Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance / Edition 1

by Ann Cooper Albright

Overview

Feminist theory illuminates the radical cultural work of contemporary dance.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780819563217
Publisher:	Wesleyan University Press
Publication date:	11/28/1997
Series:	Studies. Engineering Dynamics Series;9
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	244
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.77(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

ANN COOPER ALBRIGHT is chair of the Dance Department at Oberlin College. She is the author of Choreographing Difference, Traces of Light, and Modern Gestures, and coeditor of Moving History/Dancing Cultures and Taken by Surprise.

Table of Contents

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

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Albright brings the insights of contemporary critical theory, particularly feminist theory, to bear on dance studies with great theoretical clarity, scholarly rigor, and writerly panache."—Susan Manning

"A clear, cogent, sophisticated in-depth analysis of recent dances concerned with issues of gender, ethnic, and racial identity, by a theorist whose own dance experience gives her special insight into the choreographic process of making meaning.—"—Sally Banes

Susan Manning

"Albright brings the insights of contemporary critical theory, particularly feminist theory, to bear on dance studies with great theoretical clarity, scholarly rigor, and writerly panache."

Editorial Reviews

"Albright brings the insights of contemporary critical theory, particularly feminist theory, to bear on dance studies with great theoretical clarity, scholarly rigor, and writerly panache."—Susan Manning

"A clear, cogent, sophisticated in-depth analysis of recent dances concerned with issues of gender, ethnic, and racial identity, by a theorist whose own dance experience gives her special insight into the choreographic process of making meaning.—"—Sally Banes

From the Publisher