Book description
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. A performer and feminist scholar,
Ann Cooper Albright is Associate Professor of Dance at Oberlin College,
where she teaches dance, performance studies, and women's studies
courses. She is co-editor, with Ann Dils, of Moving History/Dancing
Cultures: A Dance History Reader (2001).
