Monday, September 30, 2013

10/08: Sarah Wilbur

Please join us at the first Chew on This of Fall 2013
Tuesday, Oct 8 at 12pm
Kaufman Conference Room #160

SARAH WILBUR

Dance for Veterans: Political Affect and Alternative Exits

With a now-notorious backlog in mental health service provisions at U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and an estimated 22 veterans committing suicide each day, the State’s ongoing investment in movement-based training strategies has taken an interesting turn toward dance-based health interventions. As a joint effort between psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and dance educators at the Greater Los Angeles VA Medical Center, the Dance For Veterans Program works to restore a sense of bodily authority among veterans who are living with severe mental illness. In this paper, I situate the Dance for Veterans program alongside a range of military training and killing practices using John Protevi’s (2009) efforts to resuscitate a politics of emotion for poststructuralist philosophy through recourse to cognitive neuroscience. As a materialist philosopher with a skeptical eye toward affective cognition, Protevi’s Deleuguattarian framework considers how biocultural and biopolitical factors contribute to emotional reprogramming at all levels of military service. Protevi’s work offers particular resources for dance and performance scholars seeking to understand the state’s historical investment in affective reprogramming through social practice, for better and for worse.

Sarah Wilbur is a choreographer, performer, dance educator, and academic who currently works for UCLA and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. To reconcile the strange path that led her here (through the more well-traversed routes of non-profit arts production, concert dance, musical theatre, opera, and experimental performance) Sarah’s dissertation research offers an analytical framework through which the choreographic co-operation of artists and institutions might come into sharper relief.  Prior to relocating to Los Angeles in 2007, Sarah worked for a decade in the non-profit arts sector as an artist-advocate-administrator. Conference presentations include: Congress On Research in Dance, American Society for Theater Research, UCLA GESIS Teacher Education Program/UCLA, and Dance Under Construction. Sarah’s writing on dance and the limits of U.S. arts policy appears the current Journal of Emerging Dance Scholarship. She also sweats more than most humans.

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