Synesthetic Rhythms:
African American Music and Dance Through Parisian Eyes

Baker capitalized extensively on this mode. From her “savage dance” (danse sauvage) with Joe Alex at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées to her infamous “banana dance” (danse des bananes) at the Folies-Bergère, she staged conventional Western representations of African and African American norms. The tableaux of La Revue Nègre, such as “Mississippi Steam Boat Race,” “New York Skyscraper,” “Louisiana Camp Meeting,” and “Darkey Impressions,” constituted an “anthology of visual clichés” of the life of African Americans in the United States.¹ In the final tableau, the famous danse sauvage which will launch her career, Baker assumes the role of the prey of a black hunter, played by, in Janet Flanner’s terms, the “black giant” Joe Alex.² The stage is set as a nightclub in Harlem. With the sounds of tam-tams drumming a steady beat in the background, Baker appears on stage on the back of the naked hunter, adorned only in rings of feathers. The hunter turns her in a cartwheel onto the floor, and she launches into an openly erotic dance. This “pas de deux of ‘savages,'” which, according to André Levinson, “attains a savage grandeur and a superb bestiality,”³ shocked and enraptured the public. While the danse sauvage is set in the context of segregated America, the banana dance at the Folies-Bergère unfolds in an explicitly colonial setting. The curtain opens onto a luxuriant jungle, palpitating to the rhythms of tam-tams played by natives in loincloths. A white explorer sleeps tranquilly under a mosquito net hung on the banks of a river. The explorer wakes up when Fatou, the native girl played by Baker, descends from a tree in a belt of bananas, a human prey and ultimate colonial fantasy. Baker’s staging of the primitive extended well beyond the confines of the theater. Forging a public persona that matched her image on stage, she strolled the streets of Paris with her leopard Chiquita; surrounded herself with monkeys, serpents and exotic birds; and put her name on a number of lines of beauty products perpetuating her erotic image.⁴

Baker’s mise en scène of the primitive accorded well with the expectations of the French public. For the Parisians, she imported the breath of the jungle. Perceived as “intoxication and unleashed instincts, unknown delirium, frenzy and deranged animality,”⁵ she represented, in the eyes of the public, the return of the repressed, the black continent of Freud, the triumph of primitive and spontaneous instincts over the intellect. She was described in the press as “a beautiful savage animal,” a “gracious, small, exotic animal,” and a “strange and splendid savage beast [….]”⁶ These illusions to animality were by no means unique in the reception of Josephine Baker in the period. A virtual menagerie was constructed around her: she was considered a she-monkey, a serpent, a giraffe, a kangaroo, a gorilla, a panther and an exotic bird.⁷ An article that appeared in 1930 described her début in the following manner: “In the month of October 1925, the Parisians invited to the performance of the new show at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées saw the curtain open onto a strange set. […] Suddenly an extraordinary person of color appeared, wearing boxers, advancing with supple and spread knees, the stomach concave, like a kangaroo hiding a baby in her pouch. This hybrid being, […] was Miss Josephine Baker” (Bauer 1930). Baker was aware of the extreme reactions her image provoked. “They think that I come from a virgin forest […],” she remarked in one of her autobiographical works. “The primitive instinct, the madness of the flesh, the tumult of the senses, animality in delirium… Everything possible! The white imagination is something when it comes to blacks.”⁸

In Paris, Baker’s apparent “savagery” was greeted with enthusiasm, as a regenerating force to a war-weary Europe. For a continent that was spiritually and physically depleted by the war, African art was considered a source of rejuvenation.⁹ Avant-garde artists saw African, West Indian, and African American cultures as authentic alternatives to European values and traditions. In the words of the critic and art collector Paul Guillaume, who considered the “revelation” of l’art nègre to constitute a crucial event in the history of civilization, “African art (l’art nègre) is the vivifying sperm of the spiritual twentieth century.”¹⁰ In a dedication to the Vénus noire which appeared in Joséphine Baker vue par la presse française, an illustrated collection of articles edited by Baker’s manager and husband Pepito Abatino, novelist Erich Maria Remarque lauded Baker for infusing a weary continent with the revitalizing force of elemental nature: “To Josephine Baker who has brought the breath of the jungle, elementary force and beauty, to the tired stages of Western civilization.”¹¹ In a reversal of terms, Europe became the locus of savagery and Africa that of an ideal elsewhere.

