Waltzing in the Dark

" 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