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Daphne Ann Brooks,
"The End of the Line: Josephine Baker and the Politics of Black Women's Corporeal Comedy"
(page 4 of 6)
While I'll return in a moment to the topic of those perpetually
crossed eyes, I want to think a bit more about Baker's mischief at the
end of the line.
Figure 3
Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Karen Dalton remind us, for instance, that
Baker's moves were both dazzling and disorienting. They point out that
in her breakthrough role as a chorus line girl in Noble Sissle and Eubie
Blake's Shuffle Along, "audiences were bowled over by her
frenetic dancing and outrageous clowning, the visual equivalents of
malapropisms" (910). What, we might ask, does it mean to do the
"wrong" dance at the right time? What are the consequences of
making incongruous gestures within certain contexts?
Such questions should remind us of the points that Margo Jefferson
raises about how one of Josephine Baker's gifts was her ability to
navigate incongruities, to take "contradictory dances and make them one
or even show them operating at the same time." By mixing American
musical theater with blues and jazz phrasings and French music hall
aesthetics, Baker was able to create dissonant humor. This dissonance,
one might argue, emerged out of that end space.[10]
Figure 4
Josephine Baker's end of the line is not just spatial, but
temporal as well. We should recall that Baker's own Topsy incarnation in
the 1924 musical The Chocolate Dandies, Topsy Anna, showcased her
in full "blackface, wearing bright cotton smocks and clown shoes" and
provided her with the platform from which to distort time with her
lightning movements. The poet e.e. cummings, sounding like Charles
Dickens watching the African dancer Juba, would revel in the racist
spectacle of this "'tall, vital, incomparably fluid nightmare which
crossed its eyes and warped its limbs in a purely unearthly manner."
(Dalton and Gates, 911)
While cummings was representative of white spectators who fetishized
what they perceived as physical deviance in Baker's dance style, Baker's
choreography actually amounted to intelligent and inspired aesthetic
design. Anthea Kraut argues that "Baker inevitably seemed to forget the
steps she had been taught" but would wind up "performing her own
idiosyncratic moves in their place."[11] We might think of this gesture
as a kind of choreographic interpellation. By this I mean that Josephine
Baker inserted a kind of dance into a space where it was not
expected.
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