Engaging Bodies

Winner of the Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics (2014)

For twenty-five years, Ann Cooper Albright has been exploring the intersection of cultural representation and somatic identity in dance. For Albright, dancing is a physical inquiry, a way of experiencing and participating in the world, and her writing reflects an interdisciplinary approach to seeing and thinking about dance. In her engagement as both a dancer and a scholar, Albright draws on her kinesthetic sensibilities as well as her intellectual knowledge to articulate how movement creates meaning. Throughout Engaging Bodies movement and ideas lean on one another to produce a critical theory anchored in the material reality of dancing bodies. This blend of cultural theory and personal circumstance will be useful and inspiring for emerging scholars and dancers looking for a model of writing about dance that thrives on the interconnectedness of watching and doing, gesture and thought.

Hardcover is un-jacketed.

Preface
Introduction: Situated Dancing
I PERFORMANCE WRITINGS
Pooh Kaye and Eccentric Motions
Johanna Boyce
Improvisations by Simone Forti and Pooh Kaye
Song of Lawino
Joseph Homes, Sizzle and Heat
Performing across Identity
In Dialogue with Firebird
Dancing Bodies and the Stories They Tell
Embodying History: The New Epic Dance
Desire and Control: Performing Bodies in the Age of AIDS
II FEMINIST THEORIES
Mining the Dancefield: Spectacle, Moving Subjects, and Feminist Theory
Writing the Moving Body: Nancy Stark Smith and the Hieroglyphs
Auto-Body Stories: Blondell Cummings and Autobiography in Dance
Femininity with a Vengeance: Strategies of Veiling and Unveiling in Loïe Fuller's Performance of Salomé
III DANCING HISTORIES
The Long Afternoon of a Faun: Reconstruction and Discourse of Desire
Embodying History: Epic Narrative and Cultural Identity in African-American Dance
Matters of Tact: Writing History from the Inside Out
The Tanagra Effect: Wrapping the Modern Body in the Folds of Ancient Greece
IV CONTRACT IMPROVISATION
A Particular History: Contact Improvisation at Oberlin College
Open Bodies: (X)changes of Identity in Capoeira and Contact Improvisation
Present Tense: Contact Improvisation at Twenty-five
Feeling In and Out: Contact Improvisation and the Politics of Empathy
V PEDAGOGY
Dancing across Difference: Experience and Identity in the Classroom
Channeling the Other: An Embodied Approach to Teaching across Cultures
Training Bodies to Matter
VI OCCASIONAL PIECES
The Mesh in the Mess
Through Yours to Mine and Back Again: Reflections on Bodies in Motion
Physical Mindfulness
Researching Bodies: The Politics and Poetics of Corporeality
Strategic Abilities: Negotiating the Disabled Body in Dance
Dancing in and out of Africa
Rates of Exchange
Moving Contexts: Dance and Difference in the Twenty-first Century
Three Beginnings and a Manifesto
Improvisations as Radical Politics
Space and Subjectivity •Strategic Practices
Resurrecting the Future: Body/Image/Technology
Falling... on-screen
The Tensions of Techn : On Heidegger and Screendance
Falling
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Index