ALIEN BODIES HOW DID DANCERS ON EACH SIDE OF THE ATLANTIC CHOREOGRAPH THE DISTURBING NEW RHYTHMS AND SPACES OF MODERNITY? Blurring the conventional distinction between modern dance and ballet, African American dance, gymnastics and dancing as popular entertainment, Alien Bodies looks at the way the dance of the 1920s and 1930s mediated the experience of modernity. It focuses in particular on ways in which dance became a form in which ideologies of national and ‘racial’ identity were expressed and contested. Through an examination of work by key dancers and choreographers including Josephine Baker, Jean Börlin, George Balanchine, Katherine Dunham, Martha Graham, and Doris Humphrey, Alien Bodies argues for a revision of the way dance history is written. Burt shows how during the 1920s and 1930s—the jazz age—dance became a privileged site for defining the lived experiences of modernity. The disturbing experience of living in the ever changing modern city through successive waves of industrial restructuring created new desires and new types of embodied identities. Alien Bodies places European and white American uses of ritual alongside the work of African American dancers and their struggle to define their own relation to modernity and to their African roots in relation to dominant cultural trends. Dance, it argues, can help us see that what individuals fear about the difference between themselves and others is actually inscribed within themselves, and it is this strangeness that, during the 1920s and 1930s, was expressed on both sides of the Atlantic by the alien dancing bodies of modern dance artists. Ramsay Burt is the author of the highly acclaimed The Male Dancer (Routledge 1995). He is currently Senior Research Fellow in Dance at De Montfort University, Leicester. ALIEN BODIES Representations of modernity, ‘race’ and nation in early modern dance Ramsay Burt London and New York First published 1998 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1998 Ramsay Burt All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Burt, Ramsay, 1953– Alien bodies: representations of modernity, “race,” and nation in early modern dance/Ramsay Burt. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index 1. Modern dance—Social aspects—United States—History. 2. Modern dance—Social aspects—Europe—History. I. Title. GV1783.B87 1998 792.8–dc21 97–23360 CIP ISBN 0-203-00623-2 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-17363-5 (Adobe e-Reader Format) ISBN 0-415-14594-5 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-14595-3 (pbk) CONTENTS List of figures v Acknowledgements vi 1 Introduction 1 2 Choreographing the disturbing new spaces of modernity 17 3 ‘Savage’ dancer: Tout Paris goes to see Josephine Baker 49 4 The chorus line and the efficiency engineers 72 5 Totalitarianism and the mass ornament 86 6 Dancing across the Atlantic 103 7 American moderns 112 8 Primitivism, modernism and ritual in the work of Mary Wigman, 136 Katherine Dunham and Martha Graham 9 Conclusion 162 Notes 167 Bibliography 177 Index 186 FIGURES 1 Nijinska and Cocteau: Le Train bleu 26 2 Jean Börlin as ‘The Madman’ in Skating Rink 34 3 Valeska Gert in Canaille 45 4 Josephine Baker posing with a night club customer 71 5 The smiling gymnast in Leni Riefenstahl’s Fest der Schönheit 87 6 Balanchine’s ‘necktie’ formation 122 7 ‘Variations and Conclusion’ from Doris Humphrey’s New Dance, 126 photo by Thomas Bouchard 8 Shango, photo by Roger Wood 147 9 Function of the dances of Haiti 148 10 ‘Hymn to the Virgin’ from Primitive Mysteries, photo by Edward 155 Moeller ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many friends and colleagues have contributed to this book, listening to me and brainstorming ideas, sharing their own research or reading drafts of chapters and giving me feedback. These include Christy Adair, Thea Barnes, Valerie Briginshaw, Deena Burton, Angela Deluca, Millicent Hodson, Michael Huxley, Ursula Pellaton, Stacey Prickett, and Linda Tomko—I am grateful to all of them, but any shortcomings in the book are, of course, my own. I also wish to thank the staff of the Dance Collection at the New York Public Library and of the Scraptoft Library at De Montfort University. Some parts of this study go back to papers which I presented at recent conferences. Parts of Chapter 2 were presented at the City Limits Conference, Staffordshire University in September 1996; Chapter 8 grew out of a paper I gave at the conference ‘Fallen Angels’, Twentieth Century Representions of Women’s Spirituality, at LSU College, Southampton in June 1996; some of the ideas in the Conclusion were presented at a Symposium at the Kanonhallen, Copenhagen, in March 1997 at the invitation of Toni Cotts. The discussion in Chapter 7 of Doris Humphrey’s New Dance and With My Red Fires developed out of an article which Ann Nugent asked me to write for an issue of Dance Theatre Journal celebrating the centenary of Humphrey’s birth (Burt 1995b). Irmgard Thorne kindly translated for me material about Valeska Gert from the original German. I am very grateful to Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer for inviting me to Zürich to observe the final stages of their work reconstructing Skating Rink with Zürich Ballet and generously sharing their research with me, and to Zürich Ballet for giving me access backstage to watch rehearsals. I am also grateful to Katherine Dunham and Jeanelle Stovall for their time and patience. In addition, I wish to thank Julia Hall, Talia Rodgers, Sophie Powell, Jason Arthur, and Shankari Sanmuganathan. The author and publisher wish to thank the copyright holders for their kind permission to reproduce visual images in this book. Detailed acknowledgements are made with the captions. The research for this book was made possible by the generous support of De Montfort University, Leicester, who awarded me a fellowship to write it and have funded my research trips to New York and Zürich. 