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Writing and Dancing with Ann Cooper Albright
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Ann Cooper Albright is the author of How to Land: finding ground in an unstable world which offers ways of thinking about and dealing with the uncertainty of our contemporary lives; Engaging Bodies: The Politics and Poetics of Corporeality; Modern Gestures: Abraham Walkowitz Draws Isadora Duncan Dancing; Traces of Light: Absence and Presence in the Work of Loïe Fuller; and Choreographing Difference the Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance. She is founder and director of Girls in Motion, an award winning afterschool program at Langston Middle School and co-director of Accelerated Motion: Towards a New Dance Literacy, a digital collection of materials about dance. Albright is also 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, Encounters with Contact Improvisation, is the product of one of her adventures in writing and dancing with others. Her work has been supported by the NEA, NEH, ACLS, The Guggenheim Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council.
OhioDance A State of Dance is a six-part series coming out the fourth Friday of each month through November 2025. This podcast is driven by the OhioDance mission to secure the foothold of dance in Ohio through increasing visibility, firming viability, and elevating the position of dance in Ohio.
In 2016, a five-person team set out on a mission to capture the achievements of persons and institutions who have shaped the intricate diversity of dance history and practice within the state of Ohio and weave them together in an easily accessible digital format. This we call the OhioDance Virtual Dance Collection. As of 2025 we have highlighted 42 individuals and institutions. The team has traveled over 5000 miles and interviewed hundreds of individuals in all five regions of Ohio. vdc.ohiodance.org
If you like what you are listening to and are not a member of OhioDance, you can go to ohiodance.org and click the membership button to join and receive the many benefits that come with your membership. You can also donate through our purple donate button.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'A State of Dance'
00:00:07
Speaker
Welcome to A State of Dance, sponsored by OhioDance and hosted by independent choreographer and interdisciplinary artist, Rodney Veal.
00:00:22
Speaker
Welcome everyone to A State of Dance sponsored by Ohio Dance and hosted by Rodney Veal, an independent choreographer and interdisciplinary artist. The podcast is based on the Ohio Dance Virtual Dance Collection, an interactive website that documents and preserves the achievements of individuals and institutions who have shaped the diversity of dance history and practice in Ohio.
Guest Introduction: Ann Cooper Albright
00:00:44
Speaker
Today, I'm super excited to welcome our guest, Ann Cooper Albright. A dance scholar, Ann Cooper Albright is a professor of dance at Oberlin College, combining her interest in dancing and cultural theory.
00:00:58
Speaker
Albright teaches a variety of courses that seek to engage students in both practices and theories of the body. Her latest book is entitled Simone Forti, Improvising a Life, and she is performing book talks in her honor.
00:01:11
Speaker
So without further ado, let's welcome Ann Cooper Albright to the podcast. Welcome, Ann. Thank you. Super excited. This is very exciting because, you know we served on the board of Ohio dance together and we clearly love what we do and we love what dance does for the state of Ohio, but the world. So you are a prolific writer and I love your writing and you have published many books.
00:01:37
Speaker
We're interested in hearing more about your latest book, Simone Forte. Can you tell us what inspired you to write about her and give us a little insight into the life and work
Inspiration from Simone Forti
00:01:45
Speaker
of Simone Forte? Very curious. I'll tell the origin story first and then talk a little bit about Simone.
00:01:53
Speaker
In 2014, I had gone on vacation to the south of France and on my way out, I grabbed a paperback biography of George O'Keefe.
00:02:06
Speaker
and read it on the plane. And when I came back, I was doing a connection through Chicago. So I'd read this life of Georgia O'Keeffe, and I'm not exactly sure. There wasn't a direct connection, but I called up a very good friend of mine, David Gere, with whom I had edited Taken by Surprise and who's also really interested in improvisation. And And I said, hey, David, I'm thinking about writing a book on Simone Forti because David knew Simone. She had recently returned to L.A. and she was teaching for UCLA where he teaches.
