Sarah Holmes

Sarah Holmes, MA, MFA, PhD Dance History and Theory. Dr. Holmes received a Ph.D. in Dance
History and Theory from the University of California, Riverside where her research examined
issues surrounding race, class, and gender in Pilates practice. She received an M.A. in dance
from Mills College, Oakland, CA, there focusing on 20th century, modern and postmodern
choreographers' use of space as a political response to the (then) social climate. In 2024,
Holmes received an MFA in Dance, where she explored the emergent knowledge of disabled
corporeality from the intersection between choreography, empathy, technology, and
neurological disease. Lastly, Holmes’ holds a B.A. in economics from Scripps College, Claremont,
CA and, as an undergraduate, researched the national and local economic benefits gleaned
from government funding for the arts. Artistically, she focuses primarily on screendance
productions so that she may better explore the mediated self through surrogate realities. By
doing so, Dr. Holmes reveals another synthetic corporeal space and, from her perspective,
these spaces house uncomfortable truths about instability and unresolved embodied
relationality. Working with the locus of control outside of the body, i.e., not entirely an interior
exploration of the kinesthetic self, her current research examines inter- and intra-subjectivity
between the bodies on screen. The visceral, sweating, breathing, "real", synthetic and unreal
bodies reveal concepts such as bifurcations, memory, and self.

2024. “Intangible.” Dance video. Premiered at the Newport Beach Film Festival. October 27.

2023/24. “Racialized Bodily Grammar: White Vulnerability in the Embodied Discourse of Somatic
Practice.” Journal of Dance and Somatic Practice. Vol. 15, Issue 2.

2020. “A Quantitative Approach to Contact Improvisational Dance.” Complex System Summer Program,
Santa Fe Institute. February 2020. Found on: https://github.com/ggrrll/improv_dance

2019. “Bodily Text and the Written Word of Pilates: How Ballet Concealed and Revealed
Cultured Legacies of Bodily Power.” Nordic Journal of Dance. August 2018. Anticipated
publication, January 2019. http://nordicjournalofdance.com/NordicJounal9(2).pdf

2018. “A New Somatic Environment: Quasi-Quantitative Study Reveals Water Training as an
Effective Method to Increase Dancer Kinesthetic Awareness.” Movement, Health, and Exercise.
Vol. 7, No. 1. https://www.mohejournal.com/index.php/mohe/issue/view/13

2015. “Understanding the ‘Unconscious’ Muscle Memories in Pilates: Using Somatics, Motor
Learning, and Pilates History to Reveal Embodied Cultural Tensions in Pilates.” Journal of Dance
and Somatic Practice 7:1, 31-42.
https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/intellect/jdsp/2015/00000007/00000001/art00004?
crawler=true

2014. “The Pilates Pelvis: Racial Implications for Immobile Hips.” Dance Research Journal, Sherril
Dodds, ed. Special Issue, “BODY PARTS: Head, Hips, Fingers, Feet, Chest, Belly, Butt.” 46:2, 57-
72. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/555597/pdf