Choreographing Difference

The choreographies of Bill T. Jones, Cleveland Ballet Dancing Wheels, Zab Maboungou, David Dorfman, Marie Chouinard, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, and others, have helped establish dance as a crucial discourse of the 90s. These dancers, Ann Cooper Albright argues, are asking the audience to see the body as a source of cultural identity — a physical presence that moves with and through its gendered, racial, and social meanings.

Through her articulate and nuanced analysis of contemporary choreography, Albright shows how the dancing body shifts conventions of representation and provides a critical example of the dialectical relationship between cultures and the bodies that inhabit them. As a dancer, feminist, and philosopher, Albright turns to the material experience of bodies, not just the body as a figure or metaphor, to understand how cultural representation becomes embedded in the body. In arguing for the intelligence of bodies, Choreographing Difference is itself a testimonial, giving voice to some important political, moral, and artistic questions of our time.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Witnessing Dance
Mining the Dancefield: Feminist Theory and Contemporary Dance
Techno Bodies: Muscling with Gender in Contemporary Dance
Moving Across Difference: Dance and Disability
Incalculable Choreographies
Dancing Bodies and the Stories They Tell
Embodying History: Epic Narrative and the Cultural Identity in African-American Dance
Appendix
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index