00:02:43
Speaker
And David, without missing a beat, said, yes, Anne, you are the right person to write that book. You're exactly what you should be doing. So I started thinking about writing a book. At the same time, i was finishing my book, How to Land, Finding Ground in an Unstable World. So I couldn't launch full time into this book, but I started really tracking Simone's career.
00:03:10
Speaker
This was at a time when Simone's career, which started in 1960s, when she moved from working with Anna Halpern to New York City and did something called the Dance Constructions in Yoko Ono's loft in 1961. That was a really significant project.
00:03:30
Speaker
part of her career. She was in her mid-20s, but it ended up being picked up by museums much later. So by the time I was interested in writing about her, in her late 70s with Parkinson's,
00:03:45
Speaker
Her career took off and art museums and galleries were really interested in shoring up their collections from the 1960s and wanted to include performance. So all of a sudden the dance constructions were revived as a very important part of her career.
00:04:04
Speaker
And she was also doing what she calls locomotions. Simone had started doing a lot of work with moving and speaking at the same time. She had a whole practice of writing to do that. This was all improvisational.
00:04:18
Speaker
In 2014, that summer, I went to see her reconstruct the dance process. constructions at the Museum of Modern Art in Salzburg, Austria. And this was her first retrospective. So I followed her through that process of reconstructing on students from the School for Experimental Dance in Salzburg, Austria. So anyway, that was kind of the beginning of doing a lot of research.
Integrating Performance and Literature
00:04:47
Speaker
But I also thought to myself, imagine that I'm turning 60 and starting to think, let's write a book on a woman whose career took off in her late 70s and is still dancing, still making performances, even in her 80s, even though she has Parkinson's. I'll tell you a great story. Are you ready for a great story? Yes. I'm so curious about this whole story.
00:05:12
Speaker
So one of the things I've been doing for this book is I'm creating what I call performed book readings, where I perform and then read sections and then I go back and perform and read another section. I did one recently at UCLA and Simone came.
00:05:29
Speaker
Simone just recently turned 90 and she can walk a little bit, but she goes places in a wheelchair. I did this whole performance in a theater and she came up afterwards. We were doing Huddle, which is one of her dance constructions, which is something a lot of people use, particularly in Contact.
00:05:49
Speaker
And we were reconstructing a human mountain where a bunch of people get together in a huddle, put their arms around each other, and then one by one, people climb over and rejoin the huddle. Simone came over and said, I want to do the huddle.
00:06:05
Speaker
She joined and she was... Starting to shrink a little bit and sink, i dove under her and went on all fours like a bench for her.
00:06:16
Speaker
Somebody else dove under her front and she put her whole body on this person's back and said, ah, you know. So that was that was very sweet. And I saw her the next day and she said she really liked the performance. That's so wild.
00:06:33
Speaker
Yeah. a great validation. Exactly. Exactly. love it. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. I love that story. This is the kind of stuff that we want to know. One of the things that has happened with Simone, because she's gotten so much press and publicity around her dance constructions, and because it's mostly art galleries and art museums, what I call in the last chapter on her legacy, the industrial art complex, which has money.
00:06:58
Speaker
Once you know they consider something you do valuable, it goes into a different place in the art museum world as opposed to the dance world. Simone's very aware of this because she was married to two artists, including her first husband, Robert Morris, who became very well known as a minimalist artist. And she says, you know, I go through these two worlds and in the art world, it's a hierarchy.
00:07:23
Speaker
And there are stars and value in terms of money. In the dance world, it's much more horizontal. Oftentimes, the people that run organizations are also dancers. They're also doing the lighting for their friend's show in small theaters somewhere or something like that.
00:07:42
Speaker
So it was interesting to unpack this. But one of the things that really struck me in doing all the archival research was how much... The art institutions completely disregarded her work with a company in the 1980s. So in the mid 80s, she had a company and they did work for about six years, but nobody pays attention
Value of Dance in Art Institutions
00:08:05
Speaker
to it. One of the great stories, ah couldn't make it out. So I got a friend of mine to videotape a workshop that Simone did in Portland.
