Joan Myers Brown and the Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina: A Biohistory of American Performance [Hardcover]

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 second half of the twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries.Foreword: Ballet Becomes Black Uplift; R.F.ThompsonPreludePrologueThe Backdrop: 1920s-1940sSpectacularly Black on Black: 1940s-1950sBut Black is Beautiful!: 1950s-1980s'Nose to the Grindstone, Head to the Stars'The Philadelphia/Philadanco AestheticAudacious Hope: The House That Joan Built: 1980s-21st CenturyEpilogueAfterword: Brenda Dixon Gottschild: A Critical Perspective; A.ChatterjeaJoan Myers Brown: Annotated ResumePhiladanco Home Seasons Repertory Chronology: 1975-2010Philadanco Choreographer ProfilesDance Practitioners Mentioned in TextPhiladanco Activity Schedule: August 2009-June 2011Interviewees: 1985, 1988, 2008-09

Dixon Gottschild pays particular attention to those who worked before, alongside, and with her [namely, Joan Myers Brown] to create what is becoming her legacy. She does this deftly, with sophisticated prose that is just as familiar and accessible as it is intellectually sound.' - Dance Research Journal

Brenda Dixon Gottschild brings a bracing mix of scholarship and unsentimental compassion to bear on the story of Joan Myers Brown, a classy, feisty, eminently pragmatic visionary whose life and dance company occupy a vivid and important place in the largely unexamined history of dance in Philadelphia. This book is an indispensable good-read about an individual and her epic fight to make a place for herself in a world that did not accept black-skinned dancers like her and then to build and maintain a major American dance company. But the book is much more. In the detail of the day-to-day work of being a dancer and developing dancers against the odds, so vividly evoked, too, in Myers Brown's pilcé