UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles U.S. Dancemakers: A Declaration of Interdependence A dissertation completed in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Culture and Performance By Sarah Marie Wilbur 2016 © Copyright by Sarah Marie Wilbur 2016 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION US Dance Makers: A Declaration of Interdependence by Sarah Marie Wilbur Doctor of Philosophy in Culture and Performance Studies University of California, Los Angeles, 2016 Professor Susan Leigh Foster, Committee Chair Who makes a dance? While no method of studying cultural production can possibly include all the people, practices, and procedures that “make” artistic works possible, dance scholars have yet to centralize dance’s infrastructural politics as a topic of research in its own right. My dissertation project looks at dance “making” -- the resourcing, staging, and legitimization of dance performance -- as the product of multiple agents and agencies. To flesh out how dance is practically produced through a dynamic network of intermediaries, I combine archival accounts of federal arts policy production at the US National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) with ethnographic research and interviews with lifelong dance “makers,” a large group that includes NEA senior leadership, administrators, citizen advisors, and NEA funded dance presenters, managers, booking agents, artists, and organizers. This emphasis on dance’s many authorial agents protests modernist understandings of the choreographer-as-autonomous producer of dance “texts” through a situated review of how people collectively fashion authorizing rhetorics, ii programs, and procedures at the NEA and in local, NEA supported dance contexts. I trade close interpretive analysis of dance texts for a processual account of infrastructural “norms” and local translations across the agency’s fifty-year lifespan. By studying dance policy and production enactments together in their cultural situatedness, we can start to notice how institutions function as living infrastructures, shaped by people with differential investments in dance practice and performance. Such an embodied epistemology of infrastructure offers a new topic and frontier of research, driven squarely from the domain of dance studies, with implications across dance, arts, humanities and policy discourse. My project is organized across the NEA’s fifty-year history of arts resourcing, regulation, and research by way of three infrastructural movements that I define here in italics. Chapter One addresses how early policy “makers” proceeded to negotiate an influx of economic resourcing through an agency-wide strategy of expansion by partition during the NEA’s first fifteen years of policy production (1965-1980). Chapter Two analyzes the agency’s most massive period of regulation and defunding, known in conventional histories as the so-called “Arts Wars” (1980- 1996) to detail infrastructural pressures and regulations that instituted a support system rooted in redistribution and artist estrangement. Chapter Three details efforts to champion art and artists as tools for achieving non-arts policy goals from the turn of the 21st century to the present as a hyper-instrumental turn strongly influenced by governmental rationalism and capital development as political endgames of US federal government writ large. In each chapter, I also weigh how NEA funded dance grantees negotiate these changes, in practice. What results is a theory of infrastructure as a living social exercise animated by people with differential investments in the production and distribution of dance. iii The dissertation of Sarah Marie Wilbur is approved. Anurima Banerji David H. Gere Shannon Jackson Janet M. O’ Shea Susan Leigh Foster, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2016 iv This dissertation is dedicated to Ed Burgess, and to past and present dance “makers” who commit themselves daily to the cooperative act of steadying dance’s wobbly infrastructure so that future generations might climb higher, stumble harder, and more breathlessly risk remaking the world. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract of the Dissertation ii Acknowledgements vi List of Figures xi Vita xii Introduction 1 1 28 Boom for Whom? Resourcing Dance at the National Endowment for the Arts [1965-1979] 2 104 Confronting the Model: Regulating Dance at the National Endowment for the Arts [1980-1997] 3 179 The Hyper-Instrumental Turn: Researching Dance at the National Endowment for the Arts [1997-present] Conclusion 260 Bibliography 297 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS People make dissertations, dances, and policies. An extraordinary chorus of mentors, conspirators, interlocutors, colleagues, families, friends, and remote icons have steadied my steps throughout this project. I will attempt to keep a lid on my robust enthusiasm as I try to briefly name the many “makers” whose support made this project possible. And I will fail. As a choreographer turned emerging ethnographer and dance scholar, I was rather stunned at the fact that, during my fieldwork, 100% of my subjects instantly agreed