Chain Breaker, Trend Maker, Mind Waker

Falling in love with La Baker

and

May 10, 2025

CONTINUED FROM:
—IN SEARCH OF MISSING BLACK MUSES - The shock of learning just how much was omitted from my earliest dance history lessons
—BEAUTIFUL, SEXY, SILLY, SAVVY - In search of the Shimmy, I discover Josephine Baker

In those last posts, we delved back into the dance styles that influenced my earliest belly dancing and filled in the gaps when I couldn't find instruction or source materials. I had originally begun researching and writing about this in the spring of 2020, but was interrupted by a slight social hiccup.1

Ahem.

Seeing as how the topics of this dance series are all rife with the magma that erupted, I took a pause and a detour before diving into the cross-pollination threads connecting Vaudeville, the Roaring 20s, the Shimmy, and Belly Dance.2

It was only after George Floyd’s murder exploded the clue-bus into the greater world — that NO, “all that race stuff” had NOT “been handled back in the 60s” like had been touted in too many places — that I started to find a small amount of original footage on YouTube highlighting Black dancers’ (abysmally erased) contributions to these topics.

While falling down this rabbit hole, I discovered Josephine Baker, one of my dancey great-great-great-grandmothers and a performer who should have been one of my Muses all along. But, you know...she was Black and female, so I'd grown into my dance chops without ever knowing how amazing she is.3

As I geeked out about her, I discovered that this quality went far beyond her groundbreaking entertainment accomplishments.

If you're short on time, here's a VERY brief overview:

Or the full documentary, which is age-restricted so you can only watch it on YouTube - totally worth spending an hour along her path.

That documentary left me in awe. So did the following video clip from one of her movie roles - what raw, passionate, unrestrained expression that touches me on such a deep, intrinsic level. Great Goddess, YES! Show us all how to set ourselves free!

"Art should comfort the disturbed
and disturb the comfortable."
~Cesar A. Cruz

In the words of Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, Author of The Black Dancing Body:4

“It was like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. It just set people crazy. Some people thought this was, like, the end of European civilization as we know it, you know? And the battlefield being Josephine Baker’s bum.”
“That black dancing body stood in stark contrast to the monarchical, hierarchical, vertically aligned body of European ballet. She disrupted that picture with all of the movements that actually go right back to minstrelsy: the Shimmy, the Mooch, the Mess Around, the Charleston. All of these things that, in the European mode would be considered awkward, become beautiful, sexy, silly, and savvy all at the same time.”

Regarding the (in)famous banana girdle:

“…and with her doing all those kind of movements that I’m describing, you can imagine that banana girdle going all over the place and it’s like, phalluses stimulated by female agency. You can look at it from the outside and think, ‘Oh, this is just a shake dancer,’ but if you look at it from the inside, again it’s this incredible female personality that is in possession of the male.”

While compiling links for this post, I stumbled upon a phenomenal gem by Sharon Ndi, a neuroscience and psychology student speaking about what Josephine Baker means to her - that yes, she was absolutely "a pretty dancer in a banana skirt" who represented the iconic "Jezebel" stereotype we covered previously.5

But to truly appreciate her, we have to look past the beautiful, the silly, and the sexy. We have to look into the savvy.

"Josephine Baker loved to play into the Jezebel stereotype. She was making fun of it. And so she would do full dances where she was the 'sexy African woman running away from the white man's gun.' She knew what people saw her as and she played upon it. The issue is that, when history was written, they forgot the fact that she PLAYED upon the role. She was not the role."
~Sharon Ndi

Beyond the savvy, there is the powerful, the driven, the inspirational.

As I've mentioned, I have known the name Mata Hari since I was young, and we'll definitely be coming back to her. But Josephine Baker had a longevity on — and beyond — the Parisian stage that her Dutch counterpart did not. She also was a fully successful spy which earned her wartime decorations, instead of being demonized as a traitor and executed as a scapegoat like we're beginning to understand that Mata Hari was.6

After the war, Josephine Baker did so much for desegregation and civil rights in the US - so why am I only hearing about her now?

For the same reasons that, in the spring of 2020, when I first started hunting down the gobs of research and videos for this blog series, she didn't come up in my search results.

But when I resumed my research in 2021, she sure did!

Now when I watch her dance, I see the way she and her dance-grandchildren have traveled down through the ages into the styles that have molded me. Boldness, audacity, sensuality, unfettered passion, unique personal expression, storytelling, humor, sexual power, goofiness, playfulness, and astounding skill outside the rigors and strictures of formal training. Her legacy branches in a number of different directions, too often delineated by color and race.

But she, her predecessors, contemporaries, and descendants are here within me, and dancers like me, whether we’re aware of it or not.

SHIMMY-SHAKERS BEYOND LA BAKER

On this side of the pond, an even more direct influence comes