Ann Cooper Albright
A conversation on Responsiveness, Resistance, and Resilience
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A dancer and scholar, Ann Cooper Albright is Professor of Dance at Oberlin College. Combining her interests in dancing and cultural theory, Albright teaches a variety of courses that seek to engage students in both practices and theories of the body. She is a veteran practitioner of Contact Improvisation, has taught workshops internationally, and facilitated Critical Mass: CI @ 50 which brought 300 dancers from across the world to learn, talk, and dance together in celebration of the 50th anniversary of this extraordinary form. The book, Resistance and Support: Contact Improvisation @ 50 is an edited collection of writing developed from that event.
Her other recent books include Simone Forti: improvising a life and How to Land: finding ground in an unstable world which uses Contact principles to offer ways of thinking about and dealing with the uncertainty of our contemporary lives. Encounters with Contact Improvisation, is the product of one of her adventures in writing and dancing and dancing and writing with others. Her work has been supported by the NEA, NEH, ACLS, The Guggenheim Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council.
Responsiveness, Resistance, Resilience These three words (what I call the three R’s) have a deep resonance for me; they are situated at the intersection of somatics and politics – the place where bodily perception meets social engagement. They play a key role in my book How to Land and I think about them in terms of the material practices of Contact Improvisation. In this discussion, I am interested in exploring how intentional physical practices can provide an embodied ground for our lives and our political activism. These words are also key to the 2025 jam's theme: Longevity of Practice.
Cultivating the 3Rs: Responsiveness, Resistance, Resilience
How can our breathing connect us to a sense of spaciousness? How can we use the support of gravity to ground ourselves even as our lives feel like they are slipping out of our control? How can we engage our strength without undue tension as we resist the status quo? How do we connect across individual differences to form strategic alliances?
This workshop is situated at the intersection of somatics and politics – the place where bodily perception meets social engagement—where self meets other. Bridging physical exploration and social engagement, this experiential workshop explores how intentional physical practices can provide an embodied ground for our lives with others. We will begin to chart the ways in which our dancing explorations can foster communal interaction and civic responsibility as well as individual empowerment.