Alien Bodies

Representations of Modernity, 'Race' and Nation in Early Modern Dance

Ramsay Burt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134758340
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

Alien Bodies is a fascinating examination of dance in Germany, France, and the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. Ranging across ballet and modern dance, dance in the cinema and Revue, Ramsay Burt looks at the work of European, African American, and white American artists.
Among the artists who feature are:
* Josephine Baker
* Jean Borlin
* George Balanchine
* Jean Cocteau
* Valeska Gert
* Katherine Dunham
* Fernand Leger
* Kurt Jooss
* Doris Humphrey
Concerned with how artists responded to the alienating experiences of modern life, Alien Bodies focuses on issues of:
* national and 'racial' identity
* the new spaces of modernity
* fascists uses of mass spectacles
* ritual and primitivism in modern dance
* the 'New Woman' and the slender modern body

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 transferr[ed] 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 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 undoubtedly 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 Valeska Gert started her career as a dancer in a cinema, performing on stage between films. Massine started his choreographic career with Diaghilev, Picasso and Satie, but in New York in the late 1920s produced ballets that were also performed in the intermissions between screenings of films. Meanwhile in Paris during the ballet Relâche (Postponed) (1924) a now famous film Entracte (Intermission) by René Clair was screened in the ‘entracte’ between two acts of the ballet. Ninette de Valois (b. 1898) is best known as the founder of the Royal Ballet (initially Vic–Wells Ballet) but she gained her initial stage experience dancing for three years in music halls and West End revues before joining Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. In her book Come Dance with Me (1957), she recalls the tradition that second house audiences on Monday nights in the provinces (i.e. outside London) always gave the acts, regardless of quality, a hard time (1957: 56). One of the revues in which De Valois appeared was You’d be Surprised (1923) choreographed by Massine (1895–1979). Also in the cast was the ballerina Lydia Sokolova (1896–1974) who had danced the role of the Chosen One three years earlier in Massine’s 1920 revival of the Rite of Spring. You’d be Surprised was designed by Duncan Grant (1885–1978),² a painter associated with the Bloomsbury group. The Ballets Russes themselves appeared for a few seasons as part of music hall shows in London. It was there that members of the Bloomsbury group ‘discovered’ ballet modernism. It is interesting to observe that Nijinsky, Pavlova, Karsavina and other ballet dancers who had trained in St Petersburg all appeared at some time on a London music hall bill. Roger Fry observed in 1920:

Now that … Picasso and Derain have delighted the miscellaneous audience of the London Music Halls with their designs for the Russian Ballet, it will be difficult for people to imagine the vehemence of the indignation which greeted the first sight of their works in England.

(Fry 1928: 292)

Across the Atlantic, similar inter-relationships between dance as popular entertainment and dance as a serious art form existed. It is well known that the Denishawn Company toured vaudeville circuits and appeared on Broadway in spectacular Ziegfield productions. Martha Graham (1892–1991), leaving Denishawn to do something more ‘serious’, nevertheless initially danced in the (commercial) Greenwich Village Follies in ‘artistic’ dances choreographed by Ichio Ito (1892–1961), another ‘serious’ modern dance artist. In 1932 Graham and her company danced her Choric Dance for an Antique Greek Tragedy as one of the acts on the opening night of the Radio City Music Hall, New York. Doris Humphrey (1895–1958) and Charles Weidman (1901–75) broke with Denishawn for reasons similar to Graham’s. But Humphrey’s Water Study (1928) and Shakers (1931) and Weidman’s Ringside (1928)³ were performed by their own dancers in J. J. Schubert’s Broadway revue Americana (1932) (see Cohen 1972: 111; Siegel 1993: 127–8). While Humphrey tried to distance herself from the commercial stage, Weidman continued choreographing shows throughout the 1930s and 1940s. According to Marcia Siegel, he increasingly got himself into a mess and Humphrey would have to come along at the last minute and pull it all together for him.⁴ In Paris, George Balanchine (1904–83) not only worked for the Ballets Russes but also gave Josephine Baker ballet classes and then choreographed a few numbers for her appearance in the 1930–1 revue Paris Qui Remue at the Casino de Paris. When she briefly returned to New York in 1935 he again choreographed some of her numbers in the Ziegfield Follies. In the 1940s, it was with money he had earned on Broadway that Balanchine commissioned a suite of music from Paul Hindemith (1895–1963) which he then used when creating his ballet The Four Temperaments (1946).

