Choreographing Difference

The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance

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by Ann Cooper Albright

Wesleyan University Press

Due/Published November 1997, 292 pages, paper

ISBN 0819563218

Albright argues that the choreographies of Bill T. Jones, Cleveland Ballet Dancing Wheels, Zab Maboungou, David Dorfman, Marie Chouinard, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, and others ask their audiences to see the body as a source of cultural identity--a physical presence that moves with and through its gendered, racial, and social meanings. She 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 and feminist, 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.