Waltzing In The Dark Paperback

Brenda Dixon Gottschild

This unique study focuses on the social, racial, and artistic climate for African American performers working during the swing era - roughly the late 1920s through the 1940s. The career of Norton and Margot, a ballroom dance team whose work was thwarted by the racial tenets of the era, serves as a tour guide and barometer of the times on this excursion, through the worlds of African American vaudeville, separate black and white Americas, the European touring circuit, and pre-Civil Rights era racial etiquette.

9780312294434

English

Palgrave USA

270

BRENDA DIXON GOTTSCHILD is Professor Emeritus of Dance Studies at Temple University and Research Fellow in the Centre for Folklore and Ethnography, University of Pennsylvania. She writes for Dance Magazine and is author of Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts.

Here is a ... scholarship possessing funk, rigor and style...It is as sensuous as the artists she describes, employs a zigzagging, swinging approach to her topic and provides a useful guide in our ongoing struggle against the sands of invisibalisation. - Bill T. Jones, choreographer "...a rare and gifted writer, a gem of a cultural portraitist...she teaches us all how to write about dance, the cool and the hot, mind and motion, making it clear how black dance centers self-realization and the moral education of the world." - Robert Farris Thompson, Trumbull Professor of the History of Art, Yale University "With insight and honesty, the author reveals careers limited by racial oppression in the pre-Civil Rights-era US." - Choice "During the 1930s and 1940s, the African American vaudeville team of Norton and Margot danced gracefully in a country scarred by segregation. Their frustrations and satisfactions, emblematic of the lives of so many African American artists in their time, are chronicle with lyrical insight in Brenda Dixon Gottschild's Waltzing in the Dark." - Journal of American History