00:08:14
Speaker
She's doing a performance and she does these talking and moving performances. She's doing something else completely and she just stops and she comes up to the audience and she goes, oh, by the way, the Museum of Modern Art wants to buy the huddle. They had been doing the huddle behind her between two of her performances.
00:08:33
Speaker
So this was something that has no trace. A bunch of people get together, they climb over each other and when it's done, it's done. There's nothing left. Without skipping a beat, somebody in the audience just blurts out, how can you buy something like that?
00:08:49
Speaker
And that's really what I delve into in that final chapter. I will say that it was a great book. I've written one other book on a single artist, my book on Loie Fuller, Traces of Light, Absence sense and Presence in the Work of Loie Fuller.
00:09:05
Speaker
And that book was wild because... It took me to Paris every summer for research. That's such a hard hard. Yeah, it was rough. Someone had to do it.
00:09:18
Speaker
The other thing about it was that I really tried to channel who she was and what her dancing was like from the archival material. But with Simona, I'd studied with her and I've seen her perform probably 30, 40 times. Oh, so there was a connection. Yeah.
00:09:36
Speaker
Yeah. And I you know had done interviews with her multiple times and all the people that worked with her, like KJ Holmes and Sarah Swanson.
00:09:47
Speaker
So I was able to gather in a very different way. Part of what I do with all of my books is work through... my body to really plumb the information, not just intellectually or theoretically or the archival information, but also to think about what it's like to write for my body.
00:10:10
Speaker
I got a Guggenheim Fellowship for this book in 2019. In 2020, when everything shut down, including all the archives, and i couldn't go to Italy to see material in Rome where she used to work.
00:10:24
Speaker
I couldn't go there. But one of the things I could do is go into
Writing and Movement During the Pandemic
00:10:31
Speaker
Oberlin. We have a beautiful big studio and nobody was using the studio because of course the school was shut down.
00:10:38
Speaker
So I went into the studio and I set up. a desk in one corner. I wrote two chapters in my Simone book there, writing, then going out and moving, then coming back to writing. Just having that kind of fluidity back and forth really informed the kind of language I used in the book.
00:10:59
Speaker
Wow. I love it. That is so fascinating. We're going to take a bit of a break. But when I come back, I want to talk about this intersectionality of this arts industrial complex and movement.
00:11:11
Speaker
Because there's some recent things that I've encountered with this concept. I really want get your thoughts on it. So we'll take a break and then we'll come back to that.
00:11:27
Speaker
We want to remind you that if you like what you're listening to and are not a member of OhioDance, you can go ohiodance.org and click the membership button to join and receive the many benefits that come with your membership.
00:11:39
Speaker
You can also donate through our purple donate button.
00:11:52
Speaker
And we are back from our break. And i am super excited about asking this question. It seems like the universe always provides these moments and opportunities of intersections with the guests that i interview and things that are happening within my own sphere of life.
00:12:06
Speaker
I'm curious because my background is in the arts industrial complex as a visual art maker and creator and as a movement maker. It's a very interesting place to straddle.
00:12:17
Speaker
And I just recent experience I had was watching a gallery show with an artist, Susan Burns in Dayton. She invited a choreographer to come in with musicians and kind of create a work that sort of spoke to this intersectionality of the space between these sculptural pieces of cast iron cow pelvises.
00:12:42
Speaker
And petticoats hanging above it from the ceiling and this dancer moving through the space and interacting, engaging with this beautiful duet of musicians. And then what I noticed is, to your point, this notion of how...
00:12:57
Speaker
That seems to be a ah trend. Like there seems to be now this resurgence towards bringing in the performance, bringing the movement, bringing the body within spaces. I believe that the arts industrial complex, as you described it, doesn't know what to do with it.
