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.

Male Choreography and Improvisatory Resistance

The most immediate answer to the question of who authored Baker's dance performances is the various male choreographers who were hired to devise and set routines for her. From her early days on vaudeville and Broadway, through her 1925 Paris debut with La Revue Nègre, through her star turns at the Folies Bergère and Casino de Paris, through her 1936 appearance in the Ziegfeld Follies, Baker worked with a string of African-American and European male dance directors, including Noble Sissle, Louis Douglas, Jacques Charles, Joe Alex, Earl Leslie, and George Balanchine. These men were not necessarily assigned the label "choreographer," as that term had yet to come into common currency, but programs and publicity materials officially credited them with staging, arranging, or directing the dances enacted by Baker. Although in the early 20th century white female artists like Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis and black female artists like Ada Overton Walker and Edna Guy were beginning to compose and produce their own dance works, choreography at that time was undeniably a male-dominated profession. Baker, certainly, was never formally granted the authority to create dances for herself or anyone else. Her complaint about the Ziegfeld Follies that she was "nothing but a body to be exhibited in various stages of undress," provides a sense of how frustrating this lack of creative power could be.[6]

It is in light of this gendered division of labor that Baker's notorious improvisations must be seen. Repeatedly, Baker "forgot" the steps that had been taught to her by male choreographers and erupted instead into a display of her own offbeat moves.[7] As a chorus girl in Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake's touring production of Shuffle Along, Baker began doing some "crazy things," in Blake's description: "no routine—just mugging, crossing her eyes, tripping, getting out of step and catching up."[8] In a 1951 article, Sissle recalled coaching Baker to perform certain steps in a particular order and then helplessly watched backstage as she replaced them with her "emotionally inspired antics." "Once," he recalled,

when she saw me scowling at her when she came off in the wing, she asked, "Did I do the steps right that time?" And I would remind Josephine that she had done something new. She would open her big beautiful eyes, put her hands over her mouth and start giggling. Then she'd say, "I'm sorry Mr. Sissle, but I'll remember next time."[9]

According to Baker, a similar phenomenon occurred during the 1925 Paris debut of La Revue Nègre. "Driven by dark forces I didn't recognize," she wrote, "I improvised, crazed by the music, the overheated theater filled to the bursting point, the scorching eye of the spotlights. Even my teeth and eyes burned with fever.... I felt as intoxicated as when, on the day I arrived in Paris, [Louis] Douglas had given me a glass of anisette."[10]

Adopting the rhetoric of involuntariness and invoking metaphors of inebriation, Baker implies that she could not be held accountable for her body's actions. Crucially, this disavowal of responsibility served Baker's purposes in several ways. Casting her dancing as unpremeditated and uncontrollable, Baker justifies her "improvisatory disobedience," to quote scholar Jayna Brown.[11] In the process, she gives herself license to "wrest the composing voice" away from the nominal creator.[12] As Carolyn Abbate has argued about opera, and Sally Banes has written about ballet, the fact that these embodied genres literally depend on performers to bring them to life effectively disperses the "locus of creation" and gives female performers a degree of agency, especially in terms of how they (re)interpret the historically male composer or choreographer's part.[13] In Baker's case, this usurpation also played right into primitivist stereotypes that branded all black expression as unthinking and instinctual, the product of a timeless African barbarism lurking just beneath the skin. Succumbing to "dark forces" rather than transgressing authority, Baker appropriated a modicum of autonomy without threatening race and gender hierarchies.[14] Paradoxically, then, Baker's rhetorical disavowal of control over her body allowed her to seize a share of the author-function with her body.

These habitual improvisations proved financially expedient as well. Each time she departed from or expanded upon the choreography, Baker not only differentiated herself from the official choreographer, she also monopolized the attention of theatergoers, also known as scene stealing. While her upstaging stunts as a chorus girl in Shuffle Along may have alienated her fellow cast members, they also became an audience draw.[15] Customers reportedly came to the box office asking explicitly, "Is this the show with the cross-eyed chorus girl in it?"[16] As a result, as her biographers have documented, Baker rose from being an unnamed member of the chorus to winning a separate credit as "That Comedy Chorus Girl." Correspondingly, by the time she joined Sissle and Blake's In Bamville (eventually renamed The Chocolate Dandies) in 1924, her salary had climbed from $30 a week to $125 a week, and she was billed as "the highest-paid chorus girl in the world."[17] In the economy of the theater, disruptive improvisations commanded attention, attention translated into recognition, and recognition translated into monetary capital.