1 INTRODUCTION While doing her field research in Haiti in 1936, Katherine Dunham found herself giving a complicated explanation to a surprisingly well informed and intellectually curious Haitian Bush Priest about why she was doing research into Haitian ritual practices. Her concern was with the function of cultural forms in creating social identity. In explaining this, she drew a comparison between the need for identity among de-racinated American Negroes and the lack of national identity felt by the German people that had led them to accept a leader like Hitler. I explained my theory that people de-racinated, denied full participation in a society in which they are obliged to live, inevitably turn backwards to ancestral beliefs or follow any leader who can propose a solution to their immediate distress, who can offer a future if not a present. I mentioned the disorientation of the German people after World War I and their subsequent need for a leader such as Hitler, nonbeneficent as he was. (Dunham 1994b:198) She then told him about the Black Muslim group in Chicago1 about whom she had written a research paper: American Negroes seeking social and economic stability, first banded together, my study showed, by a Japanese in Detroit but soon transferred] their headquarters to Chicago and call[ed] the new establishment Temple Number Two. According to press reports Temple Number One was disbanded under pressure; rumour had it that some of the Detroit members had been intercepted in a basement in the act of dismembering a white policeman in preparation for ritual feasting. My thesis was…that people would not fall victim to such accusations were they not deprived of full benefits in the social structure, their own or imposed, in which they lived. (ibid.: 198–9) In essence Dunham explains here her underlying motive in going to the Caribbean and looking for dances that retain elements of African traditions from before the Diaspora: her overall aim could be broadly stated as the recovery of dance material that could be used to help re-establish a positive sense of American Negro identity. When approaching people in the Caribbean to find out about their ritual practices she usually exploited the fact that, as an African American, local villagers recognised her as someone who, like them, was a descendent of Africa, but from a group who had forgotten their religious practices and therefore needed help in rediscovering them. The reason why she took a Alien bodies 2 different line with this priest is because of the reputation of the cult to which he belonged. This was the Moundong cult who, some said, practised human sacrifices and cannibalism, and kept Zombies. Zombies and the darker side of Caribbean magical and religious practices were to feature in her 1939 ballet L’Ag Ya. Presumably Dunham told the priest sensational rumours about Temple Number One to try to draw him on these subjects. What fascinates me about this story, however, is the way it reveals Dunham in 1936 as someone who brought together Europe and America, black and white, anthropology and the urban sociology of modernity, and the ideas of the recently exiled German psychologist Erich Fromm. Furthermore Dunham was, at the time, someone who had experience of both ballet and modern dance and would draw on these in developing an African American style of dance. Dunham’s early dance training was in ballet with Mark Turbyfill and Ludmilla Speranzeva in Chicago (Barzel and Turbyfill 1983). Her first significant professional appearance had been in a ballet with Ruth Page. Speranzeva herself had initially trained at the Kamerny Theatre in Moscow but she had also studied in Germany with Mary Wigman. Dunham had taken lessons from, among others, the German dancer Harald Kreutzberg (who was also a pupil of Wigman’s) when he had been in Chicago working with Ruth Page. In an early statement that is undated but was presumably written some time in the 1930s, Dunham expresses an interest in studying with both Mary Wigman and Martha Graham ‘so that I would be capable, in every sense of the word, to train a group of dancers with which to interpret the [African and Caribbean] materials collected in research, and produce ballets which I am confident such research would inspire’ (Dunham 1978a:199). It should not be surprising that Dunham felt confident about linking together European and American modern dance, ballet, African American (including popular vernacular) traditions and African and Caribbean dance, given the brilliant, highly educated, and self- confident woman she undoubt-edly was at the time. The point is, however, that such cross-overs do not easily fit into the way the history of modern dance has until recently been told. The books that established the canonical history of modern dance have until recently done so by excluding European modern dance altogether. Similarly, books on modern dance have dealt with the work of white dance artists, while books on black dance discuss the work of black dance artists. My aim in this book is unashamedly revisionist, and I have therefore purposely chosen to discuss a range of material that encompasses both Europe and America, black and white, modern ballet, modern dance, and African American dance, and leads me to consider examples both from theatre dance as elite culture and from dancing as popular entertainment. There is now ongoing research that is beginning to reconsider the work of the pioneers of modern dance in the United States and to re-situate their contribution in relation to European developments. There is also, of course, a growing body of German research into early European modern dance, and there is beginning to be research into the relationship between the two. A review of literature about the period reveals a number of coincidences and connections between, on the one hand, ballet and modern dance and, on the other hand, dance in musicals and revues. The inter-relationships between dance as popular entertainment and dance as a serious art form during the period was a complex one, as is demonstrated in the following collection of juxtaposed examples. During the war years, the avant-garde dance artist