The Black Dancing Body
Subtitle: A Geography from Coon to Cool
Edition: 1st Palgrave Macmillan Pbk. Ed edition
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: October 6, 2003
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 332
ISBN-13: 9780312240479
Subjects: Black studies; Blacks In Performing Arts; Dance; Performing Arts; Performing Arts/Dance; USA; Dance - General; Ethnic Studies - African American Studies - General; United States - General; Social Science / African-American Studies; African American dance; African American dancers; Body image; History
First sentence: With dance as the focus and race the parameter, this work is a personalized cultural study, the third installment in my exploration/excavation of Africanist presences in performance.
Description: "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 has spoken to some of the greatest dancers and choreographers of our time - Fernando Bujones, Trisha Brown, Garth Fagan, Bill T. Jones, Ralph Lemon, Meredith Monk, Merian 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."--Jacket.