‍^{©Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, 2026. All Rights Reserved}

Introduction‍

When I moved to Philadelphia in the 1980’s I was introduced to and became part of a uniquely rich cultural landscape rooted in dance. Joan Myers Brown was, and remains, central to this picture. Her personal and professional history reflect hardships as well as advances of Black Americans in artistic and sociocultural developments from the mid-twentieth century to today.

I use the ‘fulcrum’ definitions as a fitting metaphor for Brown’s prestige in the dance field, with her stature originating in Philadelphia and reaching far beyond. In a professional career of well over half a century, her perspective and vision have influenced generations of dancers, choreographers, artistic directors, and presenters. Arguably, Brown’s Philadelphia School of Dance Arts and Philadelphia Dance Company (hereafter referred to as Philadanco) originated a performance and teaching tradition that can be called the “Philadanco Aesthetic,” comparable to the renowned “Philly Sound” created by composers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff. (But dance milestones, unlike its musical counterparts, are often invisibilized.¹) Although she had important local predecessors, Brown’s breadth and scope can be understood as a fulcrum of cultural formation evidenced by the advancement of an ongoing dance community in Black Philadelphia and its subsequent rise and influence beyond regional borders to national and international distinction.

Brown’s artistic journey from a segregated urban community to founding a world-class dance company is no rags-to-riches story. It is a teaching moment, an American primer—a lesson on creating an alternative yet marketable identity and utilizing it to transcend racial barriers. Her odyssey embodies issues of identity, social change and cultural comfort levels, compelling us to understand dance as a measure of culture and a barometer of society.²


Lineage

I grew up on a Black college campus in the segregated south, and I spent hours (because of a lack of babysitters) sitting in a corner of the dance studio at the college watching the students practice. I wanted to be like them and like my mother. And, you might be amused to know, that since my mother and these young women were the only dancers I had ever seen, it was some years before I found out there were white ballerinas! My father later took me to see Maria Tallchief, which didn’t exactly straighten that out. I was amazed when I was in college during the sixties, that there was a problem with black bodies in ballet.
(Thulani Davis)³
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I gave my daughters ballet so they could know how to walk and create the picture I wanted. I wanted them to have an excellent education. I didn’t want them to suffer the pains of racism.
(Robert Joseph Pershing Foster)⁴

If you think you can dance without studying ballet, it’s like thinking you can go to college without taking English.
(Sign posted on wall in a Philadelphia School of Dance Arts/ Philadanco studio)

Born on Christmas Day, 1931 in Philadelphia’s Graduate Hospital, Joan Myers Brown was the only child of Julius and Nellie Myers, young working parents. Her father was a chef and former restaurateur and her mother worked in research and chemical engineering for the Arcos Corporation. They moved from a traditionally Black South Philadelphia neighborhood to the striving, sheltered middle-class environment of West Philadelphia when Brown was in grade school. The neighborhood was racially mixed when they moved in. Thanks to white flight, it was predominantly Black by the time she was a teen. Her beginnings in dance were, literally, accidental. At age seven or eight, playing “curb tag” with playmates (jumping on and off the curb, from sidewalk to street), Brown was struck by a truck, sustaining an injury to one foot. Doctors suggested dance classes might help her rehabilitation. She was enrolled in the Essie Marie Dorsey School of Dance, which was famous in the local Black community. (Dorsey, 1893-1967, was the forerunner of the Black Philadelphia ballet tradition and trained other important artist-teachers including Sydney King and Marion Cuyjet.⁵) However, Brown did not stick with it, explaining “I lost my shoes; I lost other things, so my mother said, after about two years, that I should stop.”

Still, dance was in the air and, for middle-class Blacks, dance was ballet, first and foremost. Not until high school did Brown begin dancing again, this time in the ballet club led by an inspiring (white) teacher:
My gym teacher, Virginia Lingenfelder, suggested that I dance. She was a ballet teacher and dancer herself and gave us dance exercises as well as regular gymnastics.⁶ She asked me to join the ballet club and encouraged me a lot. Until then I had wanted to be an artist, but by the time I graduated in 1949 I knew I wanted to be a dancer—a ballet dancer—but you know how it was in those days. I tried to get into white schools, and they simply weren’t taking Blacks in their classes.⁷
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At a time when generations of jazz musicians were learning their profession at public high schools on borrowed instruments so, too, quality instruction and a dance legacy were established at West Philadelphia High School by Lingenfelder’s ballet club. These clubs functioned on a pre-professional model and gave well-rehearsed performances.

