A Culture’s Living DNA
Sarah Skaggs in Mathers Theatre, in the Holland Union Building, home to Dickinson dance and theatrical productions. Photo by Dan Loh.
Office Hours: Associate Professor of Dance Sarah Skaggs
by Tony Moore
Associate Professor of Dance Sarah Skaggs, who is also Dickinson’s director of dance, earned her MFA from Hollins University. An internationally renowned choreographer, she is the artistic director of Sarah Skaggs Dance and has received numerous fellowships from such organizations as the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation. She teaches classes such as Dance History, Modern Technique and Choreography.
Dance has served as a profound lens on the human condition since ancient rituals first took form. What distinctive opportunities at Dickinson—like the CPYB collaboration or rigorous somatics work—elevate it as a prime undergraduate hub for the discipline.
I would reframe the statement: Dance has served as a profound repository for the body politic. It is a rich and ripe area for interdisciplinary study—everything passes in and out of the body: science, culture, politics. Dance is biopoltical in every sense! You can trace the history of cultural values directly through the body.
Teaching dance as an intellectual and embodied practice at Dickinson has been a sheer joy for me simply because of our focus on interdisciplinarity. On one end of campus we have the world famous Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet (CPYB) and on the other end Erin Woods Burke’s movement lab in somatic practices. These two seemingly radically different approaches to training meet in the middle as all of our dance students take the Introduction to Global Dance Forms and our U.S. Dance History course. In these pivotal courses, students learn how a body or collection of bodies reflect, resist or remix the values of a dominant culture. Our students have the distinct opportunity to actually “embody” these complex notions of power and resistance in the studio, as we’ve merged much of our intellectual and corporeal modes of learning. Students emerge from our dance program hyperaware of not only their bodies but of their place and relationship in society.
Your multiyear choreographic cycle on the body amid disasters, zeroing in on 9/11's ripples, sounds like a gut-punch turned poetry in motion. What's the raw spark of that work, and what drew you to choreographing crisis?
Before 9/11, I created these inclusive dance events that took place in spaces where people congregated: parks, clubs, ballrooms, gymnasiums—any place where people could move together. The point was to create a communal space where at some point in the evening the lines between the spectator and performer blurred. We toured this work all over the country
But after 9/11, that type of ecstatic energy seemed completely out of touch. I lived 20 blocks from the twin towers, and my studio was 10 blocks away. I watched towers explode and then implode. I was frozen in disbelief, but then I calmly began to prepare for more possible attacks. I was moving in slow motion. I wanted to respond in some way. I created a short dance inspired by the circular power of Tai Chi and the slow-motion walking I did while visiting the Vietnam memorial in DC, which is a powerful inspiration for my public dance works. From there, 9/11 Dance: A Roving Memorial took shape. I taught the work to groups of all shapes and ages in NYC, D.C. and Shanksville. For the 10-year anniversary of 9/11, these groups of dancing bodies performed the dance simultaneously in all three cities. Even the Dickinson students were involved in the Shanksville site. Several times since then I will teach the dance to Dickinson students, where we roam around campus in slow-motion performing the dance.
So I would say the spark was how to move through the explosive trauma of 9/11. My way was to walk—to create a communal public grieving project in the form of a procession dance—and to continuously move with any and every body.
Beyond the stage, how does dance weave into the fabric of society and global cultures—maybe as a mirror for shared grief, a catalyst for empathy or a quiet force for healing across divides?
Yes, dance is a repository for all sorts of forces playing out in societies. In both our academic and studio classes, we engage students in all the ways that dance heals, connects, entertains, flirts and transforms us. Dance is always “doing” something. For example, our students study the protest power of the gumboot dance found in the South African gold mines, or meta-kinetic empathic dances of Martha Graham or the community bonding found in Jane Austin’s English Country dances. These are just a few of the dance forms woven into the fabric of different cultures that reveal how movement both reflects and creates community.
At this moment on campus, we have an exquisite dancer and teacher offering Bharatanaytam, a classical Indian dance that dates back to more than 2,000 years. We are fortunate that a parent understood our desire to expand the breadth of our program, and thanks to that gift we will be able to continue to bring in international dance artists to campus. Their presence amplifies our mission to understand dance as part of a culture’s living DNA.
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Published December 9, 2025