Everybody’s Fire Dance: Zora Neale Hurston and American Dance History

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.¹ 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.²

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.³ 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.

1. See Gottschild, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996). [↩]
2. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1942; reprint, New York: HarperPerennial, 1996), 281. [↩]
3. 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. [↩]