Recent research on African American concert dancers has also shown up connections that have until now been hidden. For example, among the fascinating details that John Perpener has brought to light is the fact that Katherine Dunham’s first New York concert – the ‘Negro Dance Evening’ in March 1937 – was organised by two black modern dancers, Edna Guy and Alison Burroughs (Perpener 1992: 114). Guy had trained with Denishawn and maintained a long but emotionally tortuous relationship with Ruth St Denis, while Burroughs had studied Dalcroze eurythmics at the Hellerau-Laxenburg School near Vienna in 1931. Also sharing the programme with Burroughs, Dunham and Guy was the African-born, European-educated dancer Asdata Dafora Horton. With Graham on the bill for the opening night of the Radio City Music Hall in New York were Kreutzberg and Georgi (who Dunham had seen in Chicago and who inspired both José Limón and Erick Hawkins to study dance), and the tap dancer Ray Bolger. Bolger is probably best known for his role as the Scarecrow in the film The Wizard of Oz (1939), but that same year he also performed in Balanchine’s ballet Slaughter on Tenth Avenue and in the Broadway musical On Your Toes (see Mason 1991: 153–8). Dunham and her company would also work with Balanchine on the Broadway musical Cabin in the Sky (1942) and star in a Hollywood feature film – Stormy Weather (1943).

There is ample evidence therefore that points to the coexistence and interdependence of the many different forms of theatre dance during the inter-war years, and of connections and cross-overs between them. In recounting these here, I do not wish to suggest that distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture and between ballet and modern dance did not exist during the first four decades of the twentieth century. Such distinctions, however, were more fluid and dynamic during that period than they subsequently became in the period following the Second World War. Rather than presenting a detailed historical chronicle of the period that fits together the many overlaps and correspondences between different dance forms, this book develops a series of arguments about modernity, ‘race’, and ideologies of national identity and internationalism as these were represented in theatre dance and contested in critical writings about dance during the period. In doing so it traces the development during this period of a series of critical positions that articulated the differences between the work of black and white dancers, between ballet and modern dance, and between dance as art and dance as part of modern mass entertainment.

The process of researching and writing about this series of critical positions has often therefore reminded me of a detective story. The assembling of clues and following up of leads in order to establish what happened is of course detective work, but underlying this is the attempt to understand the motivation – why certain events happened. In some of the best crime novels (or at least the ones I like reading) the detective is not really concerned with finding out who actually committed the crime but with trying to work out who’s calling the shots and what power structures are at play in the situation she or he is investigating. These power structures are generally masked and dark secrets inevitably lie beneath a seemingly innocent normality. Most of the best crime novels are also visceral. Julia Kristeva, who has herself written a roman policier, recently quipped that Lacan was wrong when he suggested the unconscious is structured like a language: rather, she suggests, it is structured like a carnage.⁵ At its best, too, modern dance has a visceral quality and powerfully moves the spectator in ways she or he doesn’t always understand but nevertheless responds to.

