Customer Reviews

Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance

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Albright has certainly accomplished a task few dance history scholars have: she gives us a comprehensive approach to dance from a variety of theoretical perspectives. However, I find her narrative style elliptical, and I also find fault with her seemingly overzealous application of theory. Albright applies many of the theorists currently en vogue in academia to dance study, often with great results. On the other hand, the variety of rubrics she uses obscures the most important part of her study: her point of view. Her pairings are stimulating, and certainly evocative. Yet what results is a good amount of speculation, not firmly grounded in rigorous historical/cultural research or in choreographic analysis. I found each chapter glittered with fascinating ideas and concepts which could have been better fleshed out. Albright presents those interested in applying theory to dance with an interesting challenge: how can dance theory change its reputation from being a field of dilettantism to a field of scholarship? I think the first step is to set out a cohesive analytic frame from the start of a study, rather than throwing a hodge-podge of post-structural/post-colonial theory to bat against a corpus composed of two hundred+ years of history and thousands of works.

An essential read for the socially concerned dance lover. This book navigates a tricky path that follows the dancing body through subjectivism and objectivism, and the identities that it cannot escape. Albright delicately manages to show how lines of gender, race, form, ability and other identities can be created and crossed by dances and the bodies that dance them. Recommended to choreographers, dancers, dance watchers and anyone who is interested in social constructs of identity.

I felt some type of connection to this book as I passed it in the shop. I have been a dance teacher for 13 years, and I have never thought to use dance as Ms. Albright has. Her section on Sex in Dance got many more students to join my class. Ms. Albright is an amazing author and some day I wish to see her dance. Her ideas are on dance are brilliant and artistic. This book has changed my life as a person, artist, but mostly as a dancer.

this was a very beautiful book, ms. Cooper is a fantastic writer