Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance

✍ Scribed by Ann Cooper Albright

• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 247
• Edition: 1st
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Cover......Page 1
Title Page......Page 4
Dedication......Page 6
Contents......Page 8
List of Illustrations......Page 10
Acknowledgments......Page 12
Introduction: Witnessing Dance......Page 14
Mining the Dancefield: Feminist Theory and Contemporary Dance......Page 30
Techno Bodies: Muscling with Gender in Contemporary Dance......Page 57
Moving Across Difference: Dance and Disability......Page 85
Incalculable Choreographies......Page 122
Dancing Bodies and the Stories They Tell......Page 148
Embodying History: Epic Narrative and Cultural Identity in African-American Dance......Page 179
Appendix......Page 208
Introduction: Witnessing Dance......Page 220
Mining the Dancefield: Feminist Theory and Contemporary Dance......Page 221
Techno Bodies: Muscling with Gender in Contemporary Dance......Page 223
Moving Across Difference: Dance and Disability......Page 224
Incalculable Choreographies......Page 226
Dancing Bodies and the Stories They Tell......Page 228
Embodying History: Epic Narrative and Cultural Identity in African-American Dance......Page 230
Selected Bibliography......Page 234
Index......Page 240
Copyright......Page 247