Origins

Barbara McAlister grew up skidding knees-first across sports courts and jamming for joy to Richard Simmons and Jane Fonda videos in turquoise tights. She took her first studio dance classes at Mount Holyoke College as part of her self-designed BA in ethnomusicology. Under the guidance of Nani Agbeli of the Dagbe Institute, Faith Conant, Victor Koblavi Dogah, and David Sanford she studied the music and dances of the Ewe peoples of present day Ghana and Togo. She holds an MFA in Dance from Texas Woman’s University where her embodied scholarship investigates the intersection of dance, play, and sport. At this intersection she seeks to understand: when are we (not) dancing?

Performance

Barbara’s performance credits include works by Nani Agbeli, ARCOS Dance’s In the Ether series, and Pilobolus Dance Theater’s Five Senses Festival. She has studied under professionals in a range of dance forms, including Sidra Bell, Pilobolus Dance Theater, and Leah Cox. She has also studied with Martha Eddy and assisted in her graduate courses at University of North Carolina Greensboro and Montclair State University. 

Influences

A trans-disciplinary artist, scholar, educator, and activist, Barbara grapples to invert perception and induce moments of kinesthetic empathy through screendance, site dance, and stage works. Her work emerges from the interplay of her eclectic movement background in sports, strength training, yoga, and a variety of dance forms including Argentine Tango, West-African dance and forms of the African diaspora, and release technique. Her screendances have been featured internationally at festivals in the United Kingdom, Venezuela, Turkey, and Greece as well as in the United States. 

Research

Barbara’s current research, made possible through a generous grant by the Jane Nelson Institute for Women’s Leadership, focuses on the gender gap amongst professional choreographers in the United States. She maintains an ongoing project on artist-activist Celeste Miller, research she was honored to share at Jacob’s Pillow. Under the guidance of Dr. Jeff Friedman, she serves as a National Dance Education Organization Oral History Student Researcher.