Anthea Kraut, "Whose Choreography?: Josephine Baker and the Question of (Dance) Authorship" (page 5 of 5)

Choreographic Signatures and "Bodily Intelligence"

However much Baker responds to and draws inspiration from the community, what perhaps stands out most about her performance in this film excerpt is that it is full of her signature moves: the shimmy; the classic Charleston "monkey knees," in which her hands crisscross her splaying knees; the standing struts, in which she bends one knee at a time and swings her arms in opposition; and the crow or chicken pose, in which she freezes in a turned-in plié with her elbows bent and her hands pointed out. Baker did not invent these moves, but the frequent use of the term "signature" to describe them—in addition to others, like her eye-crossing, fingertip flexing, and placement of her finger on the crown of her head—establishes an affiliation between her and them that approximates an assertion of authorship.[28] In other words, by mastering certain dance steps and gestures, performing them in a distinctive style, and enacting them repeatedly in a variety of venues, Baker implicitly claimed them as her own. Given the debt her dancing owed to black vernacular traditions, Baker's success in developing what we might think of as corporeal autographs—a sort of bodily writing of her name in and through performance—arguably amounted to another kind "wresting of the composing voice," this time away from the largely uncredited community of dancers who influenced her.

To be sure, while Baker's repertoire was based on African-American vernacular idioms and her style was rooted in an Africanist aesthetic tradition, it was the idiosyncrasy of her dancing that set her apart. Commentators, struggling for the right words to characterize her physicality, pointed frequently to the energy, eccentricity, and humor of her moving body. As one London critic wrote, "any inch of her body, an elbow-tip, or a shoulder-blade, is more sentient and expressive than most people's countenances."[29] Even in the flattened medium of film, Baker's kinetic articulateness and fluidity are unmistakable. One minute she is kicking her legs, swinging her arms, swaying her hips, tilting her head, smiling, and rolling her eyes all at once, and the next she abruptly switches directions, drops into a deep lunge, and bounds across the floor. These "high-affect juxtapositions"[30] and dynamic facial expressions contributed to the comedic tenor of her dancing—what the French critic André Rouverge described as "the genius to let the body make fun of itself."[31] Whosever moves she was performing, Baker stamped her dancing with an exuberance and zaniness that became her personal calling cards and enabled her to reap some of the chief rewards of authorship: recognition and financial remuneration.

Well aware of the conditions of her success, Baker once told an interviewer, "It is the intelligence of my body that I have exploited, and that is what has turned me into an international star."[32] This remark speaks volumes about the contingencies and consequences of choreographic authorship for Baker. From a position of relative powerlessness, Baker managed to mine the one form of capital she possessed in abundance—what she terms her bodily intelligence. The phrase encapsulates two things simultaneously: Baker's refusal of the raced and gendered hierarchies prescribed for her, and her embrace of a different model of artistic authority. First, by ascribing an intelligence to her body, Baker confounds mind/body divisions that were supposed to relegate her to the position of the docile/primitivist body reflexively executing moves preordained by agentive/rational choreographers. And second, she shifts the locus of agency to her own thinking body; it was, she suggests, her corporeal aptitude for mimicry, improvisation, humor, and stylistic individuality—and her ability to judge when to deploy each of these skills—that authored her rise from uncredited chorus girl to global celebrity.

Finally, then, the question of who should be considered the choreographer of the dancing Baker performed can have no single or definitive answer. In arguing for an understanding of Baker's dancing as an act of creative artistry that allowed her to usurp a good portion of the author function, I am not proposing that she should be considered a genius choreographer who deserves sole credit for fashioning the movement performances that made her famous. My purpose is not to dismiss the craft and invention of those who directed, produced, designed for, and helped shape her dancing. Rather, my point is that the nature of her dancing forces us to contemplate questions of dance authorship; it is the fact that she elicits the question "whose choreography?" in the first place that is significant. If Baker's improvisatory resistance, development of signature moves, and bodily intelligence disrupt the primacy of the (historically white and typically male) choreographer, they also encourage us to approach authorship as a site where contests for power are waged both discursively and corporeally.

