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About Us

Sarah Skaggs Dance, created in 1995, Is a non-profit company dedicated to the creation of dance and movement based art works that engage the public in social, political, spiritual, and physical ways. Her choreographic investigations over many years have focused on the intersection between social and concert dance, between the casual and formal, the ambiguous and the definitive. Working in formats that range from large scale non-proscenium events to small concert settings, the  work  presents dance in immersive and participatory environments, environments  that connect performers and spectators in embodied ways. Created through the collaborative efforts of dancers, scholars, and designers, Sarah Skaggs Dance is dedicated to a continual and rigorous examination of such questions as "Why Dance? Why Now?" "Why does it matter?" And how does it matter?"From the meditative to the ecstatic, Sarah Skaggs Dance works to uncover the transformative in the everyday.

photo by Mary Gearhart
 
   
 
Mission Statement
 
My mission is to create innovative movement works that respond to the contemporary moment in radically physical ways. Working with a highly nuanced movement vocabulary, I create dances that articulate the ecstatic, the solemn, the restless, the meditaitve, the meticuous, and  the ambiguous, in ways that embrace our vulnerabilities. Folding, carving, cutting, piercing are actions I take to create choreographic meaning for myself. Through, repetition, accumulation, and augmentation, I make dances that embrace highly ambivalent, tense, percarious and ambiguous states, mercurial states that believe in the power of the body as both subject and object to rise up and celebrate the perpetual unfolding of the human spirit.
 
Biography
 

SARAH SKAGGS is a dancer/choreographer who has been making dances in New York City for over twenty years.She has received six National Endowment for the Arts Choreography fellowships and two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships as well as the numerous grants from the Rockefeller, Culpeper, Jerome, Harkness, Greenwall, Dreyfus and Bulova Foundations. She has the honor of having a two page entry devoted to her in the International Dictionary of Modern Dance.  

In addition to her extensive travel and teaching in Hong Kong, Prague, Taipei and Bali her work has been produced by The Joyce Theatre's "Altogether Different" series, Lincoln Center Festival, The Andy Warhol Museum, DancePlace DC, Dance Theatre Workshop, Danspace Project, The Kitchen, PS 122,  Jacob's Pillow, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Dublin Arts Festival and most recently at the Society of Dance History Scholars conference at Stanford University. She has served on the Board of Directors of The Danspace Project at St.Mark's Church in New York since 1992. She holds an MFA in Dance Studies from Hollins University/American Dance Festival. Currently, she is the director of the dance program at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. 
Her choreographic investigations over many years have focused on the intersection between social and concert dance, between the casual and formal, the ambiguous and the definitive. Her work has looked for immersive and embodied ways to engage audiences either through large-scale non-proscenium dance events or intimate hyper-articulate concert performances. In either format, her work carves out spaces that knit the audience and performer together in social, spiritual and sensual ways.

 
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