Brenda Dixon Gottschild

Brenda Dixon Gottschild is a cultural historian, performer, choreographer, and anti-racist cultural worker. She has utilized her background as both a dance performer as well as a professor of dance to create works that bring racism, gender, and societal questions to the forefront of discussions. Her choreographic work is often in collaboration with her husband, Hellmut Gottschild, who is also a dancer/choreographer. She is actively publishing literary works and giving lectures in which she uses her own dancing body as a crucial part of her presentations.

Biography

Gottschild spend the early years of her career performing dance. From 1964 to 1966, she was a member of the Mary Anthony Dance Theater. Later, she became an independent choreographer, teacher, and performer. Gottschild has worked in New York, Stockholm, Helsinki, and London between the years of 1966 and 1968. From 1968 to 1971, she was a member of the Open Theater (directed by Joseph Chaikin) and the Frank Silvera Writers’ Workshop. She was a student at the Performance Studies Department of New York University and earned her Ph.D. in 1981. Today, she uses her own body as well as lecture as an instrument with which she demonstrates performance and kinesthetic principles.

She is presently a Professor Emerita of dance studies at Temple University and is collaborating with Joan Myers Brown in writing a book and giving lectures about the Philadelphia Dance Company. Gottschild performs with her husband Hellmut Gottschild in a form of somatic and research-based collaboration they have dubbed “movement theater discourse.” Additionally, she is the Philadelphia correspondent for Dance Magazine.

Publications Books:

• Joan Myers Brown & The Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina: A Biohistory of American Performance

• The Black Dancing Body – A Geography From Coon to Cool, (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2003; paperback, 2005)

• Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2000; paperback, 2002)

• Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Greenwood, 1996; paperback, 1998)

Essays:

• Outside the Box with Faustin Linyekula

• Dance is a Message in a Cultural Envelope: Urban Bush Women, Jant-Bi, and Diasporan Dialogues

• The Diaspora Dance Boom

• DIASPORAN DIARIES/CARIBBEAN CONNEXIONS/CALYPSO & CYNTHIA

Books Co-written:

• History of the dance in art and education

Online Articles:

• The Black Dancing Body - A Geography From Coon to Cool

• On Solid Ground

• Recovering the Phoenix: Dance, Education, Society & the Politics of Race

• The movement is the message: five dancemakers who dare to mix activism with art

• In the Eyes of the Beholder

• the Movement is the Message

• Prince ScareKrow and the Emerald City

• Amazing Grace: Philadanco celebrates 35 years

• Generations of Inspiration

• Making A Difference

• Strengthening the Field

• On The Rise: Matthew Neenan

• On The Rise: Teneise Mitchell

• Whoa!: Whiteness in Dance?

• Drumstruck

• DM Recommends

• Balanchine in black

• Achieving balance

Grants and Awards

2011: Production grant from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through Dance Advance

2009: Leeway Foundation Transformation Award for Art and Social Change

2008: Congress on Research in Dance Award for Outstanding Leadership in Dance Research

2008: Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through Dance Advance

2004: de la Torre Bueno Prize for The Black Dancing Body – A Geography from Coon to Cool

2001: CORD (Congress on Research in Dance) Award for Outstanding Scholarly Dance Publication for Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era