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.
Ann Cooper Albright
A dancer and scholar, Ann Cooper Albright is Professor of Dance at Oberlin College. She is the author of How to Land: finding ground in an unstable world which offers ways of thinking about and dealing with the uncertainty of our contemporary lives; Engaging Bodies: The Politics and Poetics of Corporeality; Modern Gestures: Abraham Walkowitz Draws Isadora Duncan Dancing; Traces of Light: Absence and Presence in the Work of Loïe Fuller; and Choreographing Difference the Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance. She is founder and director of Girls in Motion, an award-winning afterschool program at Langston Middle School and co-director of Accelerated Motion: Towards a New Dance Literacy, a digital collection of materials about dance. Albright is also a veteran practitioner of contact Improvisation, has taught workshops internationally, and facilitated Critical Mass: CI @ 50 which brought 300 dancers from across the world to learn, talk, and dance together in celebration of the 50th anniversary of this extraordinary form. The book Encounters with Contact Improvisation, is the product of one of her adventures in writing and dancing with others. Her work has been supported by the NEA, NEH, ACLS, The Guggenheim Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council.
Wesleyan University Press
