Anne Searcy (she/her)

Anne Searcy researches the intersections of music, politics, and dance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her current book project is Choreographing Minimalism: Music, Neoliberalism, and the Creation of Contemporary Ballet, under contract with Oxford University Press. In this book, she explores the era after the mid-century boom in U.S. dance funding. As money for dance dried up in the U.S., avant-garde composers and choreographers were pulled into the better-resourced world of ballet, bringing minimalist music and postmodern choreographic techniques with them. In doing so, they changed the relationships between time, space, movement, and subjectivity that had governed American ballet since the 1950s. The book explores choreography by Geoffrey Holder, Lucinda Childs, Jerome Robbins, Twyla Tharp, William Forsythe, and Ulysses Dove, and music by Tania León, Philip Glass, Thom Willems, Arvo Pärt, and Richard Einhorn.

Searcy’s first book, Ballet in the Cold War: A Soviet-American Exchange, analyzes the American and Soviet cultural diplomacy programs, focusing on tours by the Bolshoi Ballet in the United States and by American Ballet Theatre and the New York City Ballet in the Soviet Union. She has also published articles on the ballet Spartacus and the musical Hamilton.

As a teacher, Searcy leads courses on classical and popular music, including a nineteenth- and twentieth-century classical music survey, as well as courses on American musical theater, New York in the 1970s, Soviet music, Tchaikovsky’s ballets, and embodiment. As a pedagogue, Searcy focuses on using writing projects—broadly conceived—as a way of practicing thinking and communicating. She has recently been a member of the Writing Fellowship at the UW Center for Teaching and Learning.

Before coming to the University of Washington, she taught at the University of Miami.