February 2014 brought with it the festive spirit of one world now commonplace for any Olympic season. The idea that we can, and will, unite through our diversity was fostered through stories of athletes who work tirelessly to earn the chance to represent their countries on the world stage. Coincidentally, it was also during this month that the United States celebrated “Black History Month”—a time to remember that all citizens of a country should be recognized for outstanding efforts both past and present. Businesses, advertisers, and television pick up on this, and their messages remind us of extraordinary contributions. Even driving through a Wells Fargo ATM to hastily complete a transaction, I was greeted by a screen that read, “Wells Fargo Honors Black History, which is American History.” Something about reading those words on the bank machine seemed to offer more substance than the fun-filled community bonding presented by the commercials for the Winter Olympics, and in so doing prompts questions about approach, tactic, and the power of recognition through the written word. Granted these messages are nothing new, but how they are approached, delivered, received, and reiterated is still worthy of scrutiny—making it imperative to ask how accomplishments in a common history can be acknowledged without reifying separation. In what ways might such recognition be palpably more genuine? Can re-placing slowly re-write? What can dance do to move toward a post-race climate, and is that the model that is optimal, or is there another way to more effectively problematize American society's consideration of race?

Despite the somewhat contrived attempts at cultivating a collective citizenry heretofore shared, there are certainly many whose faithful treatments have had lasting impact. It is in this spirit that it feels appropriate to consider Brenda Dixon Gottschild's history of Joan Myers Brown in Joan Myers Brown & the Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina. To those well-versed in dance studies, Dixon Gottschild needs no introduction; her ideas are seminal, and her writing has truly shaped the course of the discipline. Whether writing about the Balanchine ballerina (1996) or ballroom dancers Harold Norton and Margot Webb (2000), as a scholar and performer, Dixon Gottschild has consistently viewed histories as multilayered and interdependent. Her analysis of Joan Myers Brown (or “JB” as she is referred to in the monograph for both clarity and as a term of informalityFootnote ¹) is no different, as it aims to secure a place in canonical dance history for an African American ballerina who found herself in a discipline with little reverence for black dancers.

Through Myers Brown's story, other prominent African American dancers who served as her mentors and/or teachers—for instance, Essie Marie Dorsey, Sydney King, and Marion Cuyjet—are also highlighted; their unique stories collectively inspired Myers Brown to invest her life in dance. Nonetheless, questions pervade, namely, why did Myers Brown and other African American women want careers in a dance form that to many seems elitist and has historically remained segregated? According to Dixon Gottschild, for Myers Brown, ballet was much more than the scope of its technical vocabulary; when understood in this way, instead of as disconnected steps, its potency and potential markedly shift. Dixon Gottschild claims that for the “black ballerinas in this book, the ballet ideal existed in partnership with black-based dance forms, and jazz, tap, and African-based—then called ‘interpretive’—dance were equally valued experiences” (128). With this in mind, further inquiry about the state of ballet today, and its practitioners, teachers, mentors, and pedagogy is initiated. Specifically, was the idea of ballet as more than a defined vocabulary particular to African American ballerinas of Myers Brown's generation? Do ballerinas in the twenty-first century see the art as a “partnership”? Does the training incorporate other genres and styles, or are these skills that the dancer must learn elsewhere? What precisely is ballet to its artists today, and what factors lead to differentiated conceptions?

By treating Philadelphia as both character and locality in Myers Brown's story, Dixon Gottschild takes us through the development of the Philadelphia School of Dance Arts (PSDA; opened in 1960) and the Philadelphia Dance Company (heretofore “Philadanco”) established in 1970. In the course of five chronologically structured chapters (with a Foreword by Robert Farris Thompson and an Afterword by Ananya Chatterjea), readers absorb the sense of urgency that is the life of a dancer. In telling Myers Brown's story, Dixon Gottschild carefully elucidates the idea that the Philadelphia black dance community is not outlined to trace the particularities of the city, but as a means of investigating more completely the “biohistory” model put forth in the book's subtitle. For Dixon Gottschild, biohistory is intended to “describe my biography-as-history approach to this work,” while “the new coinage can stand for biology-history as well, meaning the ecology of this community—the interactions between the people and their environment” (xxx). Assisting in these narratives, six appendices provide invaluable archival information about Myers Brown and Philadanco (such as her resumé, a repertory chronology from 1975–2010, Philadanco choreographer profiles, biographies of practitioners mentioned in the text, the Philadanco activity schedule, and various interviews). This material shows how the wide network that Philadanco, vis-à-vis Myers Brown, has built extends the concept of partnership beyond the balletic form and to the formation of ballet. As Thomas DeFrantz points out, African American female dancers “recognize collective subjectivities” in contradistinction to “the agency of individuated subjects” that is articulated by the majority of Western philosophical thought (Reference DeFrantz2011, 58). DeFrantz posits that African American dancers realize careers, organizations, and legacies through the acts of communication and connectivity (58). Because Myers Brown's story is certainly of this kind, Dixon Gottschild pays particular attention to those who worked before, alongside, and with her to create what is becoming her legacy. She does this deftly, with sophisticated prose that is just as familiar and accessible as it is intellectually sound.

