Endangered Strangers

The project of tracking competitive advantages in US federal dance funding is complicated by the historically partial, contingent, and indirect character of government support for the arts in US culture. Rather than discussing grant competition strictly in terms of who won the funds, this chapter offers a comparative analysis of early and recent funding infrastructures at the US National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the lone arts philanthropic arm of the US federal government. By following the political rationales of NEA key players and the institutional rhetorics, programs, and governmental procedures that set these agendas in motion, one can better attend to which competitors hold advantages in the millennial turn toward art as an investment yielding economic deliverables, a far cry from the NEA’s early promotion of cultural preservationism, defined through the narrow production curricula of concert dance.