Ann Cooper Albright ► from the skin to the soul
Ann Cooper Albright
from the skin to the soul
Before I knew Jess Curtis as a choreographer, I knew him as an improviser. Contact Improvisation was our shared movement practice. We both embraced its wild, wonderful combination of disorientation and intimacy. And we both leaned into its commitment to accessibility, championing the idea that any body could dance this form. Self-identified radical feminists, we engaged across physical practices, political implications, communal contexts, and even spoke of Contact’s spiritual underpinnings. As our bodies aged, we shared strategies for continuing despite hip issues and explored how to bring our punk movement appetites in line with the realities of our mid-life possibilities. Jess was part warrior, part love. He interwove provocation with care, blending artistic rigor with personal vulnerabilty.
My longest interaction with him in person was when I was teaching an intensive at the Freiburg Jam in August 2017. I remember being suitably impressed when he gave Berkeley/Berlin as his transcontinental addresses. During the teacher’s meeting before the big event, we had several interesting conversations. I do not remember exactly whose idea it was to pair Jess and myself for some lunchtime talking/performing duets, but my recollection is that they were wonderfully outrageous and fun, as well as intellectually vibrant. While improvising together, we realized that we shared many similar sensibilities – somatically and politically. This was a time when I was working on my book How to Land: finding ground in an unstable world in which I discuss Fallen, Jess’s 2002 collaboration with fabrikcompanie. I returned to Freiburg in the summer of 2024, right after he died so unexpectedly. I was thinking about him there and afterwards when I traveled to Berlin and then Ponderosa where I also spent time in the memorial outdoor room that was set up to honor him. Photos and messages lined the walls and there was a bench inviting me to sit and reflect on his life and work. These memories all flooded back to me when I was asked to contribute to this Festschrift. Inspired by these recollections, I offer the following meditation, one – with its mix of cultural critique and poetic elegy – that I feel he might appreciate. I hope so.
Corporeality exceeds the visible. Dancers know this. Although we base our practice in the material conditions of the body, we are not limited to them. Expressivity requires an engagement beyond the quotidian to the ephemeral. That is why movement becomes a metaphor for everything that doesn’t stand still, including life itself. Perhaps this is also why death brings out dancing in so many cultures. Moving with absence takes us beyond the visible world and brings us into the realm of feeling. We mourn the physical loss at the same time that we sense the possibility of an invisible companionship. Together and in motion, we channel the unknown to realize connections in the present moment, the present of moments – long gone, but still here. From the skin to the soul.
Contact is a word that moves between act and action. Used as a noun, it refers to the state or condition of touching someone or something. As a verb, it extends itself towards another, reaching out across a gap of space or time. From the perspective of its etymology, contact literally means with the tactile (con/tact), accounting for the meeting of one’s self and the world in terms of a tangible sensation. While it is not limited to the physical, contact necessarily engages our corporeality, calling forth the reciprocity of touching and being touched – for it is impossible to touch anything in a way that does not also implicate one’s own body. Contact Improvisation is predicated on an exchange of feeling, the meaning of which is unknown. As my skin presses into your skin something happens, but what, where and how is open to our mutual engagement.
In teaching the form of Contact Improvisation, we often begin by focusing awareness at the level of our skin, opening our pores to allow someone else’s touch to enter our somatic experience. This is not a safe experience; it requires a willingness to give up and give over, to be disoriented, and release our weight into the support of another person. Teachers often use the metaphor of the pores of skin as being like a thousand little ears, helping us listen intensely for what our partners are saying. In addition to calling attention to the pores of the skin, I guide my students into sharing weight in a fluid and responsive manner by invoking a homonym – asking them to pour through the pores of their skin. This image helps them physically comprehend that they can pour a little or a lot of weight into their partner. It also helps them understand that they can resist by pouring back. This sensitive exchange of pouring creates a responsive support such that neither partner needs to brace with tension to hold the other person up. I also believe that the physical communication involved in pouring weight back and forth requires a certain porousness of one’s identity.
What does it feel like to open the pores of my skin wide enough to let the world in? Standing with my eyes closed after moving quickly through the space, I feel the wind on my skin and sense the light warming the floor at my feet. I connect to the line of energy running from sky to earth through my spine, inviting the natural forces of gravity and air to support my presence in this particular moment, in this particular space. Contact Improvisation cultivates a porous way of being-in-the-world that goes beyond the physical practices of the form; it helps me feel connected to the world as well.
