Angeles and Helios Dance, performing with Arianne MacBean/The Big Show Co., and producing my own choreography with ShowBoxLA’s coveted experimental dance series Anatomy Riot (http://showboxla.org/tag/anatomy-riot/). I also made two trips in 2008-2009 to the Yard artist colony in Chilmark, Massachusetts as a Bessie Schönberg fellow, where I conducted a community-based dance project entitled The Greatest Dance on Earth (excerpts) with 25 islanders in the cast. I joined UCLA in 2009 as a graduate MFA student in dance, after receiving a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship from the US Department of Education to fully fund my graduate research. The stipend and symbolic capital associated with this award were enormous factors influencing my decision and capacity to pursue my PhD in the same program (2012 to the present).
Now:
I am presently writing this profile for Jill Homan Randall --- in part --- to avoid editing a horribly overwritten chapter of my dissertation that deals with various approaches to dance touring! I plan to complete draft one of this provisional manuscript (required for my PhD degree in culture and performance studies) this December while commencing a job hunt to locate the next proverbial tree branch to catch --- I graduate as Dr. Dance (breakaway pants) in June 2016. I am supported in these semi-boring, semi-audacious pursuits by a Dissertation Year Fellowship awarded by UCLA Graduate Division. For those seeking to pursue degrees in or related to dance in academia --- I will state the obvious here and say that obtaining external and internal funding is the only way to go (don’t incur debt for dance --- dance has a horrible track record of paying us back, but I’m working on that!).
Major influences:
Dance faculty members at UWM (my BFA alma mater), including the interminable Ed Burgess, Janet Lilly, Marcia Parsons, and the wonderful Ferne Yangyeitie Caulker Bronson, whose almost fifty-year African Dance Company, Ko-Thi, is the third oldest in the country (http://www.ko-thi.org/history.html). Ferne’s approach pushed me to question my own cultural inheritances as a dance “omnivore;" implicitly her drive to clarify cultural context animated my urge to study dance from the cultural studies orientation upheld at the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance. As a young choreographer, my soul lit up participating in a pair of summer choreography institutes at UWM taught by the late-great Robert Ellis Dunn; fast forward twenty years, and I continue to surround myself with formidable dance “makers," including my longstanding mentor at UCLA Susan Leigh Foster, and the kickass UCLA MFA faculty (Vic Marks, Dan Froot, David Rousséve, Lionel Popkin, Cheng Chieh Yu, Simone Forti, Rennie Harris, and Angelia Leung). Perhaps above all, I take great inspiration from the veritable army of LA dance artists, presenters, program administrators, educators, and funders who have the audacity to sweat the ridiculously transient and unpredictable circumstances of making a life in dance in this ginormous über-city. The many cultural catalysts of LA fuel my keyboard clicking, ticket buying, and my hamstring stretching into the present moment.
"See Saw" with Brenan Gerard (1961, 2012 restaging at the Box Gallery, LA Chinatown); choreography Simone Forti Photo credit: Nguyēn Nguyên
What is on your plate/calendar for the next year’s time? Are you performing and choreographing as well as completing your dissertation?
Time to degree pressures at UCLA this year shrink my ability to accept performance and choreography invitations, at least until June 2016. Right now I am preparing job application materials and post doctoral fellowship applications while I am dissertating and working on a few small publication opportunities, including a digital humanities research project dedicated to infrastructural research and debate in the dance field. A few summers back, I did dance (happily) in Simone Forti’s reconstruction of her 1961 Dance Constructions at the Box Gallery in LA’s Chinatown and also served as Simone's rehearsal assistant for that exciting process. I still teach for the VA, part time, and take technique class at UCLA. Dancing continues to give me so much more than it "takes" away, especially as I get older. I still depend heavily on dance as a “place” of deep security and outrageous spontaneity---THAT'S the inner paradox that I think the world struggles to understand and that keeps so many dancers returning to dance despite its instabilities as a viable vocational pursuit. So I'm still dancing. Dancing is something that I cannot live without, especially during the isolating practice of dissertating.
Can you talk to us about your PhD program - what are you exploring, researching, specializing in?
I began my PhD research wanting more clarity about how people make policies that influence dance at the US National Endowment for the Arts, and how artists have managed to make and sustain careers in the field for three decades or more quite despite the historical lack of direct, stable, or full support for the arts in US culture. My dissertation project, entitled, US Dance Makers: A Declaration of Interdependence, counterbalances the career maneuvers of lifelong dance artists with major arts policy shifts across the fifty-year lifespan of the US National Endowment for the Arts. For an extended abstract outlining this work in greater detail, please see: http://www.swilburdance.com/#!research--publications/cy76.
Advice to dancers who are seriously considering a PhD program.
