Workshop: Training a Political Body: Responsiveness, Resistance, and Resilience

FLOCK member Danielle Ross is thrilled to host a workshop by friend and mentor Ann Cooper Albright. How do we train for a political body – one that is responsive, resistant, and resilient? How do we engage our citizenship as dancers? Bridging the divide between political action and somatic instruction, this class draws on practices informed by Contact Improvisation and Body-Mind Centering to explore how intentional physical training can provide an embodied ground for our activism. This workshop is open to everybody, but will require that participants dance, sing, write and move together.

Saturday Jan 21st // $20-$25 // no one turned away from lack of funds // Email daniyellross@gmail.com to reserve your place

BIO: A dancer and a scholar, Ann Cooper Albright is Professor and Chair of Dance at Oberlin College and President of the Society of Dance History Scholars. This past year she has been teaching in Athens, Greece, Seoul, Korea, and Berlin, Germany – all places where public protest is alive and well and invigorated by conversations with artists from all disciplines. She has been teaching and dancing Contact Improvisation for over two decades and this work informs her latest book, Gravity Matters: finding ground in an unstable world. Combining her interests in movement and cultural theory, she is involved in teaching a variety of courses that seek to engage students in both practices and theories of the body. She is the author of Engaging Bodies: the Politics and Poetics of Corporeality (2013), which won the Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize from the American Society for Aesthetics; Modern Gestures: Abraham Walkowitz Draws Isadora Duncan Dancing (2010); Traces of Light: Absence and Presence in the Work of Loie Fuller (2007); Choreographing Difference: the Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance (1997) and co-editor of Moving History/Dancing Cultures (2001) and Taken By Surprise: Improvisation in Dance and Mind (2003). The book, Encounters with Contact Improvisation (2010), is the product of one of her adventures in writing and dancing and dancing and writing with others. Ann is founder and director of Girls in Motion, an award winning afterschool program in the Oberlin public schools and co-director of Accelerated Motion: Towards a New Dance Literacy.