Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Preface
• Introduction: Situated Dancing
• I Performance Writings
• Pooh Kaye and Eccentric Motions
• Johanna Boyce
• Improvisations
• 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 Loie Fuller's Performance of Salome
• 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

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This is Albright's sixth book: she is author of Choreographing Difference (CH, May'98, 35-4996), Traces of Light (CH, May'08, 45-4896), and Modern Gestures (2010), and she coedited two other volumes. The present title comprises pieces Albright (Oberlin College) has written over 35 years. In a brief introduction, the author provides insight into her methodology for selecting the material and notes her hopes for the interdisciplinary uses of this volume. These writings range from historically focused essays to pieces of a more philosophical nature; a number of the pieces were originally written as reviews. Throughout the reader encounters Albright's continuing interest in the intersections of critical and feminist theory and the practical, kinesthetic experiences of the dancing body. The 41 essays (including an afterword) are divided into six sections: "Performance Writings," "Feminist Theories," "Dancing Histories," "Contact Improvisation," "Pedagogy," and "Occasional Pieces." Entries from the mid-1980s are placed in dialogue with those written in the past few years. Brief, accessible pieces and pieces that require deep theoretical grounding are intermingled. Well balanced overall, the book will be useful for young scholar artists and their mentors. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty/professionals. S. E. Friedler Swarthmore College

Author notes provided by Syndetics

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.