Ann Cooper Albright has been an important presence in the dance field for more than 25 years as a choreographer, scholar, and educator. In this retrospective collection, she recounts her abiding uses of phenomenology and feminist theory, coupled with embodied practices, as her primary tools for manifesting “a life spent thinking and moving.”

The book includes forty-one previously published pieces written for publications and purposes ranging from dance reviews to conference proceedings, book chapters, and peer-reviewed journals. Albright organizes her material in six sections: Performance Writings, Feminist Theories, Dancing Histories, Contact Improvisation, Pedagogy, and Occasional Pieces. Each section begins with the author's contextualizing introduction, which is original to this collection. My intention is not to provide an exhaustive review of Albright's extensive offerings, but rather to highlight those aspects of the work that in my view make it an especially important contribution to the field. There are many.

The individual pieces in each section are not arranged chronologically—dance reviews written early in Albright's career are adjacent to pieces developed as a mature scholar. The author's decision to include early writings (including those written prior to receiving an M.F.A. in dance at Temple University and a Ph.D. in performance studies at New York University), as well as to arrange them a-chronologically is tied to two pedagogical intentions she achieves in Engaging Bodies. The first is to model a way of writing about dance that merges practice with theory—one that privileges the body as a primary source of knowledge. The second is to keep her “fledgling efforts at writing about performance intact so that younger dancers and scholars can trace the threads of ideas as they weave their way through the various political and poetic strands of this collection” (21). Albright's dual commitment to embodied practice as the essential starting point for her engagement with theory, and to leave a legacy for emerging scholars with similar interests, is one of the most important themes of this collection.

At first I found it disorienting that the various threads woven throughout Engaging Bodies do not follow a linear path. Thematic material repeats with a loop-like rhythm. For example, references to the history of contact improvisation at Oberlin College (where Albright has been teaching for twenty years) or descriptions of her innovative classes, which combine theory and practice, are reiterated, though never verbatim, throughout several chapters. I occasionally wondered whether I was re-reading material; however, I quickly began to relate to the text as I might notes documenting a choreographic project or, perhaps, as a metaphorical contact improvisation duet in which I am both witness and active participant. Repetition, layering, and disorientation in relation to established conventions (movement or text), space, time, and gravity are welcome elements in creative processes. And training in disorientation, broadly defined, is essential to contact improvisation (82).

Disorientation—described in the book variously as commotion, dual-vision, vibration, loss of equilibrium—functions as a point of return for Albright, both explicitly and subtly, and paradoxically it emerges as one of the book's orienting threads. For example, she notes in the Introduction that her research interest to “think about life experiences that disorient us, that teach us to turn around and reorient to what may have been part of a background or what initially felt out of our reach” aligns with Sara Ahmed's questions regarding dis/orientation in Queer Phenomenology (Reference Ahmed2006). In “Situated Knowledge,” Albright introduces a new project called Gravity Matters, through which she explores falling, the quintessential state of disorientation, as a way of investigating “the theoretical implications of being grounded in the midst of all the physical and psychic turmoil at the beginning of the twenty-first century” (15). The seeds for that project are ever-present in Engaging Bodies. Footnote ¹ Convinced of the relationship between our perception of the world and our movement (15), she refers to dance generally and to contact improvisation specifically as research modes that teach practitioners to become comfortable in extreme states of disorientation, and to intentionally experiment with falling, yielding to, and playing with gravity through solo and group movement (178). The recurring motif of disorientation reinforces a key value for Albright: in order to shift one's embodied relationship to space, time, and gravity, it is necessary to also shift one's intellectual perspective. These shifts have the potential to jostle the fixity of identity as a marker of cultural representation. Dance—and perhaps especially contact improvisation—investigates disorientation as a way to expand into new relationships to self and other and to navigate through the body, destabilizing political and cultural contexts, especially given our increasing use of the groundless mode of technology to communicate (15).

