Oberlin Dance Company performance ca. 1990 featuring Nancy Stark Smith's hieroglyphs. Photo by John Seyfried.
People, let’s work together to build a critical literacy around Contact Improvisation! The 50th anniversary is a critical moment to gather and to investigate the legacy of this vital form of contemporary dance.
In conjunction with the conference Critical Mass: CI @ 50 (July 7-11, 2022) Ann Cooper Albright is hoping to assemble and edit a collection of thoughtful essays locating the past, present, and future of the form.
Your perspectives are important! Commit yourself to writing a longer form essay (7,000-10,000 words) that historicizes, reflects on, critiques, imagines, what Contact Improvisation has been/is/can be. The topics are open and abundant, but the commitment is to thinking and writing through layers of history, ideas, and future in this dance form that holds so much potential. In order to facilitate your writing process and create conversations around this work, Ann Cooper Albright will host a writing workshop for a group of 8-10 dancer/artists/scholars for three days immediately following the conference. The goal of this workshop will be to reflect on the lessons of the conference and to read and give feedback on the drafts of essays by participants in the writing workshop. These writings will eventually appear in a collection of critical essays edited by Ann Cooper Albright.
Deadlines: abstracts (500-800 words) due December 1, 2021; folks will be notified of acceptance no later than January 15, 2022.
Preliminary drafts of essays (10-15 pages double-spaced) due for circulation May 15th, 2022.
Writing workshop July 12-15th, 2022.
Final drafts due September 1, 2022.
Send submissions via email to: ann.cooper.albright@oberlin.edu