Anthea Kraut, "Everybody's Fire Dance: Zora Neale Hurston and American Dance History"
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Indispensably, however, it was only when Hurston could publicly retain her affiliation with the West Indian idioms that she stood to gain personally from such transactions. And as the Bahamian dancers continued to perform the Fire Dance in various locales around New York and to accrue new affiliations with additional white dancers, Hurston's original association with the troupe gradually faded. Yet what John Martin's response to Run, Little Chillun! demonstrates is that affiliation alone was not enough to confer full artistic credit on Hurston, for a mantle of racial authenticity rendered much of her choreographic labor illegible. Returning then to Mason's warning to Locke about the threat of exploitation, I want to suggest that the real problem lay neither in the public exposure of black vernacular forms, nor in the commercial appetites of outside producers, nor even in the widespread dissemination of those expressive forms. Rather, as I hope I have shown, the foremost danger to Hurston's folk material came from the underlying assumptions that attended enactments of black folk dance and shaped spectators' disparate perceptions of white and black dancing bodies. In effect, it was the operation of racialized notions of artistry and authenticity—notions that insisted on essential, immutable differences between black folk dancers and white modern artists—that not only "invisibilized" Hurston's choreographic contributions but also limited her ability to retain control over productions of the West Indian dance and therefore her ability to assign her own meanings to the idiom. The case of Hurston's Fire Dance thus exemplifies cultural critic Robin Kelley's observation that terms like "folk" and "authentic" are in actuality "socially constructed categories that have something to do with the reproduction of race, class, and gender hierarchies and the policing of the boundaries of modernism."[16] For if the extensive circulation of the Bahamian number reveals how mutually imbricated black folk dance and white modern dance were in the 1930s, it equally demonstrates how rigorously the boundaries between those two categories were policed.

Endnotes

1. Charlotte Mason's notes to Alain Locke, 10 January 1932, Alain Locke Papers, Manuscript Division, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University [hereafter ALP]. [Return to text]

2. I address the complex effects of Charlotte Mason's patronage on Hurston's concert undertaking in my current book project, Choreographing Authenticity: Zora Neale Hurston and the Staging of Black Folk Dance. For a fuller account of the relationship between Hurston and Mason, see Robert Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), Valerie Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston (New York: Scribner, 2003), and Carla Kaplan, ed., Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (New York: Doubleday, 2002). [Return to text]

3. See Gottschild, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996). [Return to text]

4. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1942; reprint, New York: HarperPerennial, 1996), 281. [Return to text]

5. See Kraut, "Re-scripting Origins: Zora Neale Hurston's Staging of Black Vernacular Dance," in emBODYing Liberation: The Black Body in American Dance, ed. Alison Goeller and Dorothea Fischer-Hornung (Hamburg: Lit-Verlag, 2001), 59–77; and Kraut, "Between Primitivism and Diaspora: The Dance Performances of Josephine Baker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Katherine Dunham," Theatre Journal 55.3 (October 2003): 433–450. [Return to text]

6. Hurston to Mason, 15 October 1931, ALP; Hurston to Edwin Grover, 8 June 1932, Department of Special Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida. [Return to text]

7. Arthur Ruhl, "Second Nights," New York Herald Tribune, 17 January 1932, 11. [Return to text]

8. Program, Run, Little Chillun!, 1 March 1933, Lyric Theatre, Programs and Playbills, in the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. A number of reviews characterized the show's dancing as "orgiastic." See, for example, Carl Carmer, "'Run, Little Chillun!' A Critical Review," Opportunity 11.4 (April 1933): 13. [Return to text]

9. Hurston to Mason, 11 August 1932; Locke to Mason, 18 April 1933, ALP. [Return to text]

10. Martin, "The Dance: A Negro Play," New York Times, 12 March 1933, sec. X, 7. [Return to text]

11. The chronology provided at the end of Marcia Siegel's biography of Humphrey, for example, reports that she choreographed Run, Little Chillun!. See Marcia Siegel, Days on Earth: The Dance of Doris Humphrey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 294. Joe Nash, too, states that Humphrey "created" the dances in Johnson's musical. See his "Pioneers in Negro Concert Dance: 1931 to 1937," in The Black Tradition in American Modern Dance, ed. Gerald Myers (Durham, NC: American Dance Festival, 1988), 12. The chronology that Richard Long provides in his The Black Tradition in American Dance (New York: Prion, 1987), which is singular for its inclusion of Hurston's Great Day concert, also lists Humphrey as choreographer of Run, Little Chillun!, although Long makes the crucial addition "with Bahama Dancers" (181). [Return to text]

12. I borrow the phrase "double misrepresentation" from Marta Savigliano, Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995). [Return to text]

13. Rollins Sandspur, 8 March 1933, 2. [Return to text]

14. Hurston to Locke, 20 March 1933, ALP. [Return to text]

15. Ruth St. Denis, Ruth St. Denis, an Unfinished Life; an Autobiography (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939), 331. [Return to text]

16. Robin D. G. Kelley, "Notes on Deconstructing 'The Folk,'" American Historical Review 97.5 (December 1992): 1402. [Return to text]