Endnotes

1. Mae G. Henderson, "Josephine Baker and La Revue Nègre: From Ethnography to Performance," Text and Performance Quarterly 23, no. 2 (April 2003): 119. [Return to text]

2. I borrow the term "invisibilization" from Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996). [Return to text]

3. Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?" in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 123; Roland Barthes, "Death of the Author," in Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill, 1977). [Return to text]

4. See, for example, Peggy Kamuf, Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi, ed., The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994); and Rosemary J. Coombe, The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). [Return to text]

5. See Betsy Erkilla, "Ethnicity, Literary Theory, and the Grounds of Resistance," American Quarterly 47, no. 4 (1995): 563-594; and Cheryl Walker, "Feminist Literary Criticism and the Author," Critical Inquiry 16 (Spring 1990): 551-71. Barbara Christian also notes how "the race for theory" has functioned to "silence" "people of color, feminists, radical critics, creative writers, who have struggled for much longer than a decade to make their voices, their various voices, heard, and for whom literature is not an occasion for discourse among critics but is necessary nourishment for their people and one way by which they come to understand their lives better" ("The Race for Theory," in Within the Circle, ed. Angela Mitchell [Durham: Duke University Press, 1994], 350). [Return to text]

6. Josephine Baker and Jo Bouillon, Josephine (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 101. [Return to text]

7. Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 58; Dixon Gottschild, 70. [Return to text]

8. Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: Schirmer Books, 1968), 134. [Return to text]

9. Noble Sissle, "How Jo Baker Got Started," Negro Digest 10 (August 1951): 17, 18. [Return to text]

10. Baker and Bouillon, 51-52. [Return to text]

11. See Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: African-American Women Performers and the Making of the Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming). [Return to text]

12. Carolyn Abbate, "Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women,' in Ruth A. Solie, ed. Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 254. [Return to text]

13. Abbate, "Opera," 234, 235; Sally Banes, Dancing Women: Female Bodies on Stage (New York: Routledge, 1998), 9-10. [Return to text]

14. As Felicia McCarren writes in Dancing Machines: Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), "Ironically, dancing as if possessed permits Baker some ownership of her image, the possession of herself" (174). [Return to text]

15. As Baker relates in her memoirs, "I had become the star of the chorus, much to the disgust of my fellow dancers. 'Monkey' they called me, and did what they could to make my life backstage miserable.... One of the dancers even tripped me up one night as we were making our entrance, but I managed to do such a comical nose dive that I received more applause than ever. They didn't try that again!" (Baker and Bouillon, 29). [Return to text]

16. Patrick O'Connor and Bryan Hammond, Josephine Baker (London: Little, Brown and Company, 1988), 9. [Return to text]

17. Jean-Claude Baker and Chris Chase, Josephine: The Hungry Heart (New York: Random House, 1993), 61, 68; O'Connor and Hammond, 11. [Return to text]

18. Stearns, 129-30. [Return to text]

19. Baker and Chase, 48. [Return to text]

20. Stearns, 130. [Return to text]

21. Zora Neale Hurston, "Characteristics of Negro Expression," reprinted in Hurston, The Sanctified Church (Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1981), 58. [Return to text]

22. Woodmansee and Jaszi, 3; Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1985). [Return to text]

23. Baker and Chase, 75. In Remembering Josephine (Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1976), Stephen Papich also cites a number of male performers whom Baker imitated, including a comedy drag performer, Benny (of Bert and Benny), who performed with Bessie Smith, and Ivan Browning, a performer who collaborated with Eubie Blake. [Return to text]

24. See, for example: Rose; Henderson; Carole Sweeney, From Fetish to Subject: Race, Modernism, and Primitivism, 1919-1935 (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 2004); Michael Borshuk, "An Intelligence of the Body: Disruptive Parody through Dance in the Early Performances of Josephine Baker," emBODYing Liberation: The Black Body in American Dance, ed. Dorothea Fischer-Hornung and Alison D. Goeller (Hamburg: Lit Verlag, 2001); and Wendy Martin, "'Remembering the Jungle': Josephine Baker and Modernist Parody," in Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism, ed. Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 310-25. [Return to text]

25. Jacqui Malone, Steppin' on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 34. [Return to text]

26. Jonathan David Jackson, "Improvisation in African-American Vernacular Dancing," Dance Research Journal 33, no. 2 (winter 2001/02): 44. [Return to text]

27. There is no choreographer credited on the film. As Baker recalled, when it was time for her to go on, the director shouted, "'It's time for your belly dance.' Because naturally Papitou danced exactly like Mademoiselle Baker of the Folies. 'That's one of the reasons people will come to see the film,' Pepito gently explained." (Baker and Bouillon, 72). [Return to text]

28. Peggy Kamuf defines a "signature piece" as "a device repeatedly associated with a subject" (3). [Return to text]

29. Hubert Griffith, "Josephine Baker at Home," London Observer Oct. 8, 1933, Harvard Theater Collection. [Return to text]

30. Brenda Dixon Gottschild identifies "high-affect juxtaposition"—the "mood, attitude, or movement breaks" that contrast the smooth transitions of European aesthetic codes—as one of the core principles of an Africanist aesthetic (14-15). [Return to text]

31. Quoted in O'Connor and Hammond, 42. [Return to text]

32. Quoted in O'Connor and Hammond, 90. [Return to text]

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