Engaging Bodies: The Politics and Poetics of Corporeality - Hardcover

Albright, Ann Cooper

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0819574104 ISBN 13: 9780819574107

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press, 2013

Synopsis

Winner of the Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics (2014)

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.

Hardcover is un-jacketed.

About this title

About the Author:

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.

Review:

"An essential offering from the eminent contemporary theorist of corporeality and feminist studies. Ann Cooper Albright's practice-infused, phenomenologically derived writings explore the largest issues in dance studies today―critical race, disability, gender, philosophy, historiography, activism, and body image. Surprising and compelling at every turn, this outstanding collection confirms the capacities of bodies in motion to matter."―Thomas F. DeFrantz, author of Dancing Revelations

"Engaging Bodies gives us not only insights into major facets of dance scholarship but also into the life of the mind of an important scholar in the field. Albright's journey from college student with no dance experience to distinguished professor is nearly as compelling as the dancers, movements, and theories she analyzes."―Nadine George-Graves, professor of theater and dance, University of California–San Diego

About this edition

• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0819574104
• ISBN 13: 9780819574107
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 408