This visceral quality is an aspect of the affective power of the body and poses a problem for ways of thinking that are conditioned by the Judaeo-Christian value system. Within such dualistic ways of thinking, the body is generally marginalised and ignored although it may occasionally be wildly overdetermined. I have advanced the argument elsewhere that social prejudices about the male dancer during approximately the last 150 years have served the function of policing dominant white norms of heterosexual masculinity (1995a: 10–30). Similarly, notions of physical hygiene and of the body’s capabilities that are mediated through dance are gendered and are socially and historically specific. The subjective experience of embodiment is also conditioned by ideologies of national identity. As Mary Douglas (1966) has observed, the body is an image of society, and it therefore follows that nations can be spoken of in embodied terms: they have boundaries, life blood, vitality, their health can be a cause for concern, and wounds may be sustained to national honour. Since the body is the primary means of expression in dance, romantic discourses about the national character of national dances have been in circulation since the Enlightenment. I am not especially interested here with the fact that nationally identifiable dancing bodies conveyed political meanings during the 1920s and 1930s. My aim is to examine the relationship between notions of national boundaries and with the differing ways in which these were mediated by dancing bodies. Thus, for example, ideologies of national community were defined in an exclusive manner in some German mass performances while notions of the French ‘spirit’ of French modern ballets produced by ‘Russian’ and ‘Swedish’ companies in the 1920s were interpreted in an inclusive way.

Any attempt to define collective identities necessitates the exclusion of strangers and their alien bodies. These and other alien bodies, I argue, were a central subject of modernist dance. A significant aim of this book is to elucidate points of view that have tended to be marginalised in the unreconstructed, modernist account of (American)⁶ modern dance. Hence, as I have already indicated, the breadth of the range of material I have chosen to discuss. The project of reinstating marginalised voices and points of view is not, however, a straightforward one. What it often reveals are perspectives that differ radically from hegemonic ones. In some cases the contrast between a dominant and alternative points of view is a useful and informative one, leading to adjustment and accommodation. However, some of the instances I have come across while doing the research for this book are ones in which dance performance and the dancing body have become a locus for contestation between different groups and formations. In writing about this I have found that in certain circumstances no single account can be made that gives an adequate idea of the knowable dance community. To put this another way, what is at issue here is the validity of the old claim that modern dance constituted a single, universal language. For example, in my chapter about Josephine Baker, different narratives are presented which all focus on the same dance event but account for its significance in widely divergent ways. Here, as elsewhere in the book, it is not enough just to recognise that certain voices and points of view (particularly black ones) have been marginalised; to try to pull these divergent voices together and infer from them an all-embracing, hegemonic conclusion would be to repeat the actions which marginalised these voices in the first place. Trying to understand them changes the way one assesses dominant points of view, in some cases revealing silences or inconsistencies that have not until now been noticed or had not previously been considered significant. Underlying these silences and inconsistencies is discontent with modernity and unease at the sense of strangeness that it arouses. The notion that modern dance constituted a universal language served the function of hiding these silences, disavowing these inconsistencies and reinforcing the power relations which underlay dominant points of view.

A basic premise of this book is that a conceptual structure based upon a particular, socially and historically constructed definition of modern dance has determined the way the canonical history of (American) modern dance has been told. Such structures enable certain kinds of discourse while closing off others. It is obvious that to ask questions that don’t easily fit into such histories may reveal a different and fuller picture. To ask such questions also constitutes a challenge to the methodologies that underpinned this history of modern dance. It is to the question of methodology that I now turn.

The novelist E. M. Forster begins his theoretical essay Aspects of the Novel (1927) by admitting ‘The novel tells a story, oh dear me yes’. Dance history tells stories too, and this book is itself structured through narratives on many levels. But, oh dear me yes, there are many different ways in which stories can be told. I look with awe, admiration but also with disbelief at the work of past historians like the Victorian scholars who pieced together detailed,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Choreographing the disturbing new spaces of modernity
• 3 ‘Savage’ dancer: Tout Paris goes to see Josephine Baker
• 4 The chorus line and the efficiency engineers
• 5 Totalitarianism and the mass ornament
• 6 Dancing across the Atlantic
• 7 American moderns
• 8 Primitivism, modernism and ritual in the work of Mary Wigman, Katherine Dunham and Martha Graham
• 9 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index