On the evening of Sunday, January 10, 1932, Zora Neale Hurston premiered her folk revue The Great Day at the John Golden Theatre in New York. Based on four years of anthropological research in the southern United States and the Bahamas, the concert traced a day in the life of a railroad work camp, from daybreak until dusk, with a West Indian Fire Dance serving as the climactic finale. As curtain time approached, Charlotte Osgood Mason, Hurston's vigilant white patron who had financed much of her research and loaned additional funds for the concert, sent a communiqué to Alain Locke, the renowned black intellectual who frequently served as a liaison between Mason and Hurston. Voicing her fears about the imminent public exposure of Hurston's stage material, Mason told Locke, "If it is at all good, there will be lots of people [who] want to make money out of it." She promptly charged Locke with the somewhat improbable task of insulating the performance and performers from the advances of these prospective profit-seekers. "Do try to protect the material from being exploited and stolen," she instructed him. "Keep your eyes open over the audience. Warn actors not to promise to do these things for any other producer."[1] While Mason's anxieties cannot be fully understood apart from her own proprietary claims over Hurston's work or her antitheatrical bias—issues I discuss elsewhere—her comments are pertinent here because they proved surprisingly prophetic.[2] For, if the success of The Great Day is to be measured by the amount of interest it generated from outside parties, then the production must be considered a hit: In the months and years that ensued, Hurston's concert material in general, and the Bahamian Fire Dance in particular, were in high demand.

Between January 1932 and September 1936, the list of artists who pursued Hurston's Fire Dance in some capacity includes the white jazz dancer Mura Dehn, the white Neighborhood Playhouse director Irene Lewisohn, the African American choral director Hall Johnson, white ballroom-dance icon Irene Castle, and celebrated white modern-dance artists Doris Humphrey, Ruth St. Denis, and Helen Tamiris. Their pursuits resulted in a succession of stage reproductions of the Fire Dance in a range of venues during that period, from Broadway to the concert hall to the nightclub. To be sure, these subsequent theatrical enactments of the Fire Dance were for the most part bilateral undertakings based on willful cooperation and not the kind of outright theft that Mason so dreaded. Still, the fact that a dance form originally staged by Hurston circulated so widely in the 1930s, combined with the fact that to date, Hurston's contributions to the field of American dance remain almost entirely unacknowledged and unexplored despite her canonization in the field of literary studies, begs the question of exploitation with respect to the transmission of the Fire Dance. Differently stated, given the number of white artists who made use of this black diasporic folk dance, Hurston's erasure from the dance record seems a classic case of "invisibilization," the term coined by scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild to describe the systematic denial and miscrediting of the African influences on Euro-American performance practices.[3] It is a case that therefore demands attention to the hierarchical relations and power imbalances that governed the diffusion of the Fire Dance. While on the one hand, then, this essay will gesture at the significance of Hurston's staging of black diasporic folk dance to American dance and performance history, on the other hand, I hope to illuminate how the racial politics of categorization and artistic credit enabled the elision of Hurston's name from extant chronicles of American dance.

Before tackling the issues of cultural theft and invisibilization, it is worth briefly sketching the details of Hurston's relationship to the Fire Dance. Perhaps the most salient question here is to what extent Hurston can be considered a choreographer with regard to this folk idiom. Hurston first came across the dynamic Fire Dance in southern Florida, where it was performed by West Indian migrant workers; she subsequently traveled to the Bahamas to find out more about it. Actually a cycle of three dances—the Jumping Dance, Ring Play, and the Crow Dance—the Fire Dance involved a circle of players who took turns in the center performing various steps according to the rhythms of an accompanying drum, as well as a solo imitation of a buzzard. During her visit to Nassau, Hurston not only "took pains" to learn the movements herself, as she reports in her autobiography, but she also took three reels of film footage of the dancing, which she sent back to New York to play for Charlotte Mason—footage that has, unfortunately, since been lost.[4]

Obviously, Hurston did not invent the dance; nor did she refashion the individual folk forms by fusing them with other stylistic idioms, as did her contemporary Katherine Dunham. Yet by no means did the Fire Dance automatically issue forth from the group of sixteen dancers she assembled for her concert, some but not all of whom were native Bahamians, for Hurston trained this troupe, using her film footage to refresh her memory as she rehearsed them. While it is clear, then, that Hurston did not function as a choreographer in the conventional sense of originating dance moves or enacting significant revisions to pre-existing forms—and it should be noted that the designation "choreographer" was only just emerging in the field of white modern dance in the 1930s—it is equally clear that Hurston alone initiated and oversaw the transformation of the Fire Dance from its West Indian vernacular incarnation to its theatrical rendering on the New York stage.

