Chorus Girls Research Articles

Black and Blue: The women who reclaimed tap

When Black and Blue opened on Broadway in 1989, it brought together some of the greatest names in tap dance: Henry LeTang, Cholly Atkins, Fayard Nicholas, Jimmy Slyde, and Savion Glover: men who had defined the art form and would continue to do so. But there were also nearly a dozen women, including Deborah Mitchell, Dianne Walker, and Germaine Goodson. “Chorus girls” have long been the unsung heroes of tap and published histories typically obscure the contributions of Black women to the art form. Furthermore, professional networks that advocate for Black concert dance have largely ignored tap, due in part to theories of racial uplift, respectability politics, and the historical associations between tap and blackface minstrelsy. In this article, I argue that the careers of Mitchell, Walker, and Goodson offer an alternative. Analysis of their performances in Black and Blue reveals how they used their dancing bodies to reclaim tap as a source of pride, while simultaneously reasserting the role of women within the form for future generations.

Chorus Girl Modernity: Of Salamanders and Periodical Culture

Lower-middle-class and working-class girls coming to the big city in the early twentieth century made all sorts of life choices, but in the popular fiction of the period a disproportionate number of them end up as chorus girls. Chorines turned into icons of American urban modernity—versatile, daring, sexy, and young. My article will approach this phenomenon by way of Owen

“The Whole Ensemble”: Gwendolyn Bennett, Josephine Baker, and Interartistic Exchange in Black American Modernism

Since her debut in Paris in 1925 and meteoric rise to stardom, views of Josephine Baker have been dominated by the white artists and audiences who constructed her as an exotic “Other”. This article revisits the phenomenon of “La Bakaire” from the perspective of a Black female artist who witnessed her performance first-hand and participated in the same Jazz Age projects of fashioning New Negro womanhood and formulating Black Deco aesthetics. When Gwendolyn Bennett saw Baker perform, she recognized her as a familiar model of selfhood, fellow artist, and member of a diasporic Black cultural community. In her article “Let’s Go: In Gay Paree”, July 1926 Opportunity cover, and “Ebony Flute” column, she utilizes call and response patterns to transform racialized sexual objectification into collective affirmation of Black female beauty and artistry. The picture that emerges from Bennett’s art and writing is one of communal practices and interartistic expression, in which Baker joins a host of now-forgotten chorus girls, vaudeville actors, jazz singers, musicians, visual artists, and writers participating in a modern renaissance of Black expressive culture.

A Tale of Two Funerals: Surrogation and the Legacy of Florence Mills in Show Boat's Black Chorus (1927)

A Tale of Two FuneralsSurrogation and the Legacy of Florence Mills in Show Boat's Black Chorus (1927) Bethany Wood (bio) Solemnity suffused the streets of Harlem on Sunday, November 6, 1927, as thousands of mourners thronged the route of Florence Mills's funeral procession.1 The local chorine-turned-headliner had been diagnosed with pelvic tuberculosis months earlier while touring in England with the revue Blackbirds. Knowing the cast and crew depended on her for employment, the thirty-two-year-old Mills had kept her diagnosis confidential and continued to perform, traveling with the show to Glasgow, Manchester, and Liverpool before returning to the United States in late September.2 Upon her return, Mills attended parties and discussed future projects, including a starring role in Florenz Ziegfeld's Follies and a possible film version of the novel Porgy with Paul Robeson. Few knew of Mills's illness at the time and none, including Mills and her family, recognized its severity. Without fanfare, Mills entered the Hospital for Joint Diseases in late October and died November 1 from complications following an operation performed to alleviate her condition.3 In his book Cities of the Dead, Joseph Roach discusses surrogation, the process by which individuals succeed a figurehead to perpetuate the departed's social and cultural function. Roach identifies various "vortices of behavior," events that function "to canalize specified needs, desires, and habits in order to reproduce them … the grand boulevard, the marketplace, the theater district, the square, the burial ground—where the gravitational pull of social necessity brings audiences together and produces performers (candidates for surrogation) from their midst."4 The literal and metaphorical "burial ground" of Mills's funeral acted as one such behavioral vortex, which resonated with a second vortex [End Page 68] occurring in the actual and conceptual "theatre district" where Mills had made her career. On November 15, just nine days after Mills's funeral, Ziegfeld presented the first preview performance of Show Boat. The musical previewed in Washington, DC, traveled to Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh again, and then opened on Broadway in late December, where it ran for 575 performances. The musical featured a chorus "of the most beautiful girls ever glorified by Mr. Ziegfeld," and, for the first time in a Ziegfeld show, the production included a contingent of Black chorus girls, several of whom had previously appeared onstage with Mills.5 The commingling of Mills's funeral with the musical's opening thrust Show Boat's Black chorines into the gravitational pull of these behavioral vortices, positioning the dancers as primary candidates to succeed Mills. The history of Show Boat's Black chorus girls, like much non-white dance history, lies largely outside the archive. Choruses in 1920s musicals functioned as a multitude, seemingly without individuality, crafted, trained, and critiqued as a cohesive unit. As Saidiya Hartman notes, "Every historian of the multitude … is forced to grapple with the power and authority of the archive and the limits it sets on what can be known, whose perspective matters, and who is endowed with the gravity and authority of historical actor."6 The nomenclature of the "chorus girl," deployed to evoke youth and vitality, positioned female chorus dancers as children, individuals lacking the agency, maturity, and importance associated with historical relevance. Rather than in individual chorus dancers, historical import rested in the era's famous impresarios, men understood as experts in discovering and shaping young women's "raw" talent into successful, artistic performances.7 Records of chorus girls from the period, particularly those who never achieved stardom, thus remain sparse, their histories overshadowed by the men who produced them. In conjunction with the chorus girl's lowly status, Black chorus girls confronted racist understandings of Black dance and dancers as essentially primitive, a construct that further distanced their stories and work from the cultural status that lends itself to documentation, acknowledgment, and preservation. Like the women Hartman studies, the Black chorus dancers in Show Boat were "young black women … destined to be minor figures" and thus were largely disregarded in contemporary and historical accounts.8 Accordingly, while studies analyzing "the chorus" in Show Boat abound, individual histories of the chorus dancers are rare...

