Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era

Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era

by Brenda Dixon Gottschild (Author)

Synopsis

The career of Norton and Margot, a ballroom dance team whose work was thwarted by the racial tenets of the era, serves as the barometer of the times and acts as the tour guide on this excursion through the worlds of African American vaudeville, black and white America during the swing era, the European touring circuit, and pre-Civil Rights era racial etiquette.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 288
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 05 Apr 2002

ISBN 10: 0312294433
ISBN 13: 9780312294434
Book Overview: Brenda Dixon Gottschild is the author of Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts .

Media Reviews

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

Author Bio
Brenda Dixon Gottschild, author of Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance, Waltzing in the Dark, and The Black Dancing Body, is Professor Emerita of Dance Studies at Temple University, USA, and a former senior consultant and writer for Dance Magazine. She lectures nationally and internationally, using her own dancing/thinking body to illustrate her ideas and blur the division between practice and theory. She is the recipient of the 2013 Scholar Award from the International Association of Blacks in Dance.