Feminist theory illuminates the radical cultural work of 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.
“Albright brings the insights of contemporary critical theory, particularly feminist theory, to bear on dance studies with great theoretical clarity, scholarly rigor, and writerly panache.”—Susan Manning
“A clear, cogent, sophisticated in-depth analysis of recent dances concerned with issues of gender, ethnic, and racial identity, by a theorist whose own dance experience gives her special insight into the choreographic process of making meaning.”——Sally Banes
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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).
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