My experience of temporary disorientation ultimately fostered an expanded familiarity with the text, bolstered my claim to subjective agency as a reader, and merged my embodied experience of reading with my intellectual engagement with the content. I began to sense my “partners”—in this case Albright, the content itself, and the “dance” of our interaction across space and time. In “Writing the Moving Body: Nancy Stark Smith and the Hieroglyphs” (76), Albright cites Smith describing how Hélène Cixious's writing inspires a new relationship with the reader: “It's a level of involvement that sort of takes you in—where you trust the person (the writer) and you're willing to go for the ride with them. You trust that they won't drop you—it's like dancing in that sense” (84). In addition to trusting Albright, I trusted my attentional rhythms and embodied experience, much as I do when witnessing live performance or spontaneously composing a dance. Albright explicitly invites this engagement in the prologue, in which she articulates her constant awareness of the reader and co-existing appreciation for autobiographical content in approaching dance research as a mode of cultural critique (x, xi). This does more then cohere what might have been an unwieldy collection. It also fosters the kind of author/reader (or artist/witness) connection that Albright employs in relationship to her work by engaging “oneself energetically—to stake one's body” at the intersection of “cultural representation and material circumstance” (xii).

Albright's research on Loïe Fuller demonstrates how she has increasingly raised the stakes for herself by using her own body as a laboratory through which she researches productive disorientation that catalyzes new perspectives. In “Matters of Tact: Writing History from the Inside Out” (175), Albright challenges existing historical readings of Fuller that emphasize the artist's contribution to theatrical spectacle, lighting, and technology while underplaying the dancer's physical contributions to the development of expressive movement (175). Albright enters Fuller's work by making a dance. Rather than attempting an exact reproduction of her dances, or a theatrical depiction of Fuller's character, she enters Fuller's potential embodied experiences with a kind of empathic kinesthesia with the intention of shedding light on Fuller's material corporeality—a corporeality that was often literally overshadowed by the mystique that surrounded her image. Albright writes: “I need to replace the act of history with an act of love—an act of rebellion against the pressure to separate in the name of academic integrity. … Ripping through the conventions of textual analysis I enter the dance… . Our juices blend, and blended they whirl into an aquatic tornado of signification” (186). Again referencing disorienting energies—whirl, aquatic tornado—Albright writes that she and Fuller meet “in a third space” (187) that is neither fully past nor present. This methodology, which Albright describes as “quixotic” (176), creates space for her to reach within herself and simultaneously back in history to discover something about both women.

Albright moves with and as Fuller—through both imagined movements and those she can glean through archives and by recreating costumes, props, stage construction, and lighting effects. In doing so, Albright experiences the physical effort and expertise that would have been necessary for Fuller to appear, fairy-like, to effortlessly navigate cumbersome and weighty fabrics and props. Albright's willingness to disorient herself in service to her research provides new insights into historical readings of Fuller, countering the narrative that Fuller's body was thick, matronly, and lacked the grace and line of the traditional dancer's body. Fuller, claims Albright, had to have been strong, agile, and profoundly fit. By being inside the dance and the “vibrations of its ongoing motion” (176), Albright develops a broader perspective of Fuller's work while simultaneously undermining the skewed relationship the dance field has with women, slenderness, and fitness. For Albright, her work is “the story of an intellectual approach to the past that not only recognizes the corporeal effects of the historian's vantage point, but also mobilizes her body within the process of research and writing” (176).

In the piece described above, Albright turns over a stone of dance history by, in a sense, merging with Fuller to uncover and recognize the artist's strengths as a dance innovator. In Albright's brief 1998 piece “Strategic Abilities: Negotiating the Disabled Body in Dance” (287), she uses her temporary experience of disability and subsequent recovery as a framework for engaging with the various ways disability is addressed in the field. In particular, she intersperses descriptive critique of examples of disability and dance on the professional stage with her own experience with and healing from temporary disability. The piece ends with Albright's decision to make a dance rather than receive the recommended medical treatment. Through this decision, equally creative and political, she demonstrates the radical trust she places in her body as a source of knowledge, even and especially in the face of disruption and disorientation. In welcoming her own disability as transformative, she challenges the medical tradition of language and procedural habits that emphasize the correction of bodies toward normative values, often through aggressive treatments. She also comments on the dance field's fetishizing of the classical body, one which, even inadvertently, can reinforce the cultural binary separating disabled and able.

“Strategic Abilities” evidences Albright's adroit weaving of autobiographical content and engagement with dance as a site of cultural critique, and demonstrates how she uses those threads to disorient herself and her subject matter in the interest of viewing them anew. Her work offers an alternative narrative and expanded historical and cultural perspective to those viewpoints limited by reductive cultural representations or the untenable chasms between body and mind, scholarship and practice, that so many in the field are keen to bridge.