Interestingly, the very possibility of sensing physical contact is predicated on an axis of difference – between you and me, my right hand and cheek, inside and outside, bone and skin. These differences create the pleasure of connection and yet also complicate this impulse to relate. Because touch involves politics, it is critical to be aware of the effects of one’s touch. Sharing weight with another person can be messy, unsettling, or euphoric; it is nearly always challenging. Reaching out mobilizes our centers and risks knocking us off-balance – both physically and psychically. This process of crossing-over requires a willingness to feel vulnerable, and, perhaps most importantly, to meet a sense of alterity within ourselves, including the physical and psychic confrontation with the limits of our bodies. Mutual weight interdependence confronts the cultural expectation that we need to learn to stand on our own two feet. The implications for folks who aren’t able to stand that way is clear – you are not really a fully independent adult. But disability studies and Contact Improvisation teach us that it can be a lot more aesthetically enticing and a lot more politically powerful to move together as a mutually interdependent concoction of curiosity and possibility. Two bodies/one animal.
Contact Improvisation trains for an exchange of weight between partners, a play of supporting and being supported. This openness to being held by another can be particularly challenging for bodies that were raised as male in American culture, with its focus on selfhood, independence, and the pursuit of power. As an artist/activist, Jess Curtis was attuned to the usefulness of Contact for men who wanted to escape the deadlock of the patriarchal “bro” culture so prevalent in the late twentieth century (and unfortunately resurgent in Washington D.C.’s current pro-war administration). His work with Contraband and various feminist, antiracist, and queer-friendly men’s movements in the 1980s and 1990s used Contact training to introduce AMAB people to the embodied experiences of risk and trust, non-sexual intimacy and somatic awareness embedded in this dance form. The first step is, of course, to allow for feeling – to direct one’s attention to sensation at the level of skin and fascia, and not just strength at the level of muscle and bone. Jess’ dancing provided a wonderful model of a male body available to fiesty as well as sensitive interactions, someone who could switch quickly from punk to ballad – from fierce dancing to an elegiac expression. And, unlike some “sensitive” but nonetheless sexist men in the Contact world, Jess was profoundly aware of his cis-male privilege and power as a teacher and experienced dancer.
How do we draw upon the interconnectedness of self and other in Contact to build a just society? How can we cultivate a responsiveness at the level of our bodies in order to generate a responsibililty – literally an ability to respond – to other people and other ideas? As we become more attentive to the possibilities of that exchange, the boundaries of our selves become more porous. This co-partnering necessarily moves us in ways that feel disorienting, that risk making us lose our bearings, or, at the very least, our expectations of who we are. In the midst of this vibration between self and other arises the imperative to move past what we think we know. Failure is to be expected, even as the urgency of the proposal calls on us to continue to try and extend ourselves into the world. In the present moment of a deeply divided and violent world, this exchange can bring us a sense of relief from our own isolation. As a physical practice with metaphysical consequences, Contact Improvisation can, I believe, teach us how to live in the world with others – a lesson we would do well to learn again, and again, and again.
Dancing improvisationally with another calls forth a special willingness to engage with the unknown. It is a practice that allows us to confront both our differences and realize our shared humanity – leading us from the skin to the soul.
– Ann Cooper Albright
May 1, 2026
Ann Cooper Albright
A dancer, scholar, and a 2019-2020 John Simon Memorial Guggenheim fellow, Ann Cooper Albright is professor and chair of the Department of Dance. Originally an undergraduate philosophy major at Bryn Mawr College, she earned an MFA in dance at Temple University, and a PhD in performance studies at New York University.
Combining her interests in dancing and cultural theory, including phenomenology, gender, sexuality and feminist studies, Albright teaches a variety of courses that seek to engage students in both practices and theories of the body.
In 2024, she was honored with an Ohio Art Council individual excellence award (her 8th OAC award).
Her latest book is entitled Simone Forti: improvising a life, and Ann will be performing book talks across the country over the next year. Her other books include 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 co-editor, with Ann Dils, of Moving History/Dancing Cultures and, with David Gere, of Taken by Surprise: Improvisation in Dance and Mind.
Albright is the founder and director of Girls in Motion, an award-winning afterschool program at Oberlin’s Langston Middle School, and is co-director of Accelerated Motion: Towards a New Dance Literacy in America, an NEA-supported website that facilitates active learning and the exchange of teaching strategies and resources to support educators who teach dance studies as a humanistic discipline.
She 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 and dancing and writing with others, as is the forthcoming collection: Resistance and Support: Contact Improvisation @ 50. Her work has been supported by the NEA, NEH, ACLS, The Guggenheim Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council.