to be interviewed for this project. The commitment of my interlocutors to discussing issues like career sustainability in dance, institutional politics, and culturally contradictory notions of dance “support” inspired me to keep going. Ethnography, as with choreography, is an imminently social and ethical exercise that I have found to be immensely humbling and gratifying throughout this process. And, while I assume total responsibility for ideas claimed in these pages, and while some testimony will be reserved for later iterations of this work, I am honored to have worked with these thirty seven dance “makers” who hail from the following cities (in italics): Chilmark (MA), David R. White, Los Angeles (CA), Sasha Anawalt, Ann Carlson, Lynn Daly, Kristy Edmonds, Dan Froot, Simone Forti, Dan Froot, Lionel Popkin, Melanie Rios-Glaser, David Rousséve, Gema Sandoval, Tamika Washington-Miller, Felicia Rosenfield, Lula Washington, and Cheng-Chieh Yu, Chicago (IL): Bonnie Brooks, in Long Beach (CA) Keith Johnson, in Milwaukee (WI): Ferne Caulker, Minneapolis (MN): Stuart Pimsler, Philadelphia (PA): Rennie Harris, Andrew Simonet, and Amy Smith, Reston (VA): Samuel Hope, New York (NY): Samuel Miller, Rena Shagan, Ivan Sygoda, Riverside (CA), Wendy Rodgers, Tacoma Park (MD): Liz Lerman, Seattle (WA): Pat Graney, Tallahasee (FL)/Brooklyn (NY): Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, vii Washington (D.C.) Suzanne Callahan, Sunil Iyengar, Sali Ann Kriegsman, Juliana Mascelli, Janelle Ott Long, Carla Perlo, and Douglas Sonntag. Thank you! My dissertation committee members are a veritable “dream team.” Their formidable intellect, patience, and warmth compelled me to arrive daily at my computer dashboard and to pound out these rhythms on infrastructure. Anurima Banerji’s acute understanding of ethical conundrums in dance inspires, as does her fierce obligation to question institutional power. As an artist-scholar, Anurima soulfully upholds the highest standards for her mentees. I leave all of our conversations charged up with a sense of obligation, passion, and purpose. David Gere’s brilliant activism, critical empathy, and dexterous navigation of epistemological dissonance across art and non-art institutions models an academic trajectory that I aspire to in my own work. Plus, he writes brilliantly about dance! Shannon Jackson, whose brilliant theorizations of institutions and embodied supports motivated me to seize doctoral study back in 2011. Shannon very generously agreed to “sit in” with me for ten (what became forty-five) minutes in her office during the UC- Berkeley sit ins protesting tuition hikes in Spring 2012, and wound up consenting to serve as my cognate Ph.D. committee member. Throughout this process, Shannon has offered me invaluable puzzles to solve around the question of how dance studies might resource infrastructural debates in non-dance fields. And, as anyone who works in the UC knows, as an institutional intermediary, Shannon is the stuff. Janet O’Shea’s grasp of cultural contradictions is breathtaking and, to me, unparalleled in dance studies. She has an inimitable capacity for synthesizing loads of complex evidence, and her interdisciplinary appetite assails me. Above all, Jay O’Shea’s brand of diplomacy and fierce critique has taught me that the two can sit comfortably side by side in academe. She is a big deal, in our field. Susan Leigh Foster’s research is why I came to UCLA. Her ideas about the body and dance have a way of blowing my mind and breaking my viii heart open, at once. This headstrong, heart open approach characterizes our relationship in many ways. To say that Susan has been a patient witness to my “spin cycle” style of writing and thinking is an understatement. As my committee chair for both M.F.A. and Ph.D. degrees at UCLA, Susan has weathered “Wilburization” (punctuation-less-verbosity-performed-at-hyper- speed) more than anyone ever should. For this, and for countless other reasons, Susan’s support means the world to me. Since none of the words in my arsenal can begin to describe the depth of her influence on my work, I’ll just say: Susan supports her students soulfully, and unequivocally. Just please don’t shoot her swan. Beyond these advisors and experts, my non-biological kinship structure has provided an invaluable army defending my most audacious ideas when I needed it most. Concretley, these people live with me. But by “living” I also mean that they have housed countless verbal, written, and enacted assaults from me in our shared domestic space. Daily, these friends slowed down my thinking. They helped me to make more sense on the page, at every stage of this breathless dissertation adventure. Much love and chest bumps for: Jenna Delgado, Mana Hayakawa, Andrew Martinez, Alessandra Lebea Williams, Carl Schottmiller, Barry Brannum, Rita Martins Rufino Valente, and Pallavi Sriram. Your spoken and unspoken faith gave me confidence to put periods on the end of my sentences. Sometimes. At UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, I am indebted to the graduate cohort members with whom I have learned immeasurable things about the situated politics of bodies and cultures in motion.