Background

Brenda Gottschild was born on October 11, 1942, in the United States. She is the daughter of George and Eliza (Hundley) Dixon.

Education

Brenda received a Bachelor of Arts from City College of the City University of New York in 1963. She then attended New York University and got a Master of Arts in 1976, and a Ph.D. in 1981.

Career

In her professional life, Brenda Gottschild has journeyed from a career as artist-performer to writer-scholar, from practitioner to observer - and, lately, a combination of both. The two developments are driven by the same passion for the performing arts and her belief in performance as a highly charged, sociopolitical phenomenon. This perspective is shaped by the fact that she spent the early years of her career as a professional performer, first as a member of the Mary Anthony Dance Theater, New York, from 1964 to 1966, then as an independent choreographer, teacher, and performer in New York, Stockholm, Helsinki, and London, from 1966 to 1968, and, later, as a member of the Open Theater, directed by Joseph Chaikin, New York and Europe, from 1968 to 1971.

Brenda's work at New York University crystallized her growing desire to find a theoretical foundation for her performance interests. In making the switch from performer to scholar she managed to blur the divisions between these categories and play both ends against an interdisciplinary middle ground. Thus, in presenting her research she uses her own dancing body to demonstrate various performative and kinesthetic principles as she attempts to use the categories of lecture, performance, and discourse. She has presented her scholarly work internationally at the University of Ghana; Metropolitan University, London; and University of Cape Town, South Africa; among others.

Gottschild has published a wide range of books, essays, and articles, including Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (1996), Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era (1999), The Black Dancing Body; A Geography from Coon to Cool (2003), and Joan Myers Brown & The Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina: A Biohistory of American Performance ( 2012). She often works in collaboration with her husband Hellmut Gottschild on somatic and research-based explorations referred to as "movement theater discourse".

Achievements

• Brenda Gottschild is known as the author of books on cultural activism, dance, and the African diaspora. Her most famous work is Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era (2000), for which she received the 2001 Congress on Research in Dance Award for Outstanding Scholarly Dance Publication.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Waltzing in the Dark

    (The career of Norton and Margot, a ballroom dance team wh...)

    2002
  • The Black Dancing Body: A Geography From Coon to Cool

    (What is the essence of black dance in America? To answer ...)

    2005
  • Dancing in Blackness: A Memoir

    (Dancing in Blackness is a professional dancer's personal ...)

    2019
  • Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts

    (This ground-breaking work brings dance into current discu...)

    1998
  • Joan Myers Brown and the Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina

    (A Biohistory of American Performance.)

    2012

Membership

Brenda is a member of American Studies Association, Congress on Research in Dance, Phi Beta Kappa.

Connections

Brenda married Esty Stowell on January 18, 1971. They divorced in 1987. Then she married Hellmut Gottschild, a choreographer, on July 24, 1991. She has one children from her first marriage, Amel Eliza Stowell Larrieux.

Father:

George Dixon

Mother:

Eliza (Hundley) Dixon

Spouse:

Hellmut Gottschild

ex-spouse:

Esty Stowell

Daughter:

Amel Eliza Stowell Larrieux

References

• Contemporary Authors A Bio-Bibliographical Guide to Current Writers in Fiction, General Non-Fiction, Poetry, Journalism, Drama, Motion Pictures, Television, and Other Fields
  2008