00:13:13
Speaker
It's almost like, well, let's apply our rules to it. And I keep trying to tell curators there's a different approach to this, this ephemeral quality of body movement. And it can't be owned. It's in the moment. And so it's the antithesis of what's happening in the now. Have museum curators and artists reached out to you to talk about how we bridges gap?
00:13:36
Speaker
So there's a lot of work coming out now talking about dancing in the museum. One of the things that, and I'll talk about museums as opposed to say galleries or artists. And I think that's maybe slightly separate institutional museums and institutional dynamics.
00:13:54
Speaker
There's this whole thing called the experience economy. So museums know that if they put up some kind of experience, whether it's ah performance or a musical or something going on in their galleries that they'll get many more people.
00:14:10
Speaker
And this is kind of in the 21st century, something that art institutions are starting to become aware of. And it's very much a part of their scheduling. What happens is that they then go out and get artists to help or dancers to help reconstruct something or to be involved in some kind of piece.
00:14:31
Speaker
But there
Dance in Museum Settings
00:14:32
Speaker
are no green rooms. They're not really considered employees of the art institution. So they're paid as independent contractors. There's no thought to whether it's okay to dance on this floor or not.
00:14:47
Speaker
What are the conditions? Dancers are going into the bathroom and changing. it's Right, like absolutely. There's this discussion of the move from the black box to the white cube, from theaters to the art institutions. I think there are a lot of issues with that, although some of these places are beautiful.
00:15:07
Speaker
The Museum of Modern Art in Salzburg is this enormous brutalist place. building The spaces inside with huge windows are quite amazing. So seeing work reconstructed in that is is beautiful oftentimes, but it does really create the dancer's body as an object to be built.
00:15:30
Speaker
used and then thrown away. And there isn't really any ongoing discussions. And even even though Simone with MoMA had set up this elaborate apparatus for her work to be sequentially and consistently reconstructed, and there was a whole discussion with Dance Space in New York about doing that,
00:15:51
Speaker
Once COVID happened, everything changed and the economies changed around that. To my knowledge, they have not done consistent reconstructing of this work. So I don't know how it's going to go moving forward.
00:16:06
Speaker
In my book, I do talk about the curator who went to Amsterdam to oversee the reconstructions of these dance constructions of Simone's.
00:16:18
Speaker
And she was invited to participate in the huddle. And she wrote this amazing essay that was published about how her whole perception of that piece changed by being inside it.
00:16:31
Speaker
And it made her really question the kind of art institutions notions of what they're buying. They need to fix what they're buying. Simone it published in 1974, something called Handbook in Motion, in which she wrote down the scores for all of those improvisational pieces.
00:16:50
Speaker
So the pieces have already been published in the 70s, but MoMA paid money for them. They insisted that she handwrite in pencil, the descriptions again and sign them so that they could officially say they had her work, which is ironic because huddle is not something that could really be signed.
00:17:13
Speaker
So there's some things to that point about the museums have to consider and we as movement makers have to kind of acknowledge, I guess. Well, if MoMA calls you up and says, you know, hey, would you want to do something? You're going to see yes, because it's just the the kind of power that these art institutions have. You know, how many people get to do that? When MoMA did the very big Judson Dance Theater exhibit.
00:17:39
Speaker
They had reconstructions at Simone's Dance Constructions three times a day for three months running. And I can tell you by the end, people were just going through the motions.
00:17:50
Speaker
Nobody was excited. Nobody was doing improvisational, alive, whatever. They were just like, here we are. we got to do it again. it really felt very rote on the part of the dancers. And that was amazing.
00:18:05
Speaker
sad to see, but it makes sense because it's just physical labor that they're doing. And I think that connection to the original, very experimental, kind of very alive moment got muted and watered down. This is a national, international sort of conversation about where we're at in the 21st century.
Themes in Ann's Writings
00:18:28
Speaker
How does this book reside in the series of the books that you have written? so far Where do you see it fitting in this sort of, if you were to say this was a mosaic of work?
