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Session 21	Biohistories
Brenda Dixon-Gottschild	"Improbable Hope*, Joan Myers Brown, and Philadelphia Dancing - A Biohistory of Art and Race,"
	The “fulcrum” definitions offer a fitting metaphor for Joan Myers Brown’s status in the dance field, with her stature originating in Philadelphia and reaching far beyond. In a professional career of fifty-plus years, her perspective and vision have influenced generations of dancers and dance makers. Arguably, Brown’s Philadelphia School of Dance Arts and Philadelphia Dance Company are responsible for a style of dance that can be called the “Philadelphia School.” I shall use Brown’s career as the fulcrum to leverage an investigation of the interface between performance, cultural formation, and race politics as evidenced by the development of a dance community in black Philadelphia and the rise and spread of its influence beyond the black community and regional borders to national and international distinction. Philadelphia’s dance history outstrips regional specificity and can be interrogated in terms of broader issues in American life—issues of identity, social change, and cultural comfort levels—allowing us to understand that dance is, indeed, a measure of culture and a barometer of society.
Megan Anne Todd	Playful Warriors: Africanist Aesthetics, Gender, and Identity in Motion
	In this paper I look at the product and process of Playful Warriors, an Afro-modern choreography by Ojeya Cruz Banks. I examine how, through these movement aesthetics and/or this choreography, healing is activated and/or potentialized for individual dancers, the dancers as a group, and/or audience members. Moving from a wide angle (global) lens of Afro-Diasporic cultural travel and the historically significant and persistent contemporary cultural residues, I unearth aspects of how Afro-Diasporic dance practices dialogue with the cultural, political, economic, and spiritual soil of the dancers in this piece. Through telling stories of their own experiences, how do individual dancers and community members narrate and thus map the borders of their own identities through dance? In addition, how do these expressions and experiences of Africanist aesthetics mark and map the imaginary of what Afro-Diasporic dance is and how it is situated as a contemporary US American concept today? I hope to show how, in various sites of practice and spectatorship, moments of utopic potential can be illumined to activate individual and social healing through dance.
	Brenda Dixon Gottschild is the author of The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool (2005); Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (1996) and Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era (2002). She is Professor Emerita of Dance Studies at Temple University. She is a senior consultant/writer for Dance Magazine and performs with her husband, choreographer Hellmut Gottschild.
	Megan Anne Todd- I have passion about/for movement, which has cultivated in me diverse trajectories of interest/study/practice in embodied systems, ranging from Afro-diasporic dance practices to yoga, Pilates, and massage therapy. In my doctoral work I explore how artistically choreographed, as well as everyday performative practices of dance and movement, articulate, transmit, and negotiate knowledges, literacies, and identities, and how these practices may impact individual and social wellness and healing. I am a Ph.D. candidate in Theatre and Performance of the Americas at ASU, with an M.S. in Exercise and Wellness from ASU (thesis: Yoga and Distractibility) and B.A. in English and Language, Reading, and Culture of the Americas from KSC. I am the mother of two beautiful children, Santiago and Zora.
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