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Brenda Dixon-Gottschild

Visiting Scholar 2007-2008 Professor emerita, Dance Department, Temple University
Through our scientific and technological genius, we've made of this world a neighborhood. And now through our moral and ethical commitment, we must make of it a brotherhood.
— Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Background

Brenda Dixon-Gottschild is professor emerita of dance studies at Temple University. She is an author, scholar, dance historian, performer and choreographer who performs with her husband and choreographer Hellmut Gottschild in “movement theater discourse,” a somatic and research-based collaboration. Dixon-Gottschild earned a bachelor’s (1979) and a PhD (1981) in performance studies from New York University.

Interests

Dixon-Gottschild’s work uses dance performance as a measure and paradigm of society. In presenting her research, she uses her “own dancing body to demonstrate various performative and kinesthetic principles…to fuse the categories of lecture, performance, and discourse,” defining her work as “choreography for the page,” an “embodied, subjunctive approach to research writing.”

While at MIT, in addition to continuing her research in movement-theater discourse, Dixon-Gottschild guest-lectured in the “Theater and Cultural Diversity in the U.S.” (21M.621/SP.595) course and held a performance-lecture titled “Researching Performance: The (Black) Dancing Body as a Measure of Culture”. Along with Hellmut Gottschild, she also performed “Tongue, Smell, Color,” an internationally renowned work that weaves together dance, music, poetry, readings from academic texts, enactments of searing personal catharsis, and a unique physical vocabulary created by the scholar/artists.

Sample Work

  • Publication

    Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance

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