Man Ray took a few arresting pictures of her in Siamese robes, one with one foot with long artificial nails and another of her bending backwards, snakelike. She also appeared in photos dressed as a little girl with a thin crown on her head and wearing only long gloves and short panties; or with feathers on her behind like Josephine Baker; or wearing her dress wide open, revealing her thighs. There are also professional portraits by Studio Harcourt of D’al-Al and Mel-Tra, called “The Chinese Sisters,” in which each of the “sisters” uncovers her breast while lifting her skirt and moving her arms like an Oriental dancer. Mel-Tra was a pseudonym, and I have not yet been able to establish her identity.
As a dancer, D’al-Al toured Europe and went from Riga, Latvia, in 1934 to Tripoli, Syria, in 1938. She performed mostly in Switzerland, Luxemburg, Belgium, Holland, and especially in Germany, where she finally settled after World War II. She never went to America. Her international career was patterned after that of Josephine Baker, a dancer who always moved fluidly between ethnic identities and artistic media. But Baker had other talents. She could also sing, which D’al-Al was unable to do.
D’al-Al had several love affairs, notably a ten-year relationship with Arnaldo Castello, her Count Abatino. But they did not marry and she has no descendants. She performed in Germany as an exotic dancer from 1947 until about 1958. She then ended her career in order to take care of her bed-ridden mother.
Research can be very difficult when it comes to minor artists, as one is obliged to rely on second-rate publications and/or the daily press. This sketchy evocation of the stories of these lesser-known artists is intended to invite exploration of the careers of the many other “minor” dancers and artists of the period—the array of “colored” girls who sought to emulate Josephine Baker’s success in Paris. These girls often performed in cabarets and nightclubs like the black-owned La Canne à Sucre and La Boule Blanche, sometimes dancing on tables or grand pianos. In the 1930s, there was Messaouda, an Arab Senegalese from Oran who danced fandango and meneo. The managers of the Palace employed a young woman from the Antilles who, in 1928, danced under the name Ya ya Sapotille. Film director Léon Poirier would make her famous by giving her the main part in the movie Cain under a new name, Rama Tahé. And there was another dancer, Sadya, who performed in the nude at La Cabane Cubaine. And so on.
André Salmon was certainly thinking of Aïcha and D’al-Al when he wrote: “In Montparnasse, one can find Nègresses incertaines (not knowing whether they have come from Guadeloupe or from Roubaix). This felicitous doubt allows those beautiful women of color to be, in order to suit circumstances, all the women of color and women of all colors. The lighter-skinned among them can sit reclining like Indian dancers or replace, at the last minute, a missing Javanese in some Malaysian ballet.” These non-white female performers made no headlines but were at times briefly mentioned in publications focusing on the erotic attractions of gay Paree and its colonies. Despite the limited attention they have garnered, however, these women shed light on an exotic night world from which Josephine Baker emerged to become and remain for decades the undisputed queen.