Then, in 1949, Brown met Antony Tudor. Prior to the founding of the Pennsylvania Ballet in 1963⁸, the Philadelphia Ballet Guild brought Tudor in from New York City to teach weekly classes for selected students from the city’s major dance studios. Brown was the first Black dancer to avail herself of this opportunity. His cultivation of talented, local Black ballet dancers was a godsend for Brown and her peers, including Judith Jamison, Billy Wilson, Delores Brown, and John Jones—all of whom went on to professional dance careers.⁹
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Tudor was either unaware of, or chose to ignore, American racism separating Blacks from whites. This worked to Brown’s advantage. She said that she:
never felt like ‘the black person’ in the room, even though very few people were friendly. You never felt that he didn’t see you. I’d be his partner, because the other [white] boys didn’t want to partner me, so he’d be teaching adagio, with me as his partner.
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He cast his extraordinary Black dancers in Ballet Guild productions of Orpheus in the Underworld and Gaite Parisienne. Brown and an additional Black ballerina danced in his production of Les Sylphides, each at one end of the corps for balance. A Philadelphia newspaper reviewer stated that the ballet was fine, except for “the two flies in the buttermilk.” Brown was devastated. It was clear that the American ballet establishment was not ready for black dancers in general, nor black ballerinas in particular.

Nevertheless, ballet’s hold continued in the Black community. In the Tudor era Brown worked at the Sydney King¹⁰ School of Dance where she was also mentored by King in the administrative duties of running a studio. In addition, she took private lessons with the foremost white ballet teachers in the city, since they didn’t accept Blacks in their classes. In 1950 the King school presented a portion of Giselle in recital form, with Brown as Giselle and King as Queen of the Wilis. From 1950 to1953 she also performed ballet in Philadelphia’s legendary annual Christmas Cotillion Balls.^11
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In 1950-51 Brown commuted weekly to the Katherine Dunham School in New York, studying with Karel Shook (ballet), Walter Nicks (jazz), Sevilla Fort (Afro-Modern) and others. She also entered show business at this time, first dancing in small New Jersey and Philadelphia nighclubs that had floor shows, bands, and dancers, then graduating to high-end cabaret extravaganzas in exclusive clubs from Atlantic City to Montreal, from Kansas City to Las Vegas. Wherever she performed, she sought out local ballet classes to keep her technique polished. She was also learning valuable knowledge about creating performances in a style that appealed to the public, with deliberate choices about costuming, pacing, casting, and programming. She performed in high heels, occasionally on point, and was trained to do a variety of styles. From 1951 through the end of the 1960s Brown worked in major touring revues headlined by Cab Calloway, Sammy Davis, Jr., Pearl Bailey, Billy Eckstine and others, including the Larry Steele Smart Affairs Revue (a well-known, spectacular variety cabaret that was at the top of live Black show business). She became Steele’s in-house choreographer during her tenure with him.
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First A School

Like the statement about what George Balanchine dreamed of accomplishing in coming to the USA—namely, “first a school”— Brown did precisely that. She founded the Philadelphia School of Dance Arts—PSDA—a full decade before founding Philadanco. The teaching philosophy of Katherine Dunham, Sydney King, and Marion Cuyjet—that dance instruction should educate the whole person—had a profound influence on Brown as she started her own dance school. Following their lead, she taught her PSDA students to uphold traditional standards of hard work, respect for elders, and attention to dress and manners, in class and in life. Due to American racism, these qualities are always relevant in a vastly different way for the Black dancer, who is still too often regarded as less trained, talented or self-possessed than her white counterpart.
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As to starting her school, Brown recalls the difficulties:
I was still dancing professionally [on the upscale Black cabaret circuit]. I had a very good girlfriend. We’d teach all day to a school of thirty kids. We used to clean and sit and wait for the phone to ring. Then I’d go to Atlantic City and dance all night. A couple of times when I went on the road my friend would teach all day. Then a couple more friends came around and they helped. My mother paid the rent to keep the school open. At about 1966 the school started to support itself.

Such grit! Such determination! One of the leitmotifs in Brown’s history is the thread of resilience and the reversal of circumstance from a measure of defeat into a tool of survival—the “audacious hope” referred to in speeches by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and President Barack Obama.¹² And so, the school began to thrive. Annual spring recitals gave every student a performance opportunity. Parents helped in making and adjusting costumes and disseminating publicity. With years of performance savvy from working with some of Black vaudeville’s royalty, Brown and her teachers finessed the school’s performances into a level of acceptability—and sometimes excellence—that pleased parents and participants, ensuring registration for the next school season. PSDA was graced with seasoned local dance instructors as well as guests. Arthur Mitchell taught for Brown whenever Dance Theater of Harlem performed in the city. Other guest teachers from New York at this early period included Karel Shook and Benjamin Harkavy (Harkness Ballet founder). Clearly, in Brown’s estimation, ballet remained the guiding principle in educating the well-trained dancer.