In addition, as I explain elsewhere, Hurston's unique treatment of the Fire Dance—the way she incorporated the idiom into her concert—substantially influenced the meanings that accompanied the movement. In particular, I argue, Hurston's staging of a West Indian folk dance cycle within a program of southern-US black folkways constituted an important turning point in the history of stage representations of black vernacular dance idioms, helping to re-orient those idioms away from the racist legacy of blackface minstrelsy and toward an understanding of how African-derived expressive forms arrive on American shores.[5] Attention to her careful framing of the Bahamian Fire Dance thus compels us to problematize the tendency in Hurston scholarship to figure her as the symbol of an "authentic" folk past, for such reification obscures the complexity of the process by which Hurston mediated and orchestrated vernacular practices for exposition in the theatrical marketplace.

There is no question, however, that a powerful discourse of authenticity surrounding Hurston's work served to obscure the labor she undertook to prepare the Fire Dance for stage presentation. Hurston herself contributed to this discourse, proclaiming repeatedly that hers was a "concert in the raw," a "natural" and "untampered-with" representation of black folk life.[6] While I maintain that her assertions are best understood as a critique of the kinds of representations of black vernacular styles that were prevalent on Broadway and in concert halls in the early twentieth century, as well as an effective marketing strategy, reviewers of The Great Day took up this rhetoric of "genuineness," extolling the revue with comments like, "If there is such a thing as natural and unpremeditated art, here it seemed exemplified, by every one concerned."[7] Still, Hurston's staging of black vernacular culture was the locus of multiple, overlapping discourses of authenticity; contemporary assumptions about the artlessness and innate simplicity of the folk converged with assumptions about the hyper-performativity of Hurston's own black body to render her authorship—her creative efforts and directorial skill—doubly invisible. If this overdetermined sense of authenticity impeded recognition of Hurston's artistry when she herself produced the folk material, it posed even greater problems when this material circulated outside of her provenance.

The earliest instance of what could be considered cultural expropriation occurred a year after the New York debut of Hurston's folk revue. On March 1, 1933, Hall Johnson's musical Run, Little Chillun!, which told the story of religious conflict in a rural black community, opened on Broadway, where it ran for a full four months in the midst of the Depression. The first act of this "Negro folk drama" culminated in an open-air "orgiastic" dance scene that was uncannily similar to the climactic dance finale of The Great Day.[8] In fact, the sensational dance number in Johnson's musical was performed by several of the very same Bahamian dancers whom Hurston had employed, although they were now cast as a cultlike primitive group called the "New Day Pilgrims." According to the Run, Little Chillun! program, the show's dances were "arranged" by the white dance choreographer Doris Humphrey, considered one of the founders of American modern dance. While a full account of how the West Indian dancers wound up in Hall Johnson's hit musical is beyond the purview of this essay, suffice it to say that Hurston received notice in Florida that Johnson was "messing with [her] stuff" and that Johnson later expressed contrition to Alain Locke about "the sources he has used and not given credit to."[9] The relevant issue here, however, is how Hurston's and Humphrey's arrangements of the same West Indian folk material received such different treatment.

Strikingly, many of those who witnessed the performance of Run, Little Chillun! registered the connection between its dance sequence and Hurston's earlier concerts. In his review of the musical, for example, New York Times dance critic John Martin explicitly invoked Hurston's presentation of "native dances" as a point of comparison and even expressed "regret that the material selected for 'Run Little Chillun' is not up to the same standard."[10] Yet, despite favoring Hurston's version, Martin went on to heap praise on Doris Humphrey, declaring her undertaking "a thoroughly workmanlike job, but one for which she is likely to get less credit than is her due." His concern that Humphrey's achievement would not be properly appreciated—ironic given the way history played out—stemmed from the specific criteria governing theatrical presentations of the folk. The "wild revel" that closed the first act, he explained,

owes to Miss Humphrey the fact that it looks as if it had not been staged at all, which is the highest praise for any sort of folk dancing across a set of footlights. It has, however, been pruned extensively and given a rude form, without which it would presumably go on indefinitely until the dancers dropped from exhaustion.

Of course, Hurston faced identical considerations, and it is worth noting that not a single review of The Great Day complained about the lengthiness of the Fire Dance section in her concert. But Martin went further than attributing the seeming unaffectedness of the Bahamians' dancing to Humphrey; he also credited her with choosing the very style of dance featured in Johnson's drama, though Humphrey herself readily acknowledged that the dance material had already been selected when Johnson brought her on board. "Miss Humphrey," Martin writes,

has apparently recognized the fact that Negroes cannot be expected to do dances designed for another race, and consequently she has moved with great caution in creating for them. The result . . . bears added testimony to the breadth of Miss Humphrey's capabilities and the excellence of her theatrical judgment.