While the liberal and avant-garde reception in Paris largely drew Baker as a regenerative force, a few reactionary voices perceived her as a symbol of degeneration. When Baker appeared on stage in 1925, dramatist and Académie Française member Robert de Flers viewed her as an affront to French taste, warning his readers that they were in the process of returning to the primate stage in much less time than it had taken them to descend from it.¹² An article that appeared in Le Soir in 1928 represented Baker as “the black peril,” a sign of European degeneration. The respected dance critic André Levinson took a decidedly conservative position. In a 1925 essay entitled “The Negro Dance: Under European Eyes,” Levinson contrasted what he considered to be the innate, spontaneous rhythms of “Negro dance” (the “formless and purely instinctive motor energy” with which “the savage is overflowing”) with the refined art of classical dance (Levinson 1991, p. 73). In an article that appeared in Comœdia in December 1925, Levinson wrote:

From the point of view of our civilization, Negro ascendancy is, certainly, a symptom of the decadence of the European spirit, the proof of a malady of the western will. The triumph of the Negroes is for us a defeat. Because they are bad? No, because they are good. […] Europe is an aristocracy. It is repelled by such an abdication of intelligence to instinct. […] We have let our supremacy go. Let us regain it; and let’s start by regaining ourselves. Let’s not have fun by lazily whistling at those who are stronger than we are.”

Au point de vue de notre civilisation, l’emprise nègre est, certes, un symptôme de décadence de l’esprit européen, la preuve d’une affection de la volonté occidentale. Le triomphe des nègres est pour nous une défaite. Parce qu’ils sont mauvais? Non, parce qu’ils sont bons. […] L’Europe est une aristocratie. Elle répugne à une telle abdication de l’intelligence devant l’instinct. […] Nous avons laissé échapper la suprématie. Sachons la reprendre; et commençons par nous reprendre nous-mêmes. Ne nous amusons pas à siffler paresseusement des gens qui sont plus forts que nous.¹³

1. Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra (New York: Doubleday, 1989), p. 20. [↩]
2. American journalist Janet Flanner, who wrote a column for The New Yorker entitled “Letters from Paris” at the time, recalls the danse sauvage as follows: “She made her entry entirely nude except for a pink flamingo feather between her limbs; she was being carried upside down and doing the split on the shoulder of a black giant. Midstage, he paused, and with his long fingers holding her basket-wise around the waist, swung her in a slow cartwheel to the stage floor, where she stood like his magnificent discarded burden, in an instance of complete silence. She was an unforgettable female ebony statue. A scream of salutation spread through the theater.” Janet Flanner, Paris Was Yesterday 1925-1939 (New York: Popular Library, 1972). [↩]
3. André Levinson, “Paris ou New-York? Douglas. La Vénus noire,” Comœdia, 12 oct. 1925. [↩]
4. Baker loaned her name to a series of products, from skin creams and lipsticks to perfumes, liquors, and bathing suits. Le Bakerfix, a hair-straightening cream, brought her almost as much revenue as her appearances on stage. See Jean-Claude Baker and Chris Chase, Josephine: The Hungry Heart (New York: Random House, 1993), p. 171. [↩]
5. Louis Léon-Martin, Paris-Midi, 8 oct. 1930 (in Abatino 1931, p. 15). [↩]
6. Excerpts from Abatino (1931), pp. 26, 24, and 37: Gérard Missaire, Journal des Débats, 9 oct. 1930; Simon Gregorio, La Rampe, 1er nov. 1930; G. de Pawlowski, Le Journal, 9 oct. 1930. [↩]
7. In an article devoted to “Negro dancing,” André Levinson comments on the “irrepressible animality” of black dancers: “[T]he undeniable rhythmic superiority of these Negro dancers is nothing less than an adjunct of their irrepressible animality. The tom-tom of the cannibal may be termed the apotheosis of brute rhythm” (Levinson 1991, p. 73). [↩]
8. Marcel Sauvage, Voyages et aventures de Joséphine Baker, feuilleton in L’Intransigeant du 12 oct. 1930. [↩]
9. In Primitivist Modernism, Sieglinde Lemke remarks that rejuvenation is a key trope of primitivist modernism: “[T]he black cultural idiom—be it a West African sculpture, or syncopated jazz, or an evening at the Savoy—is, somehow, primarily invigorating” (Lemke 1998, p. 101). The interpretation of the postwar popularity of African American cultural forms as arising from a profound cultural need for revitalization runs through the critical literature. See, for example, Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1996), pp. 30-32. [↩]
10. Paul Guillaume, “Opinion sur l’Art nègre,” La Dépêche africaine, 17 (October 15, 1929). See also “L’art nègre et l’esprit de l’époque,” Paris-Soir, 25 nov. 1925. [↩]
11. Erich Maria Remarque, 1930, dédicace (in Abatino 1931, p. 51). Colette, who frequented Chez Joséphine, Baker’s nightclub in Montmartre, also included a dedication in this collection, in which she wrote: “To the most beautiful panther, to the most charming woman, with my friendship.” [↩]
12. Robert de Flers, “La Semaine Dramatique,” Figaro, 16 nov. 1925. [↩]
13. André Levinson, “‘Loin du bal:’ Joséphine siffléeÑBlanc et noir,” Comœdia, 7 déc. 1925. [↩]