American Gold Digger: Marriage, Money, and the Law from the Ziegfeld Follies to Anna Nicole Smith

This study of gold diggers is illuminating and original. Donovan defines gold digger as a woman who pursues romantic relationships primarily for economic gain. In five chapters organized chronologically and thematically, he examines the evolution of this stereotype from its emergence before World War I through Anna Nicole Smith’s marriage to an elderly billionaire in 1994. One chapter explores a moral panic about alimony in the 1920s; another investigates a 1930s crusade to end heart balm laws (prohibiting seduction, breach of promise, and alienation of affection); and a third analyzes a furor over “Allotment Annies” who married multiple servicemen apiece during World War II to pocket their military allowances. Another covers the Lee Marvin–Michelle Triola palimony case of the 1970s.According to Donovan, the trope originated in the early 1910s from the urban-amusement culture of dance halls and popular theater. In this setting, on the boundary between prostitution and dating, the custom of “treating” arose—women exchanging sex and companionship for money and gifts from men. Women who participated in these exchanges were young, good looking, sexually charged, deceptive, and manipulative; most of them appear to have been white and to have come from working-class backgrounds. Although few were actual sex workers, they nonetheless offended genteel sensibilities and, perhaps as a legacy of the recent Klondike gold rush, became known as “gold diggers.”A playwright named Avery Hopwood, who overheard dancers in the Ziegfeld Follies call each other gold diggers, borrowed the term to entitle his 1919 play about the travails of New York City chorus girls. The phenomenal success of The Gold Diggers and its remake as a silent film in 1923 and as a musical in 1929 turned what had been a slang phrase into a powerful, enduring stereotype. From the outset, the stereotype was pejorative and gendered, with class and racial overtones. Notwithstanding that the chorus girls who inspired Hopwood embraced the slang term and applied it to themselves knowingly and even affectionately, Donovan says that the stereotype has always been wielded against women, often when established systems of marriage and courtship break down. Gold diggers are vilified for being childlike, frivolous, and unsophisticated, as well as scheming and sexually adventurous. The stereotype has persisted because it allows Americans to concentrate their wrath on supposed individual misbehavior, diverting attention from larger cultural transformations and social inequities.Much of American Gold Digger comprises an analysis of popular culture, particularly the understandings spawned by movies, television shows, and celebrities. He correctly suggests that the messages promulgated by popular culture are essential to this kind of history. For example, Anita Loos’ development of her Lorelei Lee character played an outsize role in fixing the gold digger in the American imagination, first through the publication of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as a book in 1925 and later as a film that starred Marilyn Monroe. Loos also wrote the screenplay for Red-Headed Woman (1932), the archetypal portrait of a femme fatale, played by Jean Harlow, who uses sex to improve her social position.As enlightening as this perspective is, however, it hides a flaw in its methodology. As his study moves beyond the 1920s, Donovan becomes so narrowly focused on popular and celebrity cultures that he cannot say how the stereotype waxed and waned on the ground or how ordinary people received it, revised it, and used it in their daily lives. It is not clear how or whether some women could mount a defense of their materialism. Nor do we learn whether women ever applied a variant of the stereotype against men, as fortune hunters. In this book, the gold-digger stereotype floats freely through popular culture, its direction unalterable by regular people.A historical study that Donovan cites in his text and that navigated similar terrain, Beth L. Bailey’s From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore,1988), employs a better methodology. In addition to consulting sources like advice and etiquette manuals that prescribed dating rules, Bailey incorporated the voices of young women by conducting research in college newspapers and in letters to the editors of popular magazines. In Bailey’s telling, women were not just victims of popular culture; they both interacted with it and acted of their own volition. American Gold Digger is insightful, but Bailey’s approach would have strengthened it.

