Originally from Michigan, Andrew is a researcher-artist working across dance, anthropology, and ecology. Andrew graduated with a BS in Dance Honors Summa Cum Laude from Wayne State University in Detroit and received an MA in Dance Anthropology with Distinction at Roehampton University. He completed his PhD in Anthropology at University College London studying under Hélène Neveu-Kringelbach and Jerome Lewis, researching how an environmental sensibility might be cultivated through dance practice, performance, and protest in the UK.
Alongside teaching and research, he has been a company dancer with Jody Oberfelder Projects and Vatic Theatre touring in the USA, UK, and Germany. He is secretary for the Ethnomusicology and Ethnochoreology Committee at the Royal Anthropological Institute. Recent projects include a workshop on meeting the River Avon with Spike Island Gallery in Bristol, and the presentation of ethnographically informed verbatim dance theatre at the 2025 UK River Summit at Morden Hall.
His current research interests include queer ecology, folk practice, and shapeshifting. An amateur herbalist in his spare time, he is an avid forager and producer of herbal remedies.
Currently working on
Writing a monograph on dance and environmental activism in the UK through the theoretical lenses of enchantment, storytelling and ‘soft activism’.
Exploring how shapeshifting appears in performance practices both as a queer survival strategy and multi-species communications.
Learning more about folk dance practice in the UK
I welcome PhD proposals in the following areas:
- Environmentalism(s) in dance through choreography, community workshops, and/or activist practices
- Ethnographically informed research in dance
- Queer theory and performance, multispecies ethnography
Publications or practice outputs:
- Sanger, A. (2024) ‘Sanctuary on the fault line: environmental dance practice as liminal critique and refuge’, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 15(3), pp. 495–510. doi: 10.1080/19443927.2024.2312296.
- Sanger, A. (2023) ‘Gaga and naming as eco-somatic practices of enchantment’, Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, 14(2), pp. 263-275. doi: 10.1386/jdsp_00086_1
- Sanger, A. (2019) ‘Gaga as embodied research (New Writer’s Prize article)’, Research in Dance Education, 20(1), pp. 5–18. doi: 10.1080/14647893.2018.1518973.