Ann Cooper Albright

Professor Ann Cooper Albright was a fellow at the Interweaving Performance Cultures Research Center at Berlin's Free University during the spring 2017 semester. She also taught a module course on dancing and writing at the University of Salzburg in Austria.

Ann Cooper Albright, professor and chair of the department of dance, led “Teaching in Three Dimensions” at Reed College in January 2017.  The daylong workshop was sponsored by the office of institutional diversity and was specifically designed for junior faculty and advanced graduate students working on issues of diversity in the classroom. While in the Northwest, she also taught a workshop entitled “Training a Political Body” for professional dancers at FLOCK, a cooperative studio in downtown Portland.

Ann Cooper Albright, professor and chair of the department of dance, lectured at the University of Patras’ Department of Theater Studies and taught workshops in Athens for professional dance students and an intercultural group of German and Greek dancers.

Professor Albright’s book Choreographing Difference was also recently translated into Greek by Nissos Press.

Professor of Dance Ann Cooper Albright in October gave a keynote entitled "Moving with the Other: embodied research at the intersection of dance and anthropology" for the International Symposium of the Korean Society in Dance in Seoul, Korea. While in Seoul, she also gave a workshop in contact improvisation in the Department of Dance, School of Fine Arts at Kook-Min University.

Professor of Dance and Department Chair Ann Cooper Albright and Assistant Professor of Dance Holly Handman-Lopez each received Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council. The Dance Department and Dance Disapora, directed by Artist in Residence Adenike Sharpley, were recognized by the Bonner Center for Service and Learning for their ongoing service to the Oberlin community. In addition, the community-based programs Girls and Boys in Motion and Dance Diaspora were the focus of an article in the May edition of Dance Magazine entitled “Dance to Give Back.”

Professor of Dance and Chair of the Dance Department Ann Cooper Albright guest edited a recent special issue of Choreographic Practices on dance and disability. “Entitled Dis/abilities: the politics of a prefix,” this international collection of essays was a collaboration with Gabriele Brandstetter, professor of theater and dance studies at the University of Berlin and 2013 Harold Jantz lecturer in German at Oberlin College.

Albright also recently published “Split Intimacies: Corporeality in Contemporary Theater and Dance” in the new Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater.

At the end of May, Ann Cooper Albright, professor of dance and chair of the dance department, taught a weeklong intensive at the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance (SEAD) in Salzburg, Austria. While in Austria, she also gave an invited lecture at the University of Salzburg.

Following these ventures, Albright produced the international dance studies conference Cut & Paste: Dance Advocacy in the Age of Austerity. Held in Athens, Greece, the annual conference is a joint effort between the organizations Congress on Research in Dance (CORD) and Society of Dance History Scholars (SDHS), the latter of which Albright is president.

The 2015 conference panels addressed issues surrounding dance advocacy on local and global levels and also put dance advocacy into practice by supporting a dance community that has been hit especially hard by the global financial crisis. By going to Athens at this particular historical moment, international dance scholars supported their colleagues in Greece, giving them an opportunity to participate in a multifaceted dance studies conference without having to travel abroad. In addition to a scholarly conference, there were free dance classes offered and curated performances by Greek companies. Scholars also donated more than 100 books to seed the first international dance research collection in Greece.

On March 27, Ann Cooper Albright, Chair of the Dance Department and Professor of Dance, along with senior dance majors Silvia Sheffield and Miryam Coppersmith, presented at the conference Dance as Experience: Progressive Era Origins and Legacies in Baltimore, Maryland. The conference was jointly sponsored by the Society of Dance History Scholars and Peabody Dance.

Their collaborative talk focused on a new section of the Accelerated Motion: Towards a New Dance Literacy in America website entitled Modern Motion, which includes materials from the Oberlin College Archives. Sheffield and Coppersmith have been working with another student, Shang-Wei Young, along as Albright throughout the year to update the website that was originally set up by Wesleyan University Press. Their work has been funded in part by a Mellon Ohio Five Digital Scholarship grant.