A Lot of Trashy Dances

Skaggs brings dance out of the studio, into the world

April 14, 2009

Sarah Skaggs, director of dance, encourages students to explore “a whole new discourse on dance” by connecting it to other disciplines.

Sarah Skaggs is always in motion. She swivels in her office chair, fiddles briefly with a pencil and tosses hands in the air when making a point, using gesture to vivify her words. Clearly, she is in the right profession.

As Dickinson's ambitious new director of dance, Skaggs will need every gram of that expressive energy. But she is up to the task.

Skaggs is a well-known dancer/choreographer who has performed, directed and taught around the world and who has carved a distinct impression on the vibrant New York dance scene. In her new life as director and assistant professor of dance at Dickinson, she teams this wealth of professional experience with a liberal-arts bent.

Skaggs began dance lessons at age 4, but she didn't consider dance as a serious career option. That is, not until she took a dance class to fulfill a physical-education requirement at Sweet Briar College.

"We discovered that the human body is a place where all disciplines intersect [and] where spirit, soul and heart—all aspects of a person—come together," she says. "I'd never thought of dance in that way."

Skaggs, who then held a double-major in anthropology and political science, was fascinated. She promptly switched to a theatre-arts major and moved to New York shortly after earning her B.A.

There, Skaggs built her professional career, launching her own dance company, Sarah Skaggs Dance, in the 1990s. She also established a nonprofit organization, Higher Ground Inc., and has served on numerous high-profile arts boards and councils.

But she never quite lost her social-scientist sensibility.

Skaggs' choreography explores the use of dance in culture by breaking artistic boundaries. She fuses classical dance forms with folk and pop-culture dance, such as hip-hop, and she sets her dance to music that ranges from classical pieces to works by Brian Eno, Nirvana and Chemical Brothers. At times, she flaunts traditional physical boundaries by including audiences in the act.

This anti-elitist approach appealed not only to the world's dance literati—whom she met as she performed, choreographed and taught dance here and overseas—but to the unschooled viewer, as well. In fact, Skaggs often reached out to dance-resistant audiences by creating site-specific works in public places, effectively sending her dancers to diverse audiences, rather than asking audiences to come to them.

She was rewarded for her innovations. Over the years, Skaggs has earned multiple fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York Foundation for the Arts; and the Harkness, Culpeper, Greenwall, Jerome, Dreyfus, Bulova and Rockefeller foundations.

Dancing her way to a new career

Skaggs' transition to higher education began in 2001. She was just about to unveil a buzzed-about, Rockefeller-grant-funded multimedia project, Get Out of the House, when she witnessed the second plane crash into the Twin Towers on Sept. 11.

"It was a defining moment. I started to re-evaluate my life," says Skaggs, who then lived near Ground Zero and, after hearing the first plane crash, had gone up to the roof of her apartment building to see what was happening. "I realized that I was spending a lot of my time writing grants to raise money for the dance company, and this was taking me further away from the dance. So I found a great MFA program for professionals [at Hollins University]."

One MFA later, Skaggs channels the enthusiasm, drive and innovative spirit that fueled her professional career into Dickinson's Department of Theatre & Dance. She says that because of her liberal-arts background, she felt comfortable at Dickinson from the start.

Over the past few months, Skaggs has presented a main-stage student production that earned rave reviews. She also collaborated with faculty and staff to integrate dance across the curriculum, creating a consciousness-raising Eco Trash Dance event that was part of this year's Focus the Nation event and a Flash Mob Trash Freeze, performed during RecycleMania 2009. (She envisions many more such collaborations in the future, quipping, "Get ready for some trashy dances!")

And as she introduces her students to the principles and history of dance, she also passes along the lessons she learned from her own undergraduate dance instructor.

"I tell them they are all 'danthropologists' now," says the dancer and former anthropology student. "I want to create interdisciplinary opportunities that encourage students to connect what they are reading about in class with what their bodies are doing."

To facilitate this, Skaggs pairs dance with writing, explaining that choreographers must establish a thesis statement, or theme, and then build on it. She also helps students translate their papers and senior projects into art. And she establishes "creativity habits" for her students to nurture creative skills that they may apply to all disciplines and all aspects of life.

As she gears up for the Dance Theatre Group's spring performance (April 24-26), Skaggs is simultaneously planning a Dance Party designed to celebrate cultural and artistic diversity, which students will present on April 29, the International Day of Dance. The event will bring all of the dance groups at Dickinson together to perform and teach each other steps from around the world.

The work is keeping her busy, but she says she is energized by her plans and inspired by her students. And when she needs an energy boost during long afternoons, she simply stops by a campus coffee shop for a double shot of espresso and keeps moving.

"Every time I get espresso, people say to me, 'You're not going to sleep tonight, Sarah,' " she admits with a full-body laugh and a characteristic wave of her hand. "And I always tell them, 'I have a lot of hours ahead of me. There's so much I want to do.' "