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

Choreography in a Black Vernacular Vein

Of course, Baker’s kinetic outbursts and chorus-girl clowning were not the spontaneous eruptions they seemed. Quite the contrary, by the 1920s, they had become something of a choreographic convention in black musical revues. In the 1913 production Darktown Follies, as Marshall and Jean Stearns point out in their indispensable book Jazz Dance, Ethel Williams, “pretending to be out of breath” and unable to keep up with the rest of the chorus line, faked “crazy steps that brought down the house.” ¹ Though Baker may not have been aware of Williams’s high jinks, her time on the vaudeville touring circuit brought her into contact with another star chorus girl named Mama Dinks. According to Broadway performer Maude Russell, Baker’s act just prior to joining the Shuffle Along cast owed much to Mama Dinks. Indeed, Russell’s description of Dinks could easily double as a description of Baker’s dancing: “All her mouth was gold, she had funny legs, she could bend them way back, she did those antics, walkin’ like a chicken, lookin’ cross-eyed, and then she’d go offstage bowlegged with her butt stuck out.” ²

The fact that Baker’s chorus line ad libs were, in the Stearnses’ words, “the perennial gag of the chorine who just cannot keep in step,” and that a number of her moves could be traced directly to an earlier female performer, offers another way of understanding the authorship of Baker’s dancing. ³ Even as she resisted one model of authorship—that of the (male) choreographer inventing and arranging steps to be faithfully executed by (female) dancers—Baker was, I want to suggest, actively participating in a black vernacular choreographic tradition, one in which mimicry and improvisation counted as compositional methods.

Approaching Baker’s performative tendencies as a kind of choreography in their own right requires challenging certain assumptions that underpin Eurocentric ideas about authorship, especially notions about what constitutes originality and about the boundaries between composition and improvisation. While we are accustomed to defining authorship as origination—as the creation of the new—there are other ways of conceptualizing originality. As Zora Neale Hurston wrote in her 1934 essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression”:

It is obvious that to get back to original sources is much too difficult for any group to claim very much as a certainty. What we really mean by originality is the modification of ideas. The most ardent admirer of the great Shakespeare cannot claim first source even for him. It is his treatment of the borrowed material. ⁴

More recent scholars have similarly exposed the notion that originality excludes “variation … imitation, or … adaptation” as the product of “modernist myth.” ⁵

1. Stearns, 129-30.[↑]
2. Baker and Chase, 48.[↑]
3. Stearns, 130.[↑]
4. Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” reprinted in Hurston, The Sanctified Church (Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1981), 58.[↑]
5. Woodmansee and Jaszi, 3; Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1985).[↑]