Writing about dancing, in many ways, is the absolute opposite of doing dancing, so that’s one difference. You really have to love to write, read, and debate dance as a fantastic problem; I don’t believe that dance gains any academic traction when it is uncritically positioned as a blanket solution to anything. To research and write about dance, in my view, requires a commitment to being critical without judgement, and to the awful but regular practice of stomaching the taste of one’s own words. Also, and finally, there is zero promise of a ”proper” job for anyone and everyone who sets out on a path to become Dr. Dance (Breakaway Pants). Like the more sought after illustrious performance careers, the slots are numbered, and the lines are long. Those seeking terminal degrees of this kind should, in my view (and in the view of the late Stuart Hall, a cultural materialist whose work I really admire), feel sufficiently urgent about their reason for joining the academy. Hall used to tell his students at the Birmingham School in the UK that they should not enter his then nascent program in cultural studies unless something in their lives had burned them so badly that they felt simply compelled to spend the better part of a decade tracking down and answering to this injustice. I’m paraphrasing, but I want to double-highlight Hall’s idea that research in any aspect of culture endures when the researcher owns an insatiable quest for exposure, debate, and recognition of something that has gone misunderstood, unrecognized, or (important to dance) trivialized by the academy and broader public. Dance needs people in the academy who have sharpened their proverbial word weapons to circumvent dance’s historic marginalization in educational institutions and in the world-at-large.
Current training practices:
Postmodern technique with Cheng Chieh Yu, hip-hop with Jackie Lopez, and House with Rennie Harris (all at UCLA) when the timing’s right. Every day, I cross train in my back yard for 45-90 minutes with my two dogs and various free online fitness apps. Keeping in mind that I’m 41, yo’, and not training for performance, I find cross training effective at keeping me physically strong and injury free. While I still don’t have the nerve to tackle the formal “club” scene in LA, I still dance socially wherever it makes sense to throw down. The last time was last weekend at a bar in Palms where we were celebrating the birthday of the head of UCLA Martial Arts, Paul “the British Ninja” McCarthy. Here, an impromptu dance battle seemed surprisingly appropriate.
Last performance you saw that really inspired you:
I just returned from a visit home to Milwaukee, where I was privileged to attend Reggie Wilson’s site-specific iteration of Moses at the Lynden Sculpture Garden, and it was incredible. Through fragmented images and sustained journeying through the acreage of this fantastic site, Reggie built a breathtaking survey of his own cultural history in collaboration with 40 local community members, many of whom were family friends, church contacts of Reggie’s mother, and local supporters (Reggie, like me, is a Milwaukee native). Audience members were cast as participants in this semi-autobiographical opus. I was moved to laughter and tears by the entirety of my colleague and this great dance work (the collective that I directed, Danceworks Performance Company, commissioned Reggie’s work in 1999 --- so I’m a total, unapologetic fan of the artist and person). Great work is always fun to behold, but great work made by one’s friends carries personal meaning that defies explanation, for me.
What do you think are the skills a modern dancer needs in 2015?
Technical skills in modern dance are multiple and something that all aspiring professionals need to practice on the daily. For me, what’s equally important is that aspiring performers embrace the cultural and political history of the techniques that they study to deepen their personal belonging to the influences and values driving these forms that we reproduce and work so hard to master. I think that the difference between a technician and a dancer rests on the latter’s awareness of the historical ground upon which their work stands. Of course, if we’re talking about career sustainability in dance (modern dance?), then this entire comment is irrelevant. Not only are there minimal concert performance careers out there in the 21st century economy, but also modern dance owns painfully little real estate in US arts philanthropic circles, at present. If dancers enjoy modern dance but want to eat, most should hone more monetizeable skills, including teaching and self-management, however these practices make the most sense to an artist based on their personal ideology. At the risk of stating what has been historically obvious to anyone working in the field for a decade or more…there are painfully few wages to be earned for modern dance performers in the US. I’m willing to debate this (email me at s.wilbur@ucla.edu), but really our time might be better spent discussing the many ways that dance attaches itself to non-dance institutional values for recognition. Dance in health care may seem tangential to some, but I often cite arts-based health interventions in the present economy as a sleeper patron of dance education and performance. Artists no longer need to own degrees in dance therapy to find opportunities in our over burdened health care system; they just need to choose to belong to those contexts, and to do their homework to know what questions to bring to the table, if this suits them.
Blogs and Twitter:
An editorial team of arts policy and production researchers led by Fractured Atlas’s Ian David Moss and a hub for up-to-date policy debates and publications in the arts sectors
2) http://infinitebody.blogspot.com/
As much as I work regularly to provincialize New York City as the cultural capital of the dance “world," Eva Yaa Asantewaa’s blog beats most for its clarity of purpose and deep unabashed respect for working dance artists.
3) http://www2.danceusa.org/ejournal/index.cfm?
The Green Room --- I just think all dancers should be aware of what the only National Dance Service Organization says and reports on dance
Artists should familiarize themselves with how the lone federal arts philanthropic arm of the US federal government defines and valorizes the arts. This is the NEA’s Art Works Blog, which lays out the agency’s policy agenda in layman’s terms through a more humanistic lens, compared to its research publications.
5) swilburdance on Twitter ☺
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Related reading:
A Modern Dancer's Guide to....Los Angeles
Questions We Ask Ourselves: The Dance Map LA Project and Some of the Findings
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Thanks again, for the exposure and for this generative platform, Jill. Congrats to any who made it through the end of this diatribe. Onward~
Sarah Wilbur
Posted by: Sarah Wilbur | 08/07/2015 at 05:20 PM