<P>The choreographies of Bill T. Jones, Cleveland Ballet Dancing Wheels, Zab Maboungou, David Dorfman, Marie Chouinard, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, and others, have helped establish dance as a crucial discourse of the 90s. These dancers, Ann Cooper Albright argues, are asking the audience to see the body as a source of cultural identity a physical presence that moves with and through its gendered, racial, and social meanings.</P><P>Through her articulate and nuanced analysis of contemporary choreography, Albright 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, feminist, and philosopher, 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. In arguing for the intelligence of bodies, Choreographing Difference is itself a testimonial, giving voice to some important political, moral, and artistic questions of our time.</P>

ANN COOPER ALBRIGHT is chair of the Dance Department at Oberlin College. She is the author of Choreographing Difference, Traces of Light, and Modern Gestures, and coeditor of Moving History/Dancing Cultures and Taken by Surprise.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Witnessing Dance
Mining the Dancefield: Feminist Theory and Contemporary Dance
Techno Bodies: Muscling with Gender in Contemporary Dance
Moving Across Difference: Dance and Disability
Incalculable Choreographies
Dancing Bodies and the Stories They Tell
Embodying History: Epic Narrative and the Cultural Identity in African-American Dance
Appendix
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index