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

200 Pages·1998·2.052 MB·English

by  Ramsay Burt

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