“What’s Happened to Chorus Girls?”: Domesticity and the Postwar Backstage Musical

“What’s Happened to Chorus Girls?”: Domesticity and the Postwar Backstage Musical

“To Help Enlighten Our People”: ‘Theater Folk’ and Stage Advice Columns in the 1920s Chicago Defender

“To Help Enlighten Our People”: ‘Theater Folk’ and Stage Advice Columns in the 1920s Chicago Defender Michelle R. Scott (bio) “Attention audience! Especially those of you that are commonly called stage struck,” noted the advice column on the Chicago Defender’s Stage Page of November 7, 1925. African American former chorus girl Vivienne Russell, who used the byline “Vivienne,” declared that she had “received a number of letters from girls and boys desirous of going upon the stage. I have answered them personally, however but not in detail. Hence this article ‘Stage Struck.’”1 Vivienne argued that overall “show business is a good business” for those with “plenty of grit,” but that only the “folks that are endowed with talent” should consider the entertainment industry. After measuring one’s vocal or dance ability against other “Race shows or acts,” Vivienne maintained, select amateur entertainers should “fight for their place” on the stage amid a racially segregated entertainment system.2 “Stage Struck” was one of the dozens of such pieces Vivienne addressed to young Black Defender readers who sought practical advice on how to successfully enter the vibrant and challenging world of the 1920s professional Black stage. Between October 1925 and May 1926, vaudevillian Vivienne Gordon Russell wrote the theatrical advice column, “Theater Folks and Theatergoers,” in the Chicago Defender, aimed at both entertainment professionals and audience members. When vivid reports of tragedy and turmoil, including chronicles of increased racial violence, new segregation policies, escalating poverty, or criminal exploits, flooded 1920s Black newspaper headlines, entertainment and leisure news could offer readers momentary escape and solace.3 Black newspapers including the Baltimore Afro-American, Pittsburgh Courier, New York Amsterdam [End Page 55] News, and Chicago Defender, often dedicated at least two pages (out of twenty) to national and local Black entertainment occurrences, from discussions of how blues singer Sarah Martin was a “hit in Baltimore” to laments of the separation of the “Crosby and Jackson” comedy team in San Diego.4 Click for larger view View full resolution Figures 1 and 2. Vivienne, “Theater Folks and Theatergoers: Chorus Girls Over the Top,” Chicago Defender, 25 October 1925 The importance of the Black press and the Chicago Defender specifically in transmitting the narratives of African American lives has been explored in historical, American Studies, and musicology texts over the past two decades.5 Likewise, the lives of Black female journalists in the twentieth century have also been chronicled by historians and media studies scholars.6 Yet Vivienne’s columns reveal a moment in the Defender’s 1920s history where a Black woman entertainer also commanded a space as a Black theater industry journalist. This social history article details Vivienne’s professional background and illuminates the broader historical context of the Defender’s “Theater Folks” column. It utilizes Vivienne’s industry experiences to explain her columns’ messages on the mechanics of Black show business, the challenges of respectability politics, her disdain for blackface minstrelsy, and the value of Black entertainment in early-twentieth-century America.7 In the absence of biographies, memoirs, or personal correspondence, Vivienne’s professional life was gleaned from census information, city directories, playbills, advertisements, oral histories of Black theater professionals, and, most importantly, the “Theater Folks” articles themselves. [End Page 56] As a Black woman theatrical journalist, amid many male theater columnists published in the Defender, Vivienne publicly championed Black entertainment as a method of “racial uplift”—the attempt to challenge racial hostility and negative images of African Americans through Black political, educational, and socio-cultural success.8 Black entertainers in the 1920s contended with the same heightened racial tensions and negative depictions of blackness that plagued African Americans more generally, and they often faced critique and ridicule from Black and white conservative communities who viewed the entertainment profession as one that was not suitable for proper ladies and gentlemen. Revealing that many in the Black entertainment world were quite self-conscious about the images of morality they exhibited on stage and off, Vivienne took it as her charge “to help enlighten” her people by redefining notions of stage respectability and demonstrating how the theatrical profession was a worthy and “honest occupation” for African Americans.9 In a decade plagued...