00:18:40
Speaker
All of my books are really different from one another. Even though Loie Fuller and the one on Simone have some parallels in that I did very consciously use my body to work on that historical material.
00:18:55
Speaker
The most recent book that came out in December is called Resistance and Support, Contact Improvisation at 50. This is a collection of essays that came out of the 50th anniversary of contact that I did at Oberlin College. It was a year-long series of events, but included international festival and conference. That was a very overwhelming project in a lot of ways, particularly because we were coming out of COVID, I started applying for NEA money back when there was an NEA.
00:19:33
Speaker
And I had to start applying two years ahead. So in the summer of 2020, when everybody thought I was out of my mind and that we would never be able to do contact with one another again,
00:19:44
Speaker
I started applying for funding and we did in 2022 pull off this mammoth project out of which these essays came. So I feel like in a lot of interesting ways, my last three books, my dancing experience and my intellectual and critical inquiry really have come together.
00:20:10
Speaker
And the reason I want to talk about how to land is this is a book that I published in 2019.
00:20:20
Speaker
And it really involved two things. One was recognizing how often my students and teenagers at that time were undergoing incredible anxiety and concern about the world falling apart, climate issues,
00:20:40
Speaker
all kinds of things going on. I wrote it during the first Trump administration. This book is what I call the meeting of semantics and politics. I look at how we can intervene in these cultural moments of anxiety or chaos or disorientation when everything seems to be falling apart.
00:21:02
Speaker
and how we can use intentional physical practices, including a lot of somatic work that intersects with contact improvisation to actually help ground us in the midst of this. When my brother died of pancreatic cancer, I adopted my nephew,
00:21:20
Speaker
who later fell to his death. So it has a lot to do with both personal and global or social issues. A lot of people have found it useful during COVID because it talks a lot about isolation, but now I think it has a new renaissance in some ways.
00:21:41
Speaker
One of the things that I did in that book was i organized it in different chapters and each chapter traces different stages of a fall. So the chapters are falling, disorientation, suspension, gravity, resilience, connection. So each of those chapters are meditations on the ways in which we think about falling, for instance, and the way in which our culture oftentimes thinks of falling and failure as parallel experiences.
00:22:16
Speaker
But actually, once you start to get used to, and this is where contact improvisation training comes in, you start to get used to falling and being off balance and being disoriented, then it's not as scary.
00:22:30
Speaker
And so I look at all of these different moments in our culture, including coming out of 9-11, of the last recession, but the ways in which these social, economic, and political pressures affect our bodies.
00:22:47
Speaker
And that's another book that I have shared with non-dance practitioners because I thought it was such an important book for people to deep dive into that impact, the body and social political change. I recommend highly, especially now, especially in these times, that is the book to read.
00:23:04
Speaker
That is the book to tab, tab, tab sections, by all means. I have mine tabbed. Thank you. That super cool. I know we're going to pivot. This is a question about improvisation.
Teaching Contact Improvisation at Oberlin
00:23:17
Speaker
In the 70s at Oberlin, you brought in Grand Union and one person, Steve Paxton, who taught class a form of meditative experimentation that later led to contact improvisation. Oberlin has become a hotbed for contact improvisation.
00:23:31
Speaker
Thank you. ah You taught this and have trained dancers in this form for 30 years. Do you have sessions that are open to the public? Because I feel that everyone needs to be in that space.
00:23:43
Speaker
So contact improvisation is a form of dance that started in 1972 when Steve Paxson came and gave a workshop. And he defined it at that time as a dance form that is dependent on weight sharing and a point of contact that can move over the body and through space We have ongoing Sunday jams from four to six.
00:24:11
Speaker
um And oftentimes we then have, like for instance, we recently had Mayfield Brooks do a guest residency and a group from Columbus came up. I taught at OSU.
