Who else could crystallize the social history and backstage story of Brown's journey but arts writer Brenda Dixon Gottschild, professor at Temple University and peerless dance scholar?
Audacious is both an unconventional "biohistory" of Brown - JB or Aunt Joan, as she is affectionately known - and a parallel history of African American dance culture.
In the last century, everything was not beautiful at the ballet for African Americans who wanted to work professionally. Dixon Gottschild deftly chronicles the disturbing dualities of Philadelphia as a racially progressive city and a city with entrenched racial divides. Against all odds, Brown and her brave contemporaries began training in the white-dominated dance world.
JB was born in 1931. Her career began by accident after a truck struck her as she was playing curb tag and injured her foot. As part of her rehabilitation, her mother enrolled her in a dance school, where the instructors immediately recognized her natural facility and "extraordinary, articulate feet." As a teenager, Brown came under the tutelage of three African American dance teachers, who were paving the way for blacks to pursue formal dance training in Philadelphia. The trio even broke the color line in one of the most influential ballet circles of New York - by sending students who could pass as white to take classes. The students would return and teach what they learned to darker-skinned students who would have been barred from such classes.