Film Chronicle

Film Chronicle Jefferson Hunter (bio) Film Chronicle: Gold Diggers of 1935, directed by Busby Berkeley (Warner Home Video, 2006) The Band Wagon, directed by Vincente Minnelli (Warner Home Video, 2005) Invitation to the Dance, directed by Gene Kelly (MGM, 2011) Ballet, directed by Frederick Wiseman (Zipporah, 1995, and Kanopy streaming service) The Red Shoes, directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (Criterion Collection, 2010) Pride and Prejudice, directed by Robert Z. Leonard (Warner Home Video, 2006) Pride & Prejudice, directed by Joe Wright (Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2006) Pride and Prejudice, directed by Simon Langton (BBC, 2019) They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, directed by Sidney Pollack (Kino Lorber, 2017). Sir John Davies's poem "Orchestra, or A Poem of Dancing," published in 1596, pays the definitive Renaissance tribute to Terpsichore. A representative excerpt: Loe this is Dauncings true nobilitie.Dauncing, the child of Musick and of Love,Dauncing it selfe, both love and harmony,Where all agree, and all in order move;Dauncing, the Art that all Arts doe approve:The faire Caracter of the worlds consent,The heav'ns true figure, and th' earth's ornament. On the page, Davies's iambic pentameter and ababbcc rhyme scheme—constituting the seven-line rhyme royal stanza invented by Chaucer—create a pattern not unlike the multiplied interweavings, symmetries, movements, and counter-movements timed to a rhythmic pulse which are formed by dancers on a stage or ballroom floor. "Orchestra" describes a harmonious order and simultaneously imitates it, thus giving double pleasure. Meanwhile Davies's claim for dancing as "the Art that all Arts doe approve" seems bold but persuasive, at least in the case of an art the poet was three or four centuries too early to know, the art of the cinema. Throughout its history film has approved the art of dancing by celebrating it onscreen, its exhilaration and orderliness, its commingling of love and harmony. Of course there are other modes of dancing—extreme, disorderly, possibly violent—and film has paid due attention to them (see, among many [End Page 126] other examples, the stylized gang rumbles danced to Leonard Bernstein's music in the film of West Side Story), but in this Chronicle, I will concentrate on the kind of performance which Davies's poem admires. Phrases of his like "th' earth's ornament" and "all in order move" immediately suggest the ornamentally patterned and elaborately synchronized choreography of American musical films from the 1930s and 1940s, above all the choreography of Busby Berkeley. The son of a silent-film actress, Berkeley began his career as a dance director on Broadway, then in Hollywood came to prominence when he staged the production numbers of Warner Brothers extravaganzas like Roman Scandals, 42nd Street, Footlight Parade, and the multi-film Gold Diggers series (today it would be called a mega-franchise). All of these are lightly plotted movies, showcases for performance, in which the likes of James Cagney or Dick Powell fall in love with the likes of Ruby Keeler, Joan Blondell, or Ginger Rogers, in the process doing a lot of singing and dancing, sometimes on a reasonable facsimile of a theater stage but more often in production numbers that may begin theatrically but soon depart into the boundary-less and sumptuously lighted space of pure cinema. For sheer flag-waving, synchronized, exuberantly costumed, no-expensespared choreography, Berkeley has never been equaled—at least until the era of televised Olympic opening ceremonies, which in their grand displays of massed forces dancing in unison and forming elaborate symmetrical patterns have become the Berkeley films' only real successors. Aficionados will have their favorites among Berkeley's dance numbers, say the "42nd Street" finale in the film of that name; or "By a Waterfall" in Footlight Parade, its chorus girls diving in a human cascade into a pool where they subsequently perform water ballet; or the at first quasi-documentary, then grandly patriotic "Remember My Forgotten Man" at the conclusion of Gold Diggers of 1933. My own favorite would be "Lullaby of Broadway," from Gold Diggers of 1935, a film which Berkeley directed as well as choreographed. Gold Diggers of 1935 offered Depression-era audiences well-dressed swank to admire...

Nightclub as a Liminal Space: Space, Gender, and Identity in Lisa See’s China Dolls

Nightclubs flourished in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the late 1930s when it became a nightlife destination. To Chinese Americans, however, San Francisco nightclubs became a new site at the time for them to re-explore their identities. For some, visiting these nightclubs became a way for them to escape from traditional Chinese values. For others, it became a way to satisfy Western stereotypes of Chinese culture. Lisa See’s China Dolls (2015) describes three young oriental women from various backgrounds that become dancers at the popular Forbidden City nightclub in San Francisco in the late 1930s. Through the three girls’ precarious careers and personal conflicts, Lisa See proposes the San Francisco nightclub as both a site for them to articulate their new identities beyond their restricted spheres and a site for them to perform the expected stereotypical Asian images from Western perspectives. It was, at that time, a struggle for the emergence of modern Chinese women but particularly a paradox for Chinese-American women. The space of the Chinese-American nightclub, which is exotic, erotic, but stereotypical, represents contradictions in the Chinese-American identity. Through studying Lisa See’s novel along with other autobiographies of the Chinese American dancing girls, I argue that San Francisco nightclubs, as represented in Lisa See’s novel, embody the paradox of Chinese American identities as shown in the outfits of Chinese American chorus girls—modest cheongsams outside and sexy, burlesque costumes underneath.

