Recovering the Phoenix, cont. By Brenda Dixon Gottschild

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Episode from Tongue Smell Color, a performance created and performed by Hellmut Gottschild and Brenda Dixon Gottschild. Photo © by Beatriz Schiller, 2002

To take this a little further, let me address my research for a moment. The hurdles I've had to jump may help you understand, by comparison, the biases inherent in the British system. On one hand, my research was regarded by the old dance establishment as "not real research." These folks simply didn't know what to make of the new, non-dance methodologies that I used and tailored to suit my need to fashion a deconstructionist, Africanist-centered theory of intertextuality. I was thinking outside their box, researching beyond the historical, aesthetic, statistical, or anthropological pale of conventional dance practice of the time. On the other hand, others recognized that I was structuring a new, creolized, fusion methodology to meet a new task; that, in order to fathom the Africanist presence in Europeanist performance, I simply couldn't use conventional Europeanist methodologies. That, in itself, was a contradiction! I had to turn to other sources outside the dance realm. I discuss this problem in my article in the 2005 issue of Discourses in Dance (volume 3, issue 1). I found my models for research in African American Studies, American Studies, race and identity studies, cultural studies---in all those wonderful amalgams that today are routinely used in what we term "dance studies," but which were not common currency in the dance scholarship of the 1980s and early 1990s, when I began my line of inquiry. This process was a lesson that I made sure to pass on to my doctoral students in my years of teaching at Temple University–namely, the importance of finding the methodology to fit the research, rather than fitting (or skewing) the research into a given methodology!

I addressed this issue in an article of mine published by the American Dance Festival in 1988:

Any serious attempt to study Black dance demands a study of African and New World Black cultures. Any attempt to evaluate Black dance–or the Black dance elements in White forms–on the concert stage demands an emic approach, so as to understand the phenomenon also in the context of its Black origins, and not only in the context of the White, western frame of reference. [Note 5]

Episode from Tongue Smell Color, a performance created and performed by Hellmut Gottschild and Brenda Dixon Gottschild. Photo © by Beatriz Schiller, 2002

It was in the 1970s, actually, that it all started for me. In the fall of 1974 I took my first courses in the Drama Department at New York University (later to become the Performance Studies Department). Dance was not a part of the curriculum, and I took no dance courses with those who would later be associated with the Performance Studies program. As I wrote in the Discourses article, it was "Richard Schechner's courses in theory and Brooks MacNamara's in popular entertainments [that] made me aware that there were histories of cultural performance that were not part of the canon but had surely influenced, and been appropriated and exploited by, that canon. This was an important discovery for me, and I took the ball and ran–no, flew–with it." (p.75) The work of these two performance practitioner/theorists was what inspired me to stand on their shoulders and survey my own Africanist culture: the popular dances and music I'd grown up with; the church my family attended; the foods we ate; the way we walked, cooked, or the jokes we made. Who'd ever have dreamed of these elements as something I could write about and "study" in graduate school! And then I met Margot Webb, the subject of my doctoral dissertation and my second book, Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2000). To echo a clich?, "the rest is history!" This dissertation was "one of the first dance-centered theses to address the social, cultural, and political ramifications of dance within the world at large... not solely about the dance world, but about dance in the world. It was ahead of its time, or at least it came before the dance field was ready for it. I could not find a publisher interested in it until nearly twenty years later, after my first book had been published and I was regarded as an established scholar." (pp.75-76)