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

Hall Johnson’s annexation of the Bahamian dancers thus resulted in a sort of double misrepresentation of Hurston’s stage material:¹ First, the dances that she had researched, learned, filmed, and taught to an assembled troupe of performers were severed from the diasporic narrative context in which she placed them and made instead to signify a fictitious pagan practice; and second, credit for those dances now went to Doris Humphrey, whose growing prominence in the dance world and whose racial distance from the represented folk legitimized the attribution.

I do not want to suggest, however, that the transmission of the Bahamian Fire Dance amounted to a zero sum game in which Hurston invariably lost out, for, even as the West Indian folk dance continued to be disseminated without her sanction or control, she continued to strive to make a name for herself with it. In fact, just four days after Run, Little Chillun! opened on Broadway, Hurston was busy pursuing a collaboration with Ruth St. Denis, another eminent white artist and pioneer of early modern dance in this country, best known for her danced interpretations of “Oriental” subjects. “Zora Hurston Dances for Ruth St. Denis,” ran the headline in the weekly paper of Florida’s Rollins College.² The “special half hour performance of folk songs and dances” was the result largely of coincidence: It was merely by chance that these two women’s paths crossed in Winter Park in early March of 1933. Apparently, several Rollins College officials, having just backed a production of Hurston’s concert, decided that her folk material would be of interest to St. Denis, who was in town to deliver a lecture-dance recital on “The Philosophy and Dance of the Orient,” and accordingly arranged for the private performance. Their supposition proved correct, for St. Denis was reportedly “enthusiastic about the Bahama dances.”

St. Denis was so enthusiastic, in fact, that she was not content merely to be a spectator to the dances but decided that she should perform alongside them. As Hurston revealed in a letter to Alain Locke dated March 20, 1933, “Ruth St. Denis was here and saw us, and wishes to appear with us as a soloist-dancer.”³ Evidently, then, following the brief performance, an exchange took place between Hurston and St. Denis in which St. Denis presumably praised Hurston for her dance work and suggested that the two might collaborate on a future presentation. What exactly St. Denis had in mind—how a solo performance by a white modern dancer could possibly have been integrated into Hurston’s program of Floridian and Bahamian folkways—can only be a matter of speculation. Perhaps realizing the implausibility of St. Denis’s proposition, Hurston nonetheless responded with undaunted pragmatism, telling Locke, “I know its [sic] novelty-publicity seeking but it will help us never-the-less.”

With this comment, Hurston provides valuable insight into how she construed outside interest in her material, in what serves as an important counterpoint to the perspective of Charlotte Mason. Most notably, her statement demonstrates a savvy awareness of the politics of interracial collaboration and of the cultural capital that her “primitive” dance idioms afforded her. Assuring Locke that she is not naïve enough to think that anything other than self-interest lay behind St. Denis’s proposal, Hurston intimates that the real appeal of her material for white artists was the novelty of associating with black dancing bodies, rather than the prospect of exploring the contours and nuances of black folk culture. Yet, instead of bemoaning St. Denis’s opportunistic motives, Hurston sees the white woman’s attention as a chance to advance her own publicity-seeking cause. For had St. Denis’s proposed stage alliance actually come to pass—and the archive provides no indication of why it did not—Hurston’s standing as a dance authority would certainly have been bolstered, perhaps enough to prevent her erasure from the dance record. At any rate, both St. Denis, who by her own account was “suffering a complete eclipse” in the field of dance, and Hurston, experiencing an upsurge in her career, were poised to profit from a collaborative venture.⁴ Of course the power imbalance between the two women cannot be disregarded; the fact that St. Denis was entitled to a free-of-charge showing of Hurston’s folk material testifies to the asymmetry of their relative positions. Still, Hurston’s determination to capitalize on St. Denis’s solicitation refutes any notion that white trafficking in black vernacular dance was exploitative in any unidirectional sense or to the benefit of any single party.

1. I borrow the phrase “double misrepresentation” from Marta Savigliano, Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995). [↩]
2. Rollins Sandspur, 8 March 1933, 2. [↩]
3. Hurston to Locke, 20 March 1933, ALP. [↩]
4. Ruth St. Denis, Ruth St. Denis, an Unfinished Life; an Autobiography (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939), 331. [↩]