Flesh-coloured tights in space: Intersections of spectacular corporeality and visuality in The Seven Sisters

Abstract This article examines the intersections between female performing bodies and stage spectacle in The Seven Sisters, Laura Keene’s 1860 musical extravaganza. In its consideration of patriotic tableaux, precision dance numbers, and the grand transformation scene, the essay suggests relationships between visuality, corporeality and aesthetics at a significant turning point in the development of American popular culture that overlapped with the Civil War. The article argues that contemporary media theories may provide a lens for looking at different historical body-to-spatial models featuring nascent American chorus girls, and locates moments of affect and subjectivity on the part of the performers.

Dick Humbird and the Devil Wagon of Doom Cars, Carnivores, and Feminine Carnality inThis Side of Paradise

Dick Humbird and the Devil Wagon of Doom Cars, Carnivores, and Feminine Carnality in<i>This Side of Paradise</i>

Christmas in July

namely, the Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular and the Park Avenue Christmas Tree Lighting and Carol Sing, I am still thinking about what I experienced at these two events in New York. The ghost of Christmas past still haunts me in July. Residing in the New York metropolitan area does not put those of us who live there beyond the occasional need to play the tourist in our own Big Apple. So when a friend suggested we attend the Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular, I welcomed the opportunity. I had seen the show only once before—some thirty years ago—and it seemed like a good way to begin the holiday season. Radio City Music Hall, part of the Rockefeller Center complex, is a cavernous and opulent theatre seating nearly 6,000 people, a vintage Art Deco masterpiece that opened in 1932. It is furnished with a twin-console “Mighty Wurlitzer” organ of 4,400 pipes, boasts a full orchestra, and features the famous Rockettes with their high-kick dance line. The annual Christmas Spectacular is not as pricey as Broadway, and many working parents can still afford to come to it with their children and flash cameras in tow. The program is an amalgam of pop-culture Christmas scenes: a high-tech animation sequence that gives the audience, bedecked in 3-D eyeglasses, the exhilarating sensation of flying with Santa Claus over the streets of Manhattan; the incredibly synchronized dancing of the Rockettes; a sampling from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker; and a procession of live sheep and camels moving on stage silently and deliberately to Bethlehem. The show builds to a climactic “living nativity” as majestically garbed wise men bow before the Holy Family and offer their gifts to the Christ child. Then the entire audience joins the cast in singing “Joy to the World.” It’s all here American style: a ninety-minute celebration seamlessly combining holiday chutzpuh, sexy chorus girls, Santa Claus, and the infant Savior in a nostalgic setting Theology Today editorial

“What Do We Mean by Opera, Anyway?”: Lloyd Webber'sPhantom of the Operaand “High-Pop” Theatre

“What Do We Mean by Opera, Anyway?”: Lloyd Webber's<i>Phantom of the Opera</i>and “High-Pop” Theatre

Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (review)

Reviewed by: Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern Deborah Elizabeth Whaley Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern. By Jayna Brown. Durham: Duke University Press. 2008. The idea of Black women's bodies in motion on stage in the early twentieth century may conjure a host of images: the minstrel performer, the chorus line girl, the cabaret singer, and the one-woman showmanship of Josephine Baker, Florence Mills, and Ada Overton Walker. A relationship between these Black women's bodies, economic capital, as well as the transatlantic circulation of culture that enabled these performative images to come to fruition, is the subject of Jayna Brown's Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern. Black female performance in the United States, the Pacific, and Europe constitute Brown's "Babylon girls," that is, the audacious well-known and nameless Black women of the stage. These women, she argues, used dance as a "creative response to shared and individual experiences of dislocation and relocation," while at the same time negotiating geographical spaces for which they might begin to "call home." (16) The book's arguments engage with the experience of exile for these women and the contradictory aesthetic of luxury, sensuality, vice, and corruption that marked 20th century variety shows. More than a cultural history and finely-formulated theoretical analysis of the well-known names of Black female performance, Brown demonstrates how lesser-known performers, such as Belle Davis, Stella Wiley, and Valaida Snow employed a complex mixture of racial mimicry, Black expressive culture, and Black dance vocabularies to communicate a gendered and diasporic representation of Blackness. As this groundbreaking book illustrates, Black women performers are not exceptions to or peripheral to the story of citizenship and nation making in these multiple geographic sites; they are central to the story of 20th century performance and to understanding the underlying grammars of spectacle. Brown begins with a discussion of children in "picaninny choruses." For audiences, the young bodies in picanniny choruses were nostalgic reminders of folk consciousness and they were objects used to fulfill colonialist cravings for racialized performance. This dual mixture of bodies for entertainment, and bodies as a restorative narrative, not only referred to picanniny choruses, but also referred to the performances of the top billing Black women such as Bell Davis and Ida Forsyne. The latter serves as Brown's example of how Black female performers exercised conscious performance strategies even within the seemingly limiting genre of minstrelsy. Brown acknowledges and historicizes the opinions of critics, especially the Black intelligentsia, who viewed Forsyne's Topsy performance as "the quintessential symbol of black artistic denigration and humiliation." (76) Critics notwithstanding, Brown argues that Forsyne's "breathtaking act references historical memory" (61) and her "performance of the contortions of time" (89) allowed her to "transform herself in the trappings of colonial wealth," thereby "reclaiming her body." (91) Babylon Girls departs from (although it returns to) the "take me back" plantation performances to analyze the burlesque inspired and urban-themed performances of Dora Dean, Bell Davis, and Stella Wiley, and the chorus girls in Black revues such as Shuffle Along. Additional shows such as Oriental America, The Octoroons, and The Creole Show reveal how Orientalist fantasies of Asian Pacific Islander women were made possible by [End Page 200] way of light-skinned, Black women's bodies. Audiences viewed colored chorus girls in a multiplicity of ways: as hopeful figures of migration, and as symbols of sexual depravity because of their light skin color, seemingly rootless, and un-married status. The book's discussion of cross racial performance bears additional intellectual fruit, by pointing out how Black female performers such as Stella Wiley's rendition of Irish Liz Leary, and the blackface performance of the white female vaudevillian May Irwin's "Louisiana Lize," represent racial crossing with commonalities and differences. Wiley's Irish song and dance girl and Irwin's tragic mulatta both addressed female autonomy, but "Black women's acts also acknowledged the irony of Black women's exclusion from national belonging, having been so recently literally belongings" (121). The last chapter may seem to cover familiar ground with its discussion...

