Abstract
This article reconsiders Josephine Baker’s legacy for the field of dance by emphasizing the principles of abstraction that she developed through performance. Although she is considered to be a modernist, Baker is rarely discussed as an abstractionist. Doing so requires a rethinking of the relationship between race and abstraction, a conversation revived by choreographer Miguel Gutierrez in 2018. Audiences in 1920s Paris described how Baker confounded identity categories to produce something new for the stage, but critics and scholars since have continued to define her by those very categories. Baker’s dancing prioritized the expression of kinesthetic energy over representation or narrative, clearly fitting within the purview of abstract dance. In building upon the work of Brenda Dixon Gottschild, I argue that Baker demonstrates how abstraction is not in opposition to Africanist dance aesthetics, but rather is a constitutive part of it.
Highlights
Reframing Josephine Baker, Rethinking AbstractionIn the 1935 French film Princesse Tam Tam, Josephine Baker—arguably one of the most famous dancers in the world at the time—plays Alouina, a Tunisian woman taken to Paris by writer Max de Mirecourt
By examining Baker’s movement, both through the descriptions offered by her contemporaries and through viewing film clips, I reveal the principles of abstraction embedded in her performances
The dehumanization that accompanies abstraction takes on a more traumatic resonance when enacted by an African American woman dancer
Summary
In the 1935 French film Princesse Tam Tam, Josephine Baker—arguably one of the most famous dancers in the world at the time—plays Alouina, a Tunisian woman taken to Paris by writer Max de Mirecourt. Baker departs from the real world in her performance, as she pays attention neither to the audience nor to her fellow dancers onstage Her Conga is embedded in a movie plot in which her action as a visibly brown-skinned woman is interpreted allegorically as a tale of Movement analysis comes from my viewing of Princesse Tam Tam, dir. By examining Baker’s movement, both through the descriptions offered by her contemporaries and through viewing film clips, I reveal the principles of abstraction embedded in her performances. Through embodiment, she theorized the body as a producer of kinesthetic energy and emphasized movement invention. In approaching Baker’s movement from this perspective, I offer a revision of existing dance histories of abstraction and of Baker’s role in the story
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