Brenda Dixon Gottschild, author of The Black Dancing Body, writes the definitive book on the Founder of the Philadelphia Dance Company (PHILADANCO) and the Philadelphia School of Dance Arts, Joan Myers Brown. Her personal and professional histories reflect the hardships as well as the advances of African-Americans in the artistic and social developments of the second half of the twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries. This is a compelling story about race and the arts in America. Dixon Gottschild uses Brown’s career as the fulcrum to leverage an investigation of the interface between performance, cultural formation, and race politics as evidenced by the development of a dance community in black Philadelphia and the rise and spread of its influence beyond community and regional borders to national and international distinction. [photograph by Gaston Devigne]
Brenda Dixon Gottschild 