Throughout her career, Professor of Dance Ann Cooper Albright has pioneered research and embodied practice in dance. Albright recently won the Dance Studies Association’s 2025 Outstanding Scholarly Research in Dance Award for her contributions to the field. Her written work, consisting of six monographs and four edited essays with more on the way, takes her everywhere. This summer, she taught intensive contact improvisation workshops on both coasts, and this fall, she is teaching courses in Paris for the Oberlin-in-Paris program’s inaugural year.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you get started with dance?
I didn’t actually take a dance class until I went to college. When I walked into the choreography class and it became clear that I’d never really taken dance classes before, I was advised to take an advanced technique class before the choreography class, which I was happy to do, but it meant that I had no idea what I was doing for a while. For me, dance became this full-faceted entity that I could approach from many different directions. My undergraduate degree was in philosophy and French literature, but the work I did tend to be interested in really foregrounded some sense of bodily perception. This idea of being situated in the world through your body was something that spoke to me intellectually as well as physically.
What makes dance so important to pursue and think deeply about right now?
I wrote this book called How to Land: Finding Ground in an Unstable World. I was really interested in the physical implications of the language of things falling apart. It was written during the first Trump administration and has a resurgence of usefulness now in some ways, because things are falling apart even more. What is crucial now, past Covid, is for people to understand the role of their bodies and the world in which we’re communicating more and more through screens. I feel that dance is an expressive medium with the body, but I think getting people to be in touch with their own bodily experience is a kind of offshoot. I have a whole argument in that book about how we just don’t ever really engage with gravity, which for me is an infinitely renewable energetic resource. You feel gravity no matter where you are in the world, and I feel that can give us a sense of connectedness to the earth that is super important for our wellbeing.
For those unfamiliar with your work, could you give them an overview?
I’m an old lady, and my career has gone in a lot of different directions. My first book is called Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance. That book came out of wanting to bring contemporary dance and feminist theory together and look at the ways in which our bodies carry identity and how performances could both enact and deconstruct that identity. I do a lot of work talking and moving in improvisatory performances as well, so I did a book on that. Then I went off into late 19th-century, early 20th-century Parisian performance and wrote a book on Loie Fuller that brought me to Paris every summer for research. If there’s one thing that distinguishes how I approach writing criticism or writing books — historical books — it’s that I use my body to research. With this last book I wrote, Simone Forti: Improvising a Life, I’ve started to do these really fun book talks. It’s a way for me to savor and use the academics and the scholarship to reinvigorate my own performance practice.
Are you working on another publication right now?
I’m finishing an essay called “Haptic Futures” for a collection on disability and dance. I’m interested in what would happen if we rethought the future as something that is a more immersive experience.
What do you think is the most important part about contact improvisation?
Contact is a form that trains one to think about interdependence as a crucial part of creative and engaged practice. It teaches you how interdependence and mutually weight-supportive experience can actually give you a fuller sense of who you are. The other thing is actual physical contact. I think we’re moving beyond that now, but post-Covid, people were scared to breathe in the same room. If I let somebody’s energy in, it doesn’t mean I give up my own sense of support or my own physical strength or power or autonomy, but it does mean that we can start to play with that.
Could you tell me a little bit more about the classes you’re teaching in Paris?
There’s an opportunity here to dwell in a space that allows you to learn through every single pore in your body and not just one way, and the courses that we’ve shaped for this program all really rely on that. We’re teaching a joint course called Tasting France, which is set up with different food groups. All of the students are responsible for their own food and their own cooking, so part of that program is learning how to do that, shop, and think about it.
And then I’m teaching a course on writing about performance — theater, opera, dance, performances that merge puppetry with theater and voice. If students take the class, they have to learn to write reviews. It’s a skill to learn how to write about live performance. In movement, particularly dance but also in theater, if writers don’t just talk about the narrative of the text, it’s really hard. People will be like, “That was so cool. I love the way they moved.” And you’re like, “Nobody just moves. What does that mean? Can we get more specific?”
There’s something really important about the inspiration you gather from being in a very different culture in a very different place. I’m looking forward to starting this program, and I think a lot of people are very excited about it.
