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

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