Choreography in a Black Vernacular Vein

Of course, Baker's kinetic outbursts and chorus-girl clowning were not the spontaneous eruptions they seemed. Quite the contrary, by the 1920s, they had become something of a choreographic convention in black musical revues. In the 1913 production Darktown Follies, as Marshall and Jean Stearns point out in their indispensable book Jazz Dance, Ethel Williams, "pretending to be out of breath" and unable to keep up with the rest of the chorus line, faked "crazy steps that brought down the house."[18] Though Baker may not have been aware of Williams's high jinks, her time on the vaudeville touring circuit brought her into contact with another star chorus girl named Mama Dinks. According to Broadway performer Maude Russell, Baker's act just prior to joining the Shuffle Along cast owed much to Mama Dinks. Indeed, Russell's description of Dinks could easily double as a description of Baker's dancing: "All her mouth was gold, she had funny legs, she could bend them way back, she did those antics, walkin' like a chicken, lookin' cross-eyed, and then she'd go offstage bowlegged with her butt stuck out."[19]

The fact that Baker's chorus line ad libs were, in the Stearnses' words, "the perennial gag of the chorine who just cannot keep in step," and that a number of her moves could be traced directly to an earlier female performer, offers another way of understanding the authorship of Baker's dancing.[20] Even as she resisted one model of authorship—that of the (male) choreographer inventing and arranging steps to be faithfully executed by (female) dancers—Baker was, I want to suggest, actively participating in a black vernacular choreographic tradition, one in which mimicry and improvisation counted as compositional methods.

Approaching Baker's performative tendencies as a kind of choreography in their own right requires challenging certain assumptions that underpin Eurocentric ideas about authorship, especially notions about what constitutes originality and about the boundaries between composition and improvisation. While we are accustomed to defining authorship as origination—as the creation of the new—there are other ways of conceptualizing originality. As Zora Neale Hurston wrote in her 1934 essay "Characteristics of Negro Expression":

It is obvious that to get back to original sources is much too difficult for any group to claim very much as a certainty. What we really mean by originality is the modification of ideas. The most ardent admirer of the great Shakespeare cannot claim first source even for him. It is his treatment of the borrowed material.[21]

More recent scholars have similarly exposed the notion that originality excludes "variation ... imitation, or ... adaptation" as the product of "modernist myth."[22]

Under Hurston's definition of originality as the re-interpretation of existing idioms, Baker's mimicry certainly qualifies as a creative act. An assiduous student of other performers' routines, Baker was known to replicate the moves and tricks she observed, both onstage and off. Johnny Hudgins, a comic pantomimist who co-starred with Baker in The Chocolate Dandies, recalled that watching her was "like seeing [himself] in a mirror": no matter how he changed his act, Baker managed to work up an imitation by the next night.[23] Mimicry played a more generalized role in Baker's performance, too, surfacing in animal dances like her chicken-inspired head motions. It was also a key factor in what many scholars have argued was Baker's parodic rendering of primitivist stereotypes.[24] Performing exaggerated versions of white ideas about African savagery, Baker simultaneously reproduced and subverted the very images she was playing up.

Just as we need to rethink the opposition between mimicry and originality, we also need to deconstruct the dichotomy between the choreographed and the improvised. While recent dance scholarship has begun to interrogate the demarcations between choreography as premeditated and intentional on the one hand and improvisation as impromptu and haphazard on the other, observers of African-American expressive practices have long recognized improvisation as a vital compositional technique that is neither unplanned nor undisciplined. As Jacqui Malone has written, "Contrary to popular opinion, black idiomatic dancers always improvise with intent ... with the success of the improvisations depending on the mastery of the nuances and the elements of craft called for by the idiom."[25] Jonathan David Jackson has likewise asserted that improvisation in black vernacular dancing "means the creative structuring, or the choreographing, of human movement in the moment of ritual performance."[26]

Jackson also depicts improvisation as contingent on the interplay between "individuation," in which a dancer establishes "a unique identity according to her or his own physical capabilities, personal style, and capacity for invention," and "ritualization," in which performers forge community through the collective organization of movement. Baker's "creative structuring" of movement depended on just such a give-and-take dynamic. In the moment of performance, she unfailingly articulated an individual style even as she drew on communally generated dance steps and aesthetic codes.

A sequence from the 1927 film La Sirène des Tropiques serves to illustrate. In a firelit scene that situates her character Papitou in a "tropical" Antillean setting, Baker dances inside a circle of other "natives," accompanied by a small group of musicians. Unlike her solo performances caught on film, here Baker interacts with two other dancers. After watching a male dancer shake his hips and rear end, Baker jumps into the circle with him, and the two shimmy together, circle each other, and perform movements that alternately echo, contrast, and gently mock one another. Eventually, another woman dancer enters the circle, and Baker claps for the two. Throughout, the assembled crowd urges the dancers on by clapping, shouting, singing, and swaying to the rhythm. The creation of choreography here is simultaneously an individual and communal affair.[27]

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]