Joan Myers Brown and the Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina A Biohistory of American Performance

Founder of the Philadelphia Dance Company (Philadanco) and the Philadelphia School of Dance Arts, Joan Myers Brown's personal and professional histories reflect the hardships as well as the advances of African Americans in the artistic and social developments of the twentieth century and into the new millennium. Dixon Gottschild uses Brown's career as the fulcrum to leverage an exploration of the connection between performance, society, and race, beginning with Brown's predecessors in the 1920s and a concert dance tradition that had no previous voice to tell its story from the inside out. Brown's background and richly contoured biography are object lessons in survivala true American narrative.

Brenda Dixon Gottschild, author of Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance, Waltzing in the Dark, and The Black Dancing Body, is Professor Emerita of Dance Studies at Temple University and a former senior consultant/ writer for Dance Magazine. She lectures nationally and internationally, using her own dancing/thinking body to illustrate her ideas and blur the division between practice and theory.

Foreword: Ballet Becomes Black Uplift--Robert Farris Thompson * Prelude * Prologue * The Backdrop: 1920s-1940s * Spectacularly Black on Black: 1940s-1950s * But Black is Beautiful!: 1950s-1980s * “Nose to the Grindstone, Head to the Stars” * The Philadelphia/Philadanco Aesthetic * Audacious Hope: The House That Joan Built: 1980s-21st Century * Epilogue * Afterword: Brenda Dixon Gottschild: A Critical Perspective--Ananya Chatterjea * Joan Myers Brown: Annotated Resume * Philadanco Home Seasons Repertory Chronology: 1975-2010 * Philadanco Choreographer Profiles * Dance Practitioners Mentioned in Text * Philadanco Activity Schedule: August 2009-June 2011 * Interviewees: 1985, 1988, 2008-09