Martin's evaluative logic here is rooted in the double standard that haunted African American dance artists throughout the first half of the twentieth century: Any dancing that departed from jazz, tap, or folk styles was deemed imitative and inferior, yet dancing that stayed within the realm of the vernacular was perceived as raw, instinctive expression rather than cultivated art. A white artist's engagement with black folk idioms, however, launched an appreciation of both her "excellence of . . . theatrical judgment" and her choreographic mastery—for Martin effectively ascribes to Humphrey all the tasks of a choreographer—not to mention the concomitant worry that her labor would go unrecognized. It would seem, then, that it was Hurston's blackness, her racial "authenticity," that made it possible for Martin to acknowledge the success of her preceding concert while disavowing her artistry, and that in turn allowed him to let a white woman's influence on the dancing in Run, Little Chillun! eclipse a black woman's. Because of Martin's own status as an authority on American theatre dance, moreover, his distorted allocation of choreographic credit ultimately became part of the received historical record.[11]

Hall Johnson's annexation of the Bahamian dancers thus resulted in a sort of double misrepresentation of Hurston's stage material:[12] First, the dances that she had researched, learned, filmed, and taught to an assembled troupe of performers were severed from the diasporic narrative context in which she placed them and made instead to signify a fictitious pagan practice; and second, credit for those dances now went to Doris Humphrey, whose growing prominence in the dance world and whose racial distance from the represented folk legitimized the attribution.

I do not want to suggest, however, that the transmission of the Bahamian Fire Dance amounted to a zero sum game in which Hurston invariably lost out, for, even as the West Indian folk dance continued to be disseminated without her sanction or control, she continued to strive to make a name for herself with it. In fact, just four days after Run, Little Chillun! opened on Broadway, Hurston was busy pursuing a collaboration with Ruth St. Denis, another eminent white artist and pioneer of early modern dance in this country, best known for her danced interpretations of "Oriental" subjects. "Zora Hurston Dances for Ruth St. Denis," ran the headline in the weekly paper of Florida's Rollins College.[13] The "special half hour performance of folk songs and dances" was the result largely of coincidence: It was merely by chance that these two women's paths crossed in Winter Park in early March of 1933. Apparently, several Rollins College officials, having just backed a production of Hurston's concert, decided that her folk material would be of interest to St. Denis, who was in town to deliver a lecture-dance recital on "The Philosophy and Dance of the Orient," and accordingly arranged for the private performance. Their supposition proved correct, for St. Denis was reportedly "enthusiastic about the Bahama dances."

St. Denis was so enthusiastic, in fact, that she was not content merely to be a spectator to the dances but decided that she should perform alongside them. As Hurston revealed in a letter to Alain Locke dated March 20, 1933, "Ruth St. Denis was here and saw us, and wishes to appear with us as a soloist-dancer."[14] Evidently, then, following the brief performance, an exchange took place between Hurston and St. Denis in which St. Denis presumably praised Hurston for her dance work and suggested that the two might collaborate on a future presentation. What exactly St. Denis had in mind—how a solo performance by a white modern dancer could possibly have been integrated into Hurston's program of Floridian and Bahamian folkways—can only be a matter of speculation. Perhaps realizing the implausibility of St. Denis's proposition, Hurston nonetheless responded with undaunted pragmatism, telling Locke, "I know its [sic] novelty-publicity seeking but it will help us never-the-less."

With this comment, Hurston provides valuable insight into how she construed outside interest in her material, in what serves as an important counterpoint to the perspective of Charlotte Mason. Most notably, her statement demonstrates a savvy awareness of the politics of interracial collaboration and of the cultural capital that her "primitive" dance idioms afforded her. Assuring Locke that she is not naïve enough to think that anything other than self-interest lay behind St. Denis's proposal, Hurston intimates that the real appeal of her material for white artists was the novelty of associating with black dancing bodies, rather than the prospect of exploring the contours and nuances of black folk culture. Yet, instead of bemoaning St. Denis's opportunistic motives, Hurston sees the white woman's attention as a chance to advance her own publicity-seeking cause. For had St. Denis's proposed stage alliance actually come to pass—and the archive provides no indication of why it did not—Hurston's standing as a dance authority would certainly have been bolstered, perhaps enough to prevent her erasure from the dance record. At any rate, both St. Denis, who by her own account was "suffering a complete eclipse" in the field of dance, and Hurston, experiencing an upsurge in her career, were poised to profit from a collaborative venture.[15] Of course the power imbalance between the two women cannot be disregarded; the fact that St. Denis was entitled to a free-of-charge showing of Hurston's folk material testifies to the asymmetry of their relative positions. Still, Hurston's determination to capitalize on St. Denis's solicitation refutes any notion that white trafficking in black vernacular dance was exploitative in any unidirectional sense or to the benefit of any single party.

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]