00:24:23
Speaker
two weeks ago and spent time with the Columbus contact people the next morning. When we did CI50, we did a big fall jam. We've been doing fall jams, sometimes 12-hour jams. We used to do 24-hour jams, but...
00:24:41
Speaker
I'm too old to do that now. So we do 12 hour jams, noon to midnight. There's something about the history of contact at Oberlin. Oberlin is very much a place that embraces experimental work and contact continues to be experimental.
00:24:57
Speaker
It hasn't settled into an easy fit in the world because it's not easy to have physical contact with another person. So there's always lots of kind of dynamics that come up there that is part of the dancing.
00:25:12
Speaker
But the other reason is that I teach contact at Oberlin three times a week for two hours and a Sunday jam for two hours. So those students are doing eight hours of contact a week for an entire semester.
00:25:28
Speaker
And I teach a second semester course called varsity contact. That is a lot of training and it's ah unusual for people who are involved in contact to have that much focused, serious training. So a lot of the people that come out of Oberlin end up, you know, like you go to the Philly jam right now, and there are four generations of Oberlin students running the Philly jam.
00:25:55
Speaker
you know But they're the ones involved in really curating and organizing and getting things happening and teaching. So now that I'm such an old lady, I'm thinking to myself, oh. No.
00:26:08
Speaker
but That's my legacy. That's my legacy at Oberlin. I just find that very fascinating. get ah get Yet again, it proves the vibrancy of, it's not a West Coast, East Coast. There's this Midwestern space that has influence beyond. Oberlin has always been ah very porous place. Like,
00:26:29
Speaker
Brenda Way taught at Oberlin before she started ODC San Francisco. This Grand Union group is coming and doing a winter term. Paul Langland came in and hung out with everybody.
00:26:41
Speaker
By the way, he came back for the 50th anniversary without registering. We closed registration within 10 hours. Everything was full. We had to open up some new spots so that people on the other side of the country who were sleeping when we opened registration could register.
Oberlin's Support for Dance
00:26:58
Speaker
One of the things about working in a university is that you can use the institutional resources to kind of help the field, right? The dance field never has money. These institutions can help support.
00:27:12
Speaker
And my dean in the spring of 2022 agreed that we could host 12 international guest dance artists for seven months.
00:27:26
Speaker
And I had gotten some funding to rent a house and help them find places. The college said, yes, they had to go to lawyers and find out like what was the right waiver and what were they going to be called.
00:27:39
Speaker
But we had 12 people here for seven months. And they were coming into my class. They had their own lab sessions. They were working all over town. We had people from India, from Argentina, from Poland, Slovenia, this wild mix of people feeling very grassroots.
00:28:00
Speaker
Like this is what contact was, people just deciding to get together and do it. But... I was very happy that it worked out the way it did. And also the Dean could have easily said, no way, you know, I can't have outside people here. We're just coming out of the pandemic, but he went with it. And that group still has bi-monthly Zoom call with one another, and they still work with each other in different places. I was in Buenos Aires,
00:28:30
Speaker
last summer and saw some people from Argentina that were there. So it's just been a really amazing experience. But I think part of it is the sense that Oberlin can kind of embrace the community as well as the people who are going to college there.
Conclusion and Acknowledgments
00:28:47
Speaker
And that just makes their college experience richer. The students love it.
00:28:52
Speaker
They love when people from the outside come to our jams. I love it. And this has been such a delightful conversation. i always enjoy our conversations. This is such great food for thought. So thank you for being a guest on our podcast.
00:29:06
Speaker
Thank you. and Cooper Albright, leading the charge.
00:29:12
Speaker
A State of Dance is produced by OhioDance and hosted by Rodney Veal, Executive Producer Jane D'Angelo, Editor and Audio Technician Jessica Cavender, Musical Composition by Matthew Peyton Dixon. OhioDance would like to thank our funders, the Ohio Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio State University Dance Preservation Fund, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, the Columbus Foundation, and the Akron Community Fund.