About the session

This session took place on Tuesday 8 December 2020, 12-1pm AEDT.

Taking Los Angeles-based integrated theatre ensemble Deaf West’s 2015 limited-run Broadway revival of Steven Water and Duncan Sheik’s musical Spring Awakening as her topic of inquiry, choreographer-researcher Sarah Wilbur (Duke University) will invite those gathered to pay close, surgical attention to the role of human movement in subverting norms of musical theatre production on and beyond the Great White Way. Her analysis of the plural functions of physical gesture on and offstage in this production together expose Deaf West’s efforts to challenge and upend production norms that have historically crowded out non-hearing performers and publics. After introducing her approach and offering a synopsis of the production, Wilbur will engage those in attendance in an informal dialogue about whether and how issues raised surface in other local productions, communities, and contexts.

About the speakers

• Dr. Sarah Wilbur

  Sarah Wilbur (she | hers) is an Assistant Professor of the Practice in Dance at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, U.S. She is also a choreographer and researcher who studies arts labor, economies, and institutional support principally in a US context. She brings a strong field orientation to bear on her scholarship including over twenty years of experience collaborating on dance and arts projects across the realms of concert dance, theatre, musical theater, opera, K-12 education, health care, and Veterans’ Affairs. Her current manuscript, Funding Bodies: Five Decades of Dance "Making" at the National Endowment for the Arts [1965-2016] asks how money motivates movement and uses dance and performance analysis to link patterns of philanthropic over-resourcing to dominant patterns of dance practice, production and organization across the agency’s first five decades. Sarah’s research, teaching, and creative practice together recognize parity between artistic works that are performed and aspects of art making that are suppressed or ignored. https://scholars.duke.edu/person/sarah.wilbur

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