The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool by Brenda Dixon Gottschild (2003-10-06)

Watching contemporary American dance is a unique and electrifying experience. Swept along with the dancers, one wonders how the unorthodox movement and unexpected tempo came about. To provide at least one answer to this question, Brenda Dixon Gottschild charts a “geography” that maps a unique, yet startlingly ubiquitous, region of influence in the history of American dance: the black dancing body. The author invites the reader on a journey of sorts and says, “The black dancing body (a fiction based on reality, a fact based upon illusion) has infiltrated and informed the shapes and changes of the American dancing body.” Using interviews with black, white, and brown dance practitioners as well as performance analysis and personal recollections of her own life in the world of dance, Brenda Dixon Gottschild charts the endeavors, ordeals, and triumphs of “black” dance and dancers by exposing perceptions, images, and assumptions, past and present. In her journey to discover the contours and importance of the black dancing body, the author spoke to some of the greatest dancers and choreographers of our time – Fernando Bujones, Trisha Brown, Garth Fagan, Bill T. Jones, Ralph Lemon, Meredith Monk, Meri n Soto, Doug Elkins, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and a cadre of their esteemed colleagues. The “embattled territories” of the black dancing body are probed chapter by chapter: feet, buttocks, hair, skin color. The whole of the black dancing body is “re-membered” in the final chapters on soul and spirit. The Black Dancing Body is a key to the ineffable rhythms and movement of dance in America.