Funding Bodies

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. The book's structural critique highlights internal debates around funding policies—with an emphasis on inclusion, race, region, and class—during the first half-century of the Endowment's history. Practically-speaking, its cultural analysis also credits the bureaucratic angling of dance grant makers from the early "boom" years through successive administrations and economic highs and lows. A history of dance funding tools and their practical use by people in power, Funding Bodies traces the disciplinary force of US arts policy through the workplace performances of generations of dance organizers. 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.