Women, harm reduction and history: Gender perspectives on the emergence of the ‘British System’ of drug control

Taking Kohn's classic book Dope Girls as its starting point, this paper explores the particular place of women and gender issues in the emergence of the ‘British System’ of drug control in the early twentieth century. The ‘British System’ refers to the approach put in place in the 1920s in Britain, notably by the 1926 Rolleston Report. In essence, it involved the medically based prescription of opiates to addicts, often on a long-term basis. It is viewed by many as one of the beginnings of the general principle of harm reduction within drug policy. This paper will examine how female figures – chorus girls, actresses, night club girls, prostitutes – were central to British drugs discourse in the 1920s, with the representation of some individual women in particular, most famously the actress Billie Carleton, featuring very prominently. It will be argued that this gendering of drugs discourse can be best understood in the wider context of social change, namely the transition from liberalism to welfarism at the turn of the twentieth century. It is suggested that this historical analysis provides a radical new perspective on some fundamental issues for contemporary approaches to harm reduction for women, a perspective that has far-reaching implications and challenges some ‘taken-for-granted’ assumptions.

The Captive

The Captive Jonathan Fink (bio) Who was I, at seventeen, who sat unmoving, silent, hands in lap, the one white athlete on a bus of thirty runners, some asleep and some awake, as three young men (two sprinters and a shot put thrower) nodded at each other once, then moved in unison to settle just across the aisle from me, the sprinters facing backward in a seat, the thrower by the student manager who sat alone, the sun descending on the fallow cotton fields, the long horizon only broken by a farmhouse every other mile. The sprinter named Elijah reached across the seat and took the book from which the manager was reading. On Elijah's right, Vermaine, the other sprinter, cocked his head as if he entertained a message only he could hear, then made a tsk, tsk sound, his tongue against his teeth, and slapped the boy across the cheek. The thrower did not speak, although he placed his arm across the shoulders of the manager and squeezed—not comforting, but firm, the way I'd seen a country vet bear down on animals to keep them motionless as an assistant flicked a needle just before inserting it into a creature's flank. Beside me on the bus the other distance runner, Rodney, looked at me as if to say, I told you so. Each afternoon both he and I were sent on longer runs and though we didn't always run where we were told (sometimes we walked the railroad tracks that ran from east to west and cut the town in half, or hid in the abandoned house we'd found where warped and swollen floorboards crumbled underneath our feet and wallpaper unrolled in long, elaborate sheets) [End Page 42] we never came back early to the track where coaches (every one of them was white) all barked instructions into megaphones and fleets of runners sprinted intervals, a straggler sometimes stepping from the track to vomit in the grass. A week before, when Rodney said to me, You'll never understand because you're white, the two of us were three miles out along a farm-to-market road so flat and barren that a screen door snapping closed was heard one hundred yards away. I had not asked him why he thought the runners turned so quickly on the manager (sometimes they waited for him in the locker room, the runners snapping towels at him, and once—as rumor had it—trapped him in a locker just before they urinated through the metal cage). I'd simply asked why Rodney thought that no one said a word to coaches, parents, anyone at all, to intervene. The manager's real name was Timothy, though only teachers called him that. The runners (most of them were also football players) hooted Hollywood at him, a name they trilled like chorus girls while blowing kisses at him from the hall. Sometimes one athlete dropped his books and, cackling, bent at waist to pick them up, while, miming thrusting motions from behind, another athlete pointed through the doorway of a class (beyond the teacher's line of sight) at Timothy, pretending not to see, the muscles in his neck drawn tight. While other students disappeared midday to work on roofing houses, fixing cars, both Timothy and I (along with thirty other honors students) spent our hours dissecting fetal pigs (a fetal pig is almost like a human fetus, [End Page 43] we were told—the size and organs, weight and skin) or solving proofs and theorems—problems and philosophies remote enough from us that we believed they had no bearing on our lives. The only truth I'd learned by seventeen was that the will of nature (human, animal, divine) was not to coalesce, but to divide. The railroad tracks that separated north from south, the lines chalked back and forth across a football field, the high school parking lot where student soldiers twirled their wooden rifles carved from two-by-fours and painted white, the weather sirens perched five miles from town to split the air by shrieking out each time a funnel cloud descended from the sky, seemed...