Critical dance scholarship from the past few decades has treated race, gender, and sexuality as a requisite triptych of inquiry. John Perpener's African-American Concert Dance (Reference Perpener2001), Thomas DeFrantz's edited collection Dancing Many Drums (Reference DeFrantz2002), Susan Manning's Modern Dance, Negro Dance (Reference Manning2004), and Nadine George-Graves Urban Bush Women (Reference George-Graves2010) are just a few that seek to redress the clear absence of African American dance(rs) in historical accounts. These theorists, like Dixon Gottschild, frequently use archaeological imagery such as “digging” and “excavation” to point to the fact that the efforts of African American dancers have not just been left out, but have been forgotten and buried so deeply that it takes real work to find and bring to light these lineages. Most recently, Yaël Tamar Lewin's Night's Dancer (Reference Lewin2011) takes the Met's first African American ballerina, Janet Collins, as central subject. Like Dixon Gottschild and the other scholars mentioned above, Lewin seeks to forge and claim space for a prominent African American dancer. Though each of these works is distinguished on its own, together they seek to expand the limited discourse.

As Dixon Gottschild clarifies throughout Audacious Hope, one way for African American dancers to be recognized in the ballet world is through the contradictory path of making themselves invisible. Getting through class without being noticed is often the black ballerina's course of action, as illustrated by Philadanco assistant artistic director Kim Bears-Bailey. She told Dixon Gottschild that in ballet classes at the University of the Arts where she was a ballet major, the teacher never singled her out in a negative or positive way. Bears-Bailey recounts:

The movement that Bears-Bailey speaks of—the change from being physically absent in the studio, due to racism's segregation, to the psychological absence of not being noticed—supports Dixon Gottchild's positioning of the black ballerina as “audacious.” The ideas suggested by that term are many, yet boldness, originality, and a sense of going-against-the-grain are some of the most common definitions. Thus the audacious ballerina is one who is not afraid to chart her own course and understands that she might have to subvert the system to stay a part of it. As Dixon Gottschild argues, Myers Brown and her contemporaries were continually working “against the odds” because “[t]heir ambitions were such that dance itself—and their continuity within the discipline—kept them in the profession, in spite of racial discrimination and lack of recognition in the white dance world” (35). The “hope” of/for the African American ballerina, from Myers Brown's generation to today's, is consequently not as optimistic as the word might otherwise suggest. It is for this reason that Dixon Gottschild modifies the word with audacious, and although we learn of Myers Brown's significant work, we likewise comprehend that it was not without considerable struggle.

As a closing anecdotal aside, I recently purchased a book for my four-year-old titled When Stravinsky Met Nijinsky by Lauren Stringer (Reference Stringer2013).Footnote ² Stringer tells the now infamous tale of Le Sacre du Printemps: Stravinsky and Nijinsky both “dreamed of making something different and new”—thus modernity was born in ballet and these men historicized as visionaries. As a children's book, the story is rendered in illustration as much as text, and although this is a practical decision for the intended audience, it is appropriate for a wordless art form. Reading the book, and considering the message it seemingly purports—the Sacre creation story is not the exclusive domain of dance or music history but rather of common knowledge … so much so that a child should know of this ballet—I couldn't help being reminded of how far away we are from recognizing the contributions of Myers Brown and other African American ballet dancers and choreographers in the same light. On the other hand, since this interpretation of Stravinsky and Nijinsky presumes the genius, individuated model of creation that is refuted throughout Dixon Gottschild's account of Myers Brown, it could be that parallel stories have not been “invisibilized,” but rather, they have not surfaced because they would misrepresent these artists as singular. Dixon Gottschild teaches us that the partnership Myers Brown understood ballet to be was not far from her conceptualization of art's organization. The black ballerina's audaciousness is indomitable today because she still has quite a fight to put up, yet thanks to progenitors like Myers Brown, there is hope.