Philadanco

Ten years after starting her school and realizing her students lacked a professional outlet for their creativity, Brown founded the Philadelphia Dance Company—Philadanco. Now in its fifty-sixth year, “the house that Joan built” still vibrates with the energy demanded of its dancers, directors, and staff, as nonagenarian Brown gently shifts the leadership role to Kim Bears-Bailey, former Philadanco dancer, longtime company teacher, and informal archivist. The Philadanco Aesthetic, chiseled from the bedrock ancestry of the city’s Black dance tradition, is a combination of definitive elements, enumerated below, which I arrived at after decades of writing about and observing this phenomenal ensemble¹³:
ㅤ• Philadelphia Attitude [pronounced, Philly-style, as Atty-tood !] – toughness; raw energy; work ethic; southern/small town etiquette
ㅤ• Strong Technical Training, with ballet as the foundational base
ㅤ• Ensemble Emphasis, with no “stars”
ㅤ• Rigorous Professionalism - directness; precision; do-or-die dancing; work ethic, revisited
ㅤ• A “show biz” élan on the concert stage
ㅤ• African American old-school elegance
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Throughout the decades Brown has presented like the legendary Zen masters, who “push students to see how deep the desire for practice is, to see whether the student will climb back up on the cushion despite the rough treatment. Is the student seeking candy from the teacher or is she seeking the real thing?”¹⁴ Morn to midnight, daily, her life unfolds in the 3-storey building in West Philadelphia—on a street renamed “Philadanco Way.” Her private office, up a steep flight of stairs to the top floor, is facetiously called “heaven.” She was known for cooking a Sunday pre-rehearsal breakfast for the ensemble, whose rehearsal schedule was Wednesday through Sunday. In 1986 she bought a building on an adjacent street and established the first artists’ housing for dancers in the city. Realizing that some of her students, though not yet ready to dance in the flagship ensemble, needed performance opportunities, she founded two junior companies, Danco II and then Danco III (for the youngest talents). In 1991, Brown co-founded the International Association of Blacks in Dance, an umbrella organization which has grown to international renown, hosting an annual conference and festival that attracts Black and brown people from around the globe. By the year 2000 Philadanco was named the permanent resident dance company for the city’s prestigious Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, which also houses the Philadelphia Orchestra. And the list of firsts goes on.

The Roots unknowingly provided me the title for this essay. “Sacrifice” is the name of a composition on the 2002 Phrenology album by Philadelphia’s hip hop geniuses. I am struck by how much their song resonates with the spirit of the Philly sound, the Philadanco aesthetic, and Joan Myers Brown. Tradeoffs. Trials. Triumphs. One telling phrase from it is an apt description of Brown and the spirit embodied in the community of hard-working artists nurtured by Black Philadelphia’s unique aesthetic. As in their song, this determined woman, kept her “nose to the grindstone, head to the stars.” For that, let us all thank our lucky stars.

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^{1 My coinage, indicating a systemic purposeful, erasure of Black achievement by mainstream white culture. “Invisibilized” is intentional ignorance.
2 See Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, Joan Myers Brown & the Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina – A Biohistory of American Performance. New York, NY: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012.
3 Novelist/librettist/poet Thulani Davis, “A Graceful Dancer in My Living Room,” Dance/USA Journal, summer 1998, p.23 of pp.23-27.
4 Quoted in Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York, NY: Random House, 2010. P. 489
5 See Dixon-Gottschild, op. cit., pp.10-27, for details on Dorsey, Sydney King, and Marion Cuyjet, Brown’s predecessors.
6 Lingenfelder had danced in Philadelphia’s Catherine Littlefield Ballet (founded in 1935, which later became the Philadelphia Ballet) and was an accomplished dancer and teacher.
7 Dixon-Gottschild, op.cit., p.30.
8 Now known as the Philadelphia Ballet.
9 Judith Jamison (1944-2024) - renowned for her work with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, where she performed (1965-1980) and was the ensemble’s Artistic Director (1989-2010). Billy Wilson (1936-1994) – internationally renowned dancer on Broadway and with the National Ballet of Holland (where Serge Lifar created for him the title role in Othello). As choreographer he created works for Black Broadway musicals, the Alvin Ailey ensemble, Dance Theater of Harlem, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, and Philadanco. Delores Brown –(1935-2023) – Master ballet teacher, having trained generations of dancers at the Alvin Ailey School and Philadanco. She toured as a ballerina with the American Negro Ballet in the 1950s. John Jones (born 1937) danced and toured with Jerome Robbins’s short-lived Ballets USA, and with Robert Joffrey Ballet, Dance Theater of Harlem, Harkness Ballet, and New York City Ballet.
10 See endnote 5, above.
11 Dixon-Gottschild, op. cit., pp.59-71
12 See Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. New York, NY: Crown Publishers, 2006. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously used the phrase "I have the audacity to believe" during his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in Oslo, Norway, on December 10, 1964
13 See Dixon-Gottschild, ibid., pp.143-159 for elucidation of these aesthetic values.
14 Brenda Shoshanna, “Religions of Kindness,” Shambhala Sun, July 2010, p.32 of pp.31-32,34}