Accounting and Accountability: How the NEA Funded Dance

Abstract

Funding Bodies by Sarah Wilbur does the important work of unpacking how dance funding flowed from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) between 1965 and 2016. Wilbur explicates the behind-the-scenes functioning of the NEA to reveal the human negotiations and the affective dimensions of distributing funding on behalf of the federal government. Meticulously researched, this book is a carefully constructed narrative of how the NEA supported concert dance as “an endowed professional ideal” (p. 29). While documenting fifty years of NEA history, Wilbur engages with current debates about establishing meaningful cultural equity in the performing arts. Wilbur unveils the past machinations of the NEA and invites readers to reimagine what the NEA could represent moving forward. Throughout this book, Wilbur reconstructs the NEA’s dance funding paradigm on the basis of extensive archival analysis and insights from her anonymized informants. She reveals how the NEA’s institutional support incorporated racial, class-based, and regional biases. She eloquently describes the NEA’s initial 1965 “distribution system” that prioritized ballet and modern dance forms and favored white, urban, and wealthy grantees (p. 32). She further expounds upon attempts to make the NEA more equitable, highlighting the efforts of Vantile Whitfield, the founding director of Expansion Arts. Wilbur describes Whitfield’s advocacy for artists of color, emphasizing that “African, Latin, Asian, and Native American arts organizers had long been delivering cultural excellence through organizational logics that simply didn’t fit the existing paradigm” (p. 75). The regional bias present in NEA funding is discussed at length, and the disproportionate representation of grantees from New York City is illustrated through quantitative and qualitative evidence and a colloquial description of the “New York dance Mafia” that often dominated NEA panel reviews (p. 130). The mechanisms that supported dance touring were