October 16-22, 2003

books

Not Dancing Around the Subject

Brenda Dixon Gottschild tackles race relations, stereotypes and body image in the final installment of her trilogy.

by Lewis Whittington

First, there's that cover: a bare pair of turned-out, muscular black legs, with the toes curled under in a collapsed pointe (posed by former Alvin Ailey dancer Vikkia Lambert). You have to look twice at the hamstrings to make sure they are not those of a muscleman. Then there's that confrontational title: The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool (Palgrave, 332 pp., $29.95). Before you even open it, you know this is not your typical dance book.

The author, Brenda Dixon Gottschild, who lives in Philadelphia, is a national treasure: performer, critic, scholar and professor emeritus at Temple University. She's now written the third in a trilogy (it joins Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance and Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era) that has uniquely chronicled the history of African-American dance.

"I'm ready for some heat. People don't really like to talk about race," Gottschild says. She and dancer Hellmut Gottschild, co-founder of Group Motion and founder of Zero Moving Company (and her husband of 12 years), are preparing to launch a tour of their new dances called "Tongue Smell Color" at Middlebury College and then teach in Munich, Germany.

Gottschild started to sketch The Black Dancing Body in 2000, and in fall 2001 it became her main project. Her approach is a bare-knuckles interrogation of race relations in the U.S. as they play out in the world of dance.

The book is comprehensive in its historical sweep, moving through the vaudevillian stage and screen stereotypes that were fused onto the national consciousness in the early part of the last century. She investigates the sexually charged dances of Josephine Baker in the '20s that were rejected in the U.S. but celebrated in Europe, and even indicts the high priest of dance, George Balanchine, for lifting signatures, or "markers" as she calls them, from African-American cultures. And that's just for starters.

Gottschild argues that "the aesthetic underbelly" of dance in America must be exposed, by breaking the discussion down into physical, emotional and spiritual realms that dissect the cultural issues of what she calls the "embattled territory" of the black dancing body. As a dancer, she confronted racism at the beginning of her professional dance career at age 17 in the '50s, and was told by choreographer Pearl Lang she would "destroy the unity of the corps" because her skin was too dark. From there, Gottschild launched a distinguished career bridging dance and academia.

Some of most celebrated dancer/choreographers are represented in this book, and Gottschild was interested in all points of view -- even opposing ones. Choreographer Bill T. Jones told her, "There was a time I never wanted to be called a black company or a black choreographer. " The whole premise of your book, dissecting the black body, is a troubling one." Later, Jones completely opens up. Chunks of her interviews with a who's-who of modern dancers both local and international -- from Fernando Bujones (American Ballet Theater) to Zane Booker (Philadanco/Nederlands Dans Theater) and company founders and artistic directors like Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (Urban Bush Women), Rennie Harris (Puremovement) and Joan Myers Brown (Philadanco), among many others -- lace the book.

Her anthropological approach penetrates what she calls "ethnographic perspective to embrace the context of each life with no blame." Some of her subjects were reluctant to dredge up memories of racism and body image, but using a technique similar to sense memory in method acting, her subjects uncover revelatory experiences, philosophies and their very purpose as dance artists.

Collectively, this volume rescues a vital history of theatrical dance that reflects a legacy of racial divides. "I feel like I have to speak truth to power. " I don't want to say it's a new canon," she says.

But it's certainly one of the most thought-provoking nonfiction titles of the year.