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

There is no question, however, that a powerful discourse of authenticity surrounding Hurston’s work served to obscure the labor she undertook to prepare the Fire Dance for stage presentation. Hurston herself contributed to this discourse, proclaiming repeatedly that hers was a “concert in the raw,” a “natural” and “untampered-with” representation of black folk life.¹ While I maintain that her assertions are best understood as a critique of the kinds of representations of black vernacular styles that were prevalent on Broadway and in concert halls in the early twentieth century, as well as an effective marketing strategy, reviewers of The Great Day took up this rhetoric of “genuineness,” extolling the revue with comments like, “If there is such a thing as natural and unpremeditated art, here it seemed exemplified, by every one concerned.”² Still, Hurston’s staging of black vernacular culture was the locus of multiple, overlapping discourses of authenticity; contemporary assumptions about the artlessness and innate simplicity of the folk converged with assumptions about the hyper-performativity of Hurston’s own black body to render her authorship—her creative efforts and directorial skill—doubly invisible. If this overdetermined sense of authenticity impeded recognition of Hurston’s artistry when she herself produced the folk material, it posed even greater problems when this material circulated outside of her provenance.

The earliest instance of what could be considered cultural expropriation occurred a year after the New York debut of Hurston’s folk revue. On March 1, 1933, Hall Johnson’s musical Run, Little Chillun!, which told the story of religious conflict in a rural black community, opened on Broadway, where it ran for a full four months in the midst of the Depression. The first act of this “Negro folk drama” culminated in an open-air “orgiastic” dance scene that was uncannily similar to the climactic dance finale of The Great Day.³ In fact, the sensational dance number in Johnson’s musical was performed by several of the very same Bahamian dancers whom Hurston had employed, although they were now cast as a cultlike primitive group called the “New Day Pilgrims.” According to the Run, Little Chillun! program, the show’s dances were “arranged” by the white dance choreographer Doris Humphrey, considered one of the founders of American modern dance. While a full account of how the West Indian dancers wound up in Hall Johnson’s hit musical is beyond the purview of this essay, suffice it to say that Hurston received notice in Florida that Johnson was “messing with [her] stuff” and that Johnson later expressed contrition to Alain Locke about “the sources he has used and not given credit to.”⁴ The relevant issue here, however, is how Hurston’s and Humphrey’s arrangements of the same West Indian folk material received such different treatment.

Strikingly, many of those who witnessed the performance of Run, Little Chillun! registered the connection between its dance sequence and Hurston’s earlier concerts. In his review of the musical, for example, New York Times dance critic John Martin explicitly invoked Hurston’s presentation of “native dances” as a point of comparison and even expressed “regret that the material selected for ‘Run Little Chillun’ is not up to the same standard.”⁵ Yet, despite favoring Hurston’s version, Martin went on to heap praise on Doris Humphrey, declaring her undertaking “a thoroughly workmanlike job, but one for which she is likely to get less credit than is her due.” His concern that Humphrey’s achievement would not be properly appreciated—ironic given the way history played out—stemmed from the specific criteria governing theatrical presentations of the folk. The “wild revel” that closed the first act, he explained,

owes to Miss Humphrey the fact that it looks as if it had not been staged at all, which is the highest praise for any sort of folk dancing across a set of footlights. It has, however, been pruned extensively and given a rude form, without which it would presumably go on indefinitely until the dancers dropped from exhaustion.

Of course, Hurston faced identical considerations, and it is worth noting that not a single review of The Great Day complained about the lengthiness of the Fire Dance section in her concert. But Martin went further than attributing the seeming unaffectedness of the Bahamians’ dancing to Humphrey; he also credited her with choosing the very style of dance featured in Johnson’s drama, though Humphrey herself readily acknowledged that the dance material had already been selected when Johnson brought her on board. “Miss Humphrey,” Martin writes,

has apparently recognized the fact that Negroes cannot be expected to do dances designed for another race, and consequently she has moved with great caution in creating for them. The result . . . bears added testimony to the breadth of Miss Humphrey’s capabilities and the excellence of her theatrical judgment.

Martin’s evaluative logic here is rooted in the double standard that haunted African American dance artists throughout the first half of the twentieth century: Any dancing that departed from jazz, tap, or folk styles was deemed imitative and inferior, yet dancing that stayed within the realm of the vernacular was perceived as raw, instinctive expression rather than cultivated art. A white artist’s engagement with black folk idioms, however, launched an appreciation of both her “excellence of . . . theatrical judgment” and her choreographic mastery—for Martin effectively ascribes to Humphrey all the tasks of a choreographer—not to mention the concomitant worry that her labor would go unrecognized. It would seem, then, that it was Hurston’s blackness, her racial “authenticity,” that made it possible for Martin to acknowledge the success of her preceding concert while disavowing her artistry, and that in turn allowed him to let a white woman’s influence on the dancing in Run, Little Chillun! eclipse a black woman’s. Because of Martin’s own status as an authority on American theatre dance, moreover, his distorted allocation of choreographic credit ultimately became part of the received historical record.⁶

1. Hurston to Mason, 15 October 1931, ALP; Hurston to Edwin Grover, 8 June 1932, Department of Special Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida. [↩]
2. Arthur Ruhl, “Second Nights,” New York Herald Tribune, 17 January 1932, 11. [↩]
3. Program, Run, Little Chillun!, 1 March 1933, Lyric Theatre, Programs and Playbills, in the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. A number of reviews characterized the show’s dancing as “orgiastic.” See, for example, Carl Carmer, “‘Run, Little Chillun!’ A Critical Review,” Opportunity 11.4 (April 1933): 13. [↩]
4. Hurston to Mason, 11 August 1932; Locke to Mason, 18 April 1933, ALP. [↩]
5. Martin, “The Dance: A Negro Play,” New York Times, 12 March 1933, sec. X, 7. [↩]
6. The chronology provided at the end of Marcia Siegel’s biography of Humphrey, for example, reports that she choreographed Run, Little Chillun!. See Marcia Siegel, Days on Earth: The Dance of Doris Humphrey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 294. Joe Nash, too, states that Humphrey “created” the dances in Johnson’s musical. See his “Pioneers in Negro Concert Dance: 1931 to 1937,” in The Black Tradition in American Modern Dance, ed. Gerald Myers (Durham, NC: American Dance Festival, 1988), 12. The chronology that Richard Long provides in his The Black Tradition in American Dance (New York: Prion, 1987), which is singular for its inclusion of Hurston’s Great Day concert, also lists Humphrey as choreographer of Run, Little Chillun!, although Long makes the crucial addition “with Bahama Dancers” (181). [↩]