Overview

How to Land: Finding Ground in an Unstable World foregrounds the importance of embodiment as a means of surviving the disorientation of our twenty-first century world. Linking somatics and politics, author Ann Cooper Albright argues that a renewed attention to gravity as both a metaphoric sensibility and a physical experience can help transform moments of personal disorientation into an opportunity to reflect on the important relationship between individual resiliency and communal responsibility. Long one of the nation's preeminent thinkers in dance studies, Albright asks how contemporary bodies are affected by repeated images of falling bodies, bombed-out buildings, and displaced peoples, as well as recurring evocations of global economies and governments in discursive free fall or dissolution. What kind of fear gets lodged in connective tissue when there is an underlying anxiety that certain aspects of our world are in danger of falling apart? To answer this question, she draws on analyses of perception from cognitive studies, tracing the discussions of meaning, body and language through the work of Sara Ahmed, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Shaun Gallagher, among others. In addition, she follows the past decade of debate in contemporary media concerning the implications of the weightless and two-dimensional social media exchanges on structures of attention and learning, as well as their effect on the personal growth and socialization of a generation of young adults. Each chapter interweaves discussions of movement actions with their cultural implications, documenting specific bodily experiences and then tracing their ideological ripples out through the world.

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9780190873714

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Reviews

How to Land would be useful as a supplementary text in a course related somatics, bodily awareness, counseling psychology, or politics of bodies. It is also a good self-care book for someone with a scholarly background in embodiment or a practitioner of medicine, health, wellness, or other healing practices. Readers will find this text to be approachable and useful for its exercises and tangible examples. -- S.M. Weiss, CHOICE This is a lovely book in which we are challenged to move through different ways of noticing, feeling and knowing. Ann Cooper Albright asks us to pay attention to the ways our bodies understand the world, information she has gleaned from years of engagement in contact improvisation, dance education, and somatics. And when we follow her journey, we can make connections between the political, social, and kinesthetic fabrics of our lives. Some of her stories are very personal, some mythic, but taken together and with the simple exercises she lays out along the way, we get a startling awakening to the possibilities of living more deeply with our body as guide, host, and generator of sensation and ideas. --Liz Lerman, Institute Professor, Arizona State University, Independent Choreographer, MacArthur Fellow Anyone engaged in living and loving, birthing, and dying will appreciate this gracious, energizing, and determinedly researched book. Both personal and universal, it offers embodiment skills essential for cultivating both resistance and resilience in challenging times. -- Andrea Olsen, movement artist and author of The Place of Dance: A Somatic Guide to Dancing and Dance Making

Author Information

Ann Cooper Albright is Professor and Chair of Dance at Oberlin College, and author of Engaging Bodies: the Politics and Poetics of Corporeality (2013); Modern Gestures: Abraham Walkowitz Draws Isadora Duncan Dancing (2010); Traces of Light: Absence and Presence in the Work of Loie Fuller (2007); Choreographing Difference: the Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance (1997)

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