Engaging bodies : the politics and poetics of corporeality / Ann Cooper Albright.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Albright, Ann Cooper, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Dance criticism.

Dance--History.

Dance.

History.

Dance--Study and teaching.

Dance--Social aspects.

Human body--Social aspects.

Human body.

Physical Description:

xiii, 391 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Middletown, Connecticut : Wesleyan University Press, [2013]

Summary:

Critical and performative writings from a well-known dance scholar, 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 each other 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. Book jacket.

Contents:

I Performance Writings 19

1 Pooh Kaye and Eccentric Motions 22

2 Johanna Boyce 25

3 Improvisations / Simone Forti Forti, Simone, Pooh Kaye Kaye, Pooh 27

4 Song of Lawino 31

5 Joseph Holmes, Sizzle and Heat 33

6 Performing across Identity 36

7 In Dialogue with Firebird 40

8 Dancing Bodies and the Stories They Tell 44

9 Embodying History: The New Epic Dance 50

10 Desire and Control: Performing Bodies in the Age of AIDS 55

II Feminist Theories 61

11 Mining the Dancefield: Spectacle, Moving Subjects, and Feminist Theory 64

12 Writing the Moving Body: Nancy Stark Smith and the Hieroglyphs 76

13 Auto-Body Stories: Blondell Cummings and Autobiography in Dance 92

14 Femininity with a Vengeance: Strategies of Veiling and Unveiling in Loïe Fuller's Performances of Salome 115

III Dancing Histories 139

15 The Long Afternoon of a Faun: Reconstructions and Discourses of Desire 142

16 Embodying History:. Epic Narrative and Cultural Identity in African-American Dance 148

17 Matters of Tact: Writing History from the Inside Out 175

18 The Tanagra Effect: Wrapping the Modern Body in the Folds of Ancient Greece 188

IV Contact Improvisation 209

19 A Particular History: Contact Improvisation at Oberlin College 212

20 Open Bodies: (X)changes of Identity in Capoeira and Contact improvisation 218

21 Present Tense: Contact Improvisation at Twenty-five 230

22 Feeling In and Out: Contact Improvisation and the Politics of Empathy 237

V Pedagogy 247

23 Dancing across Difference: Experience and Identity in the Classroom 250

24 Channeling the Other: An Embodied Approach to Teaching across Cultures 263

25 Training Bodies to Matter 270

VI Occasional Pieces 279

26 The Mesh in the Mess 281

27 Through Yours to Mine and Back Again: Reflections on Bodies in Motion 288

28 Physical Mindfulness 292

29 Researching Bodies: The Politics and Poetics of Corporeality 294

30 Strategic Abilities: Negotiating the Disabled Body in Dance 297

31 Dancing in and out of Africa 318

32 Rates of Exchange 321

33 Moving Contexts: Dance and Difference in the Twenty-first Century 325

34 Three Beginnings and a Manifesto 335

35 Improvisation as Radical Politics 338

36 Space and Subjectivity 343

37 Strategic Practices 348

38 Resurrecting the Future: Body/Image/Technology 354

39 Falling ... on-screen 360

40 The Tensions of Techne: On Heidegger and Screendance 367

41 Falling 370.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780819574107

0819574104

9780819574114

0819574112

OCLC:

840477917