Whose Choreography?:
Josephine Baker and the Question of (Dance) Authorship

Male Choreography and Improvisatory Resistance

The most immediate answer to the question of who authored Baker’s dance performances is the various male choreographers who were hired to devise and set routines for her. From her early days on vaudeville and Broadway, through her 1925 Paris debut with La Revue Nègre, through her star turns at the Folies Bergère and Casino de Paris, through her 1936 appearance in the Ziegfeld Follies, Baker worked with a string of African-American and European male dance directors, including Noble Sissle, Louis Douglas, Jacques Charles, Joe Alex, Earl Leslie, and George Balanchine. These men were not necessarily assigned the label “choreographer,” as that term had yet to come into common currency, but programs and publicity materials officially credited them with staging, arranging, or directing the dances enacted by Baker. Although in the early 20th century white female artists like Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis and black female artists like Ada Overton Walker and Edna Guy were beginning to compose and produce their own dance works, choreography at that time was undeniably a male-dominated profession. Baker, certainly, was never formally granted the authority to create dances for herself or anyone else. Her complaint about the Ziegfeld Follies that she was “nothing but a body to be exhibited in various stages of undress,” provides a sense of how frustrating this lack of creative power could be. ¹

It is in light of this gendered division of labor that Baker’s notorious improvisations must be seen. Repeatedly, Baker “forgot” the steps that had been taught to her by male choreographers and erupted instead into a display of her own offbeat moves. ² As a chorus girl in Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake’s touring production of Shuffle Along, Baker began doing some “crazy things,” in Blake’s description: “no routine—just mugging, crossing her eyes, tripping, getting out of step and catching up.” ³ In a 1951 article, Sissle recalled coaching Baker to perform certain steps in a particular order and then helplessly watched backstage as she replaced them with her “emotionally inspired antics.” “Once,” he recalled,

when she saw me scowling at her when she came off in the wing, she asked, “Did I do the steps right that time?” And I would remind Josephine that she had done something new. She would open her big beautiful eyes, put her hands over her mouth and start giggling. Then she’d say, “I’m sorry Mr. Sissle, but I’ll remember next time.” ⁴

According to Baker, a similar phenomenon occurred during the 1925 Paris debut of La Revue Nègre. “Driven by dark forces I didn’t recognize,” she wrote, “I improvised, crazed by the music, the overheated theater filled to the bursting point, the scorching eye of the spotlights. Even my teeth and eyes burned with fever…. I felt as intoxicated as when, on the day I arrived in Paris, [Louis] Douglas had given me a glass of anisette.” ⁵

Adopting the rhetoric of involuntariness and invoking metaphors of inebriation, Baker implies that she could not be held accountable for her body’s actions. Crucially, this disavowal of responsibility served Baker’s purposes in several ways. Casting her dancing as unpremeditated and uncontrollable, Baker justifies her “improvisatory disobedience,” to quote scholar Jayna Brown. ⁶ In the process, she gives herself license to “wrest the composing voice” away from the nominal creator. ⁷ As Carolyn Abbate has argued about opera, and Sally Banes has written about ballet, the fact that these embodied genres literally depend on performers to bring them to life effectively disperses the “locus of creation” and gives female performers a degree of agency, especially in terms of how they (re)interpret the historically male composer or choreographer’s part. ⁸ In Baker’s case, this usurpation also played right into primitivist stereotypes that branded all black expression as unthinking and instinctual, the product of a timeless African barbarism lurking just beneath the skin. Succumbing to “dark forces” rather than transgressing authority, Baker appropriated a modicum of autonomy without threatening race and gender hierarchies. ⁹ Paradoxically, then, Baker’s rhetorical disavowal of control over her body allowed her to seize a share of the author-function with her body.

These habitual improvisations proved financially expedient as well. Each time she departed from or expanded upon the choreography, Baker not only differentiated herself from the official choreographer, she also monopolized the attention of theatergoers, also known as scene stealing. While her upstaging stunts as a chorus girl in Shuffle Along may have alienated her fellow cast members, they also became an audience draw. ¹⁰ Customers reportedly came to the box office asking explicitly, “Is this the show with the cross-eyed chorus girl in it?” ¹¹ As a result, as her biographers have documented, Baker rose from being an unnamed member of the chorus to winning a separate credit as “That Comedy Chorus Girl.” Correspondingly, by the time she joined Sissle and Blake’s In Bamville (eventually renamed The Chocolate Dandies) in 1924, her salary had climbed from $30 a week to $125 a week, and she was billed as “the highest-paid chorus girl in the world.” ¹² In the economy of the theater, disruptive improvisations commanded attention, attention translated into recognition, and recognition translated into monetary capital.

1. Josephine Baker and Jo Bouillon, Josephine (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 101.[↑]
2. Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 58; Dixon Gottschild, 70.[↑]
3. Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: Schirmer Books, 1968), 134.[↑]
4. Noble Sissle, “How Jo Baker Got Started,” Negro Digest 10 (August 1951): 17, 18.[↑]
5. Baker and Bouillon, 51-52.[↑]
6. See Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: African-American Women Performers and the Making of the Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming).[↑]
7. Carolyn Abbate, “Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women,’ in Ruth A. Solie, ed. Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 254.[↑]
8. Abbate, “Opera,” 234, 235; Sally Banes, Dancing Women: Female Bodies on Stage (New York: Routledge, 1998), 9-10.[↑]
9. As Felicia McCarren writes in Dancing Machines: Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), “Ironically, dancing as if possessed permits Baker some ownership of her image, the possession of herself” (174).[↑]
10. As Baker relates in her memoirs, “I had become the star of the chorus, much to the disgust of my fellow dancers. ‘Monkey’ they called me, and did what they could to make my life backstage miserable…. One of the dancers even tripped me up one night as we were making our entrance, but I managed to do such a comical nose dive that I received more applause than ever. They didn’t try that again!” (Baker and Bouillon, 29).[↑]
11. Patrick O’Connor and Bryan Hammond, Josephine Baker (London: Little, Brown and Company, 1988), 9.[↑]
12. Jean-Claude Baker and Chris Chase, Josephine: The Hungry Heart (New York: Random House, 1993), 61, 68; O’Connor and Hammond, 11.[↑]