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"Albright, Ann Cooper"
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Choreographing difference : the body and identity in 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.
Ebook Edition Note: All images have been redacted.
eBook
Situated Dancing: Notes from Three Decades in Contact with Phenomenology
I began to study philosophy at the same time that I began to study dance, at college in the early 1980s. Both of these choices surprised me at first, as I had originally planned to study politics and become a civil rights lawyer after college. I see now that these two areas of inquiry were routes toward figuring out how to bridge the divides between my academic self and my increasingly explosive physicality. Figuratively as well as literally divided into day and night, my academic experience and the club scene I thrived in were separated by geographic distance and differing class values—a study in the cultural bifurcation produced by the hierarchies of brain and brawn. But these body/mind boundaries were always porous for me, and they became increasingly so as I explored the epistemological origins of the Cartesian split in my survey of Western philosophy course while also taking my first modern dance class. My desire was to become both verbally and physically articulate, and I savored those moments when vague impulses or ideas found the right expressive gesture or crucial wording. By the time I was a senior, I was choreographing a quartet and writing a thesis on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1962). Somewhere along the way, philosophy and dance leaned into one another, beginning a duet that would lead to a life spent thinking and moving.
Journal Article
The Public Is Invited to Dance: Presentation for Seema Haria's Arangetram Cleveland, Ohio, September 31, 1993
This short talk, written over a decade ago, was originally presented at Seema Haria's arangetram in Cleveland, Ohio on July 31, 1993. At that performative event, Seema's dancing was showcased for an audience of over 200 friends and family. Although over the years I have lost contact with Seema, I have continued to be involved with different aspects of Classical Indian Dance, both in the United States and abroad. I have also taught dance (including Contact Improvisation) in India, and I find myself engaging with the concept of rasa that I present here in various aspects of my life. The exchange of ideas across cultures is a strange and wondrous phenomenon. Real concerns about cultural appropriation and the unequal access to the power of representation mean that we must learn to tread carefully across regional and ethnic differences. Yet at the beginning of the twenty-first century I am more convinced than ever that these exchanges, when consciously initiated, can be extraordinarily fruitful. There is something compelling for me about Classical Indian Dance, and as I engage with various forms and their histories, I am inspired to share in the dancing—intellectually, physically, and spiritually. Please join me.
Journal Article
Matters of Tact: Writing History from the inside out
This essay is an attempt to articulate the theoretical implications of Albright's rather quixotic methodology in studying Loie Fuller, an attempt to understand the very conditions of its possibilities. She identifies two strategies that guide her scholarship on Fuller. While one is primarily intellectual and the other is based in physical study, both practices refuse the conventional separation of scholarship and the studio, folding themselves into a mix of dancing and writing that houses physical receptiveness at its core.
Journal Article
Choreographing difference: the body and identity in 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.
eBook
Matters of Tact: Writing History from the Inside Out
Long before I became a committed academic, long before I was a college professor teaching dance history, long before terminal degrees and professional titles, I chanced upon an exhibition of early dance photographs at the Rodin Museum in Paris. I bought the small catalogue, and from time to time I would page through the striking black and white images searching for dancing inspiration. I always paused at a certain one of Loïe Fuller. There she is, radiant in the sunlight of Rodin's garden, chest open, arms spread like great wings, running full force towards the camera. It is an image of a strong, mature woman, one who exudes a joyful, yet earthy energy. A copy of this photograph taken in 1900 by Eugène Druet currently hangs above my desk. With a nod to the meanings embedded in historical study, Walter Benjamin once wrote: “To dwell means to leave traces” (1999, 9). Indeed, traces are the material artifacts that constitute the stuff of historical inquiry, the bits and pieces of a life that scholars follow, gather up, and survey. The word itself suggests the actual imprint of a figure who has passed, the footprint, mark or impression of a person or event. These kinds of traces are omnipresent in the case of Loie Fuller. Some traces are more visible than others, some more easily located. But all traces—once noticed—draw us into another reality.
Journal Article