The Bride Wielded a Razor: Images of Women on the Blackface Stage of James McIntyre and Thomas Heath

A newspaper advertisement for James and Thomas Heaths 1919 musical play Hello, Alexander! describes it as a Gorgeous Musical Extravaganza featuring 50 Talented Singing and Dancing Broadway Beauties The advertisement contains only one, hand-drawn image: a chorine performs a high kick, one lifted arm partially overlapping the name of McIntyre with the tip of her outstretched dancing shoe almost grazing the underside of the e. The chorine's costume exposes long, shapely legs, and apparently bare arms, shoulders, throat and decolletage, topped by diminutive facial features. (1) To look at this image and the descriptive text, one would think that the focal point of Hello, Alexander! was a collection of pretty white girls presenting the slightly risque leg show of early twentieth-century popular theater. This assumption is half correct, for the chorus girls strongly appealed to the predominantly white, male, middle-class audiences of vaudeville. and Heath needed this appeal because the true centerpiece of their decades-old act--blackface minstrelsy--was losing popularity quickly. The of the play's title was the same blackface character who had first appeared, with his partner during the 1870s. and Heaths introduction of white chorus girls to their blackface act was symptomatic of the decline of minstrelsy; it also provides an entry into an interrogation of the blackface duos career-long play on race and gender. and Heaths long career began during the height of blackface minstrelsy, ran through the glory days of Tony Pastor's variety, and survived into the roaring 1920s environment of vaudeville and burlesque, requiring the duo to adapt to changing theatrical conventions. Although the delineations of Henry and Alexander remained the chief attraction of their act, and Heath developed spectacular framing devices for these characters by incorporating supporting players and large female choruses. These dazzling elements layered new objects of humor and desire upon the established racial foundation of minstrelsy. (2) Although their partnership was extremely productive, and Heath have attracted little attention in recent scholarship. Their act is noted in such anecdotal histories as Douglas Gilbert's 1940 volume American Vaudeville, (3) but Henry and Alexander have not figured into theoretical analyses of blackface minstrelsy. In this essay, I will first describe the core elements of the Henry/Alexander stage relationship; then I will explore the addition of feminine elements to the act, and the reflections that gender make upon the central racial impersonations. The changing images of femininity in the work of and Heath--from the grotesque blackface gar to the mechanized white sex object--create a link between the oldest blackface traditions and the commodification of race and sexuality in the twentieth century. In both blackface stereotypes and idealized white dancing choruses, white, male theatrical artists projected an illusion of knowledge, even intimacy, with the bodies of people-African Americans and white women--who held inferior social positions. and Heath used this process to assert and confirm their performative authority, which translated into decades of ticket sales. The Henry and Alexander characters were typical of blackface minstrelsy, representing the urban dandy and the dim-witted stable hand, respectively. The original dynamic between Henry and Alexander--before they began sharing the stage with chorus girls--demonstrates several of the qualities described by Eric Lott: African American masculinity is reduced to a blackface binary; plots revolve around bodily urges such as hunger and lust; much of the humor arises from punning malapropism; and the blackface world they live in also contains grotesque blackface females, who represent a monstrous, devouring sexual power. (4) There is also evidence of a strong homosocial bond between the two actors, which echoes the larger homosocial context Lott ascribes to blackface minstrelsy. …

