Whose Choreography?:
Josephine Baker and the Question of (Dance) Authorship
Writing about Josephine Baker, one inevitably confronts questions of
agency. How much control did Baker have over her performances and
persona? Did her success derive from her capitulation to racist
stereotypes that insisted on black primitiveness, or from her ability to
play with and rattle those stereotypes? Was she object or subject? While
critics, biographers, and scholars have taken a range of positions on
these issues, today I want to take the occasion of the centennial of her
birth and this remarkable colloquium to approach these questions from a
slightly different angle by asking: Who should be considered the author,
or choreographer, of the dancing Baker performed? As Mae Henderson
rightly points out, "It was the dancing body that brought to Baker the
status of ... stardom."[1]
Yet the actual crafting of her dance practice
often gets short shrift. Paying heed to the composition and execution of
Baker's dance moves, I hope to show, has implications not only for the
ways we understand her agency and artistry, but also for the ways we
understand the operation of authorship in dance.
Here I should note that my interest in querying Baker's dance
authorship stems from my work
on Zora Neale Hurston's staging of black
diaspora folk dance in the 1930s. Recovering her contributions to
American dance and trying to account for her "invisibilization" from the
dance record provided a vivid case study in how the misrecognition of
black choreographic labor enabled white dancers to construct themselves
as innovative artists, and indeed as choreographers, working with black
"raw material."[2]
As I turn my attention to Baker, I want to continue
thinking through the racial politics of the ways we perceive and
categorize dance labor.
Today, questions of authorship are virtually impossible to address
without conjuring up poststructuralist claims about the death of the
author. As part of broader challenges to the stability of subjects and
the coherence of texts in the late 1960s, writers like Roland Barthes
and Michel Foucault productively complicated traditional notions of the
author, recasting it as a function of discourse that serves as a "means
of classification" and is "regulated by the culture in which it
circulates."[3]
Yet, as scholars in literary and legal studies have
pointed out in response, authorship continues to hold a good deal of
economic, legal, political—as well as aesthetic and cultural—capital.[4]
For raced and gendered subjects who have historically been denied the
privileges of authorship, moreover, matters of recognition and authorial
control cannot be so easily written off.[5]
Building on the insights of both the poststructuralists and those who
have argued for the continuing relevance of the author, this paper seeks
to further explore the ways in which authorship has been constructed
without losing sight of its very real ramifications and material stakes.
A parsing of choreographic influence, authority, and attribution
vis-à-vis Baker's dancing, I will suggest, problematizes conventional
models of authorship and helps flesh out the contours of her struggle
for self-determination. In particular, Baker points to the idea of
"bodily intelligence" as a way of confronting questions about the nature
and locus of her agency.
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