Katherine Dunham on the French Stage (No Repeat of La Revue Nègre)

In 1948, at the peak of her career, she and her company set out for their first European tour. Having traveled widely in North and South America, Dunham welcomed the opportunity to work in Britain and France. In Paris she was known mostly for her performances in Broadway shows and Hollywood films like Stormy Weather, but the spectacular acclaim her London appearances elicited preceded her arrival in France. Dunham had personal reasons for performing in Paris. She had her own romantic idea of Parisian life. Anything French was to her both sophisticated and exotic. She was already familiar with the Creole language, which meant much for her ethnographic work. And she was attentive to the French-sounding names that designate the steps and dances she studied; she always insisted on using them for the titles of her numbers and listed them in the programs. She was also curious to visit the country that had ruled over Haiti, one of her favorite islands. Besides, she had a French Canadian mother, and she was intrigued by this part of her heritage, by the ways in which it did or did not connect with her African American background. Having lived mostly in Illinois, she was definitely American: a black woman who was to dedicate much of her work to the “deprived” on Chicago’s South Side and in East St. Louis. By other standards she was a mulatto, and she developed throughout her career a strong identification with the French Creoles. In many of the reviews of her shows, the color of her skin was noted and variously perceived in shades ranging from ebony to white.¹

Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham were bound to meet each other in Paris; each was intensely curious about the other. Both were stars; both were greeted, courted, and hailed for bringing life and novelty to the stage. Baker—who, as one of Dunham’s dancers, Tommy Gomez, described her, “owned Paris and was Paris”—feared she might lose favor with the French public. She secretly dreaded the coming of another star, the handsome “dancing anthropologist” who had been called by Martha Graham the “goddess with the pelvic girdle,” and whose work had been hailed as groundbreaking and visionary. Dunham, for her part, was eager to meet Parisian audiences and experience Parisian high life. She hoped to take Paris by storm, as Baker had done in the mid-1920s. After Broadway and Hollywood and her great international successes, Paris would provide the consecration. She was determined to seduce the French, not only as a woman with a perfect body and much elegance and wit, to say nothing of impressive jewels, but as an innovative, inventive choreographer who would herald a new era for Negro modern dance. She knew she would have to face Baker’s presence, but to judge by her own words, she didn’t feel threatened by the situation:

It was shortly after the war…. I am not sure that she [Baker] was as much a fan with the Paris public as she had been before. Anyway, our coming opened a whole new vista for her. As she told me, our appearance spurred her on to open her own club. She certainly was one of the most loved people in Europe then and had held an undisputed position as a star in some of the same fields in which I operated. She excelled in dancing, acting, singing and in a kind of total theater, although for the most part she performed in the various music halls. So I think her immediate reaction was to accept us as a challenge in her own field. As we got to know each other, we became friends. She called me her sister; whichever jealousy existed, I am sure must have been mine as well as hers.²

Baker offered to introduce Dunham to Paris, but Dunham felt she needed no introduction. Baker bore her no grudge and, as Gomez reports, one day she “came backstage to Dunham’s dressing room to see her after the show, with Chevalier, Marais, Cocteau and Mistinguett; and she congratulated the whole company…. The next day there was a handwritten note from Baker saying how wonderful the show was and thanking every member of the company.” Gomez was impressed by the fact that Baker spoke French with her maid and German with her chauffeur, and that her pet monkey, Mika, often accompanied her, dressed with the same outfit she was wearing (Aschenbrenner, 143). Rivalry or no rivalry, Baker always publicly commended Dunham’s talent. Maryse Bouillon, who was taken by Baker to a cabaret in Paris on her birthday, recalls:

Aunt Jo invited my favorite stars: Jean Marais, Jean Louis Barrault and Madeleine Renaud, Gérard Philippe, Katherine Dunham draped in a white lace shawl, and Carmen Anaya wearing a red one…. During her favorite parts of the show, Josephine sat perched on the edge of her seat as if ready to leap across the footlights. ‘What purity,’ she sighed, nudging me in the ribs (Carmen was dancing). ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ Another nudge. (This time the dancer was Katherine.) My aunt was greatly impressed by the fact that both women drew inspiration from folk sources. She described Carmen as ‘a tall flame in a small body’ and marveled that ‘Katherine knew everything about Africa and, more important, understood it.’ … Josephine admired diplomas immensely since she had none of her own…. My last memory as I drifted off to sleep was of Katherine and Josephine dancing side by side.³

1. She shared this stage image with Baker. Soon after her triumphant arrival in Paris, the French seem to have forgotten that Josephine was born in the States and thought of her as French island Creole. In 1931 she was nominated “Queen of the French colonies” for the Colonial Exhibition. When organizers discovered that she was American, her name was withdrawn, but for many she remained la créole, especially after she starred in Jacques Offenbach’s operetta in 1934 and 1940. [↩]
2. Quoted in Ruth Beckford, Katherine Dunham, a Biography. New York: Marcel Dekker, 1979, 106. A few other works will be mentioned in this essay: Joyce Aschenbrenner, Katherine Dunham, Dancing a Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002; and Kaiso, Writings by and about Katherine Dunham. Eds. VèVè Clark and Sara E. Johnson, University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. [↩]
3. Josephine Baker and Jo Bouillon, Josephine. New York: Harper and Row, 1976, 16-18.  [↩]