The Prompter's Box: Back to the Future: One-Hundred Years after Ibsen

The Prompter's Box:Back to the Future: One-Hundred Years after Ibsen Alan Ackerman [T]he man suddenly began to speak to me. He was traveling to Boston, he said, to visit his grown son who was in the hospital. A disease had, among other consequences, impaired the son's speech, so that he could only mouth words soundlessly; still more seriously, as a result of the illness, he had lost his will to live. The father was going, he told me, to try to restore that will, but he was troubled by the thought that he would be incapable of understanding the son's attempts at speech. He had therefore a favor to ask me: would I mime a few sentences so that he could practice reading my lips? Would I say, soundlessly, "I want to die. I want to die"? Taken aback, I began to form the words, with the man staring intently at my mouth: "I want to . . ." But I was incapable of finishing the sentence. "Couldn't I say, 'I want to live'?" Or better still (since the seat belt sign had by this time flashed off), he might go into the bathroom, I suggested lamely, and practice on himself in front of a mirror. "It's not the same," the man replied in a shaky voice, then turned back to the window. "I'm sorry," I said, and we sat in silence for the rest of the flight. -Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (255) Stephen Greenblatt's comic-tragic, autobiographical parable for his New Historicist project, "to explore the ways in which major English writers of the sixteenth century created their own performances, to analyze the choices they made in representing themselves and in fashioning characters, to understand the role of human autonomy in the construction of identity," is marked by a radical and irremediable alterity, a sense of difference between self and other that is impossible to overcome (256; emphasis added). It also indicates a tension between writing and orality (or performance); the "impaired" speech of the son here is silent and leads only to more silence, the difference in the text, [End Page 225] as Michel de Certeau describes it in The Writing of History, like "a missing precious stone" waiting for a "writing to circumscribe it" (213, 210). The role-playing proposed by the father on the airplane leads not to communication but to isolation, even to a form of pathetic (sorrowful) solipsism. Of the two men borne together in (a return) flight, it is not an angel of history but a historian who turns "lamely" back to his book (Clifford Geertz's Interpretation of Cultures). The father, "an isolated, needy individual," his face to the window, looks into a vacant exterior space or into himself (who knows?), as both are propelled forward by a jet engine yet also back to another figure of history - this one not a heavenly vision but a speechless son, an emblem of descent, wrapped in a quotidian, decaying, and incommunicable reality (256). This tragic-comic quality, elsewhere described, in similarly paradoxical terms, as a "lightly ironic piety," haunts Greenblatt's enormously influential critical practice (Greenblatt, "Prologue" 9). In one of his most vivid and intimate, yet also hilarious and publicly oriented, anecdotes, the literarily entitled "Prologue" to Hamlet in Purgatory," Greenblatt describes his own father's obsession with death, a fascination characterized by a blend of wonder and denial informed by a tension between the theatrical and the anti-theatrical, that appears ironically to have been transmitted across the generations: The wonder had a specific origin: my grandfather had died in New York. . . .My father then had to bring back the body to Boston by train. The coffin was in the baggage car; and my father was sitting quietly weeping in the club car, when in New Haven, Connecticut, the entire chorus line of the Ziegfeld Follies climbed on board. The chorus girls, leggy, buxom, bejeweled, bedecked in feather boas and wide-brimmed hats, sweetly crowded around my weeping father, kissing and hugging him and trying to cheer him up. It was perhaps my father's purest encounter with the wonderful power of eros over...

Swinging the machine: modernity, technology, and African American culture between the World Wars

An innovative study of the influence of black popular culture on modern American life; In any and any given society, cultural practices reflect the material circumstances of people's everyday lives. According to Joel Dinerstein, it was no different in America between the two World Wars - an era sometimes known as the age - when innovative forms of music and dance helped a newly urbanized population cope with the increased mechanization of modern life. Grand spectacles such as the Ziegfield Follies and the movies of Busby Berkeley captured the American ethos of mass production, with chorus girls as the cogs of these fast, flowing pleasure vehicles. Yet it was African American culture, Dinerstein argues, that ultimately provided the means of aesthetic adaptation to the accelerated tempo of modernity. Drawing on a legacy of engagement with and resistance to technological change, with deep roots in West African dance and music, black artists developed new cultural forms that sought to humanize machines. In The Ballad of John Henry, the epic toast Shine, and countless blues songs, African Americans first addressed the challenge of industrialization. Jazz musicians drew on the symbol of the train within this tradition to create a set of train-derived aural motifs and rhythms, harnessing mechanical power to cultural forms. Tap dance and the lindy hop brought machine aesthetics to the human body, while the new rhythm section of big band swing mimicked the industrial soundscape of northern cities. In Dinerstein's view, the capacity of these artistic innovations to replicate the inherent qualities of the machine - speed, power, repetition, flow, precision - helps explain both their enormous popularity and social function in American life.

Posing a Threat: Flappers, Chorus Girls and Other Brazen Performers of the American 1920s. By Angela J. Latham. Hanover, NH &amp; London: Wesleyan University Press, 2000. Pp. xi + 203 + illus. $19.95. Pb.

<i>Posing a Threat: Flappers, Chorus Girls and Other Brazen Performers of the American 1920s</i>. By Angela J. Latham. Hanover, NH &amp; London: Wesleyan University Press, 2000. Pp. xi + 203 + illus. $19.95. Pb.