Josephine Baker: Black History Month 2021-11

63; 64. No Black History Month in dance should be imagined without Josephine Baker (1906-1975). I love the seaside photograph of her with the ballet star Serge Lifar (1905-1986), apparently taken in the early 1930s: she seems so much less vain than him but so much so glorious. As for the poster of her with a belt of bananas, I have it on my wall.

As I wrote in December, I love Josephine Baker’s singing even more than her dancing, but it was with dancing that she stormed Paris in the 1920s. Her dancing combined sensual allure with a startling capacity for violence. People still spoke then of Negros as savages; Baker shook everyone up by combining physical savagery with intense sophistication, sexual charm, wit, and great good humour. Like the great black jazz musicians of the 1920s, she transformed perceptions of people of colour, becoming le dernier cri.

Interestingly, and unhappily, she encountered more hostility in the United States than in Europe. She was the toast of Paris and other European cities when she appeared in New York in a new number by George Balanchine in “The Ziegfeld Follies of 1936”. Two of the most famous American stars of the same show, Fanny Brice and Bob Hope, shunned her. Balanchine showed her wearing little while being partnered by four white men in white tie; numbers along those lines had been part of her legend in Europe, but were found offensive in New York. (“Time” magazine referred to her as “a Negro wench”.) She returned to Europe, soon becoming not only a French citizen but a French Resistance agent during the Second World War. Balanchine always spoke of her with intense admiration up to his final years.

Friday 12 February

Serge Lifar (left) and Josephine Baker, probably early 1930s

Josephine Baker