What do you think?
Rate this book
Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance
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.
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.
244 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1997
1 person is currently reading
113 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
Read
November 12, 2009Very happy to have finished dance book #4. Albright does an excellent job of covering a lot of ground in contemporary performance in a cogent and challenging manner. The clear connections she draws between structuralism, feminist studies, and the dancing body are incredibly informative and help me clarify some of my underlying assumptions about the study of dance. The chapters range from very straight-forward (her analysis of a variety of types of multi-abled dancing) to quite experimental (her look at the dancing body of Marie Chouinard) and her descriptions of dances are especially vivid. I especially love how she is always foregrounding the moving body (her own and others)and pushing her writing towards constant motion.
March 19, 2015
I think that I would mark any individual chapter in this book higher than a 3, but it seemed a bit disjointed in its focus. The writing is compelling and the descriptions and analysis of dances are vivid and well thought out. Enjoyable, exciting to read, but it ends abruptly without feeling like there has been a continuous thread throughout.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
Can't find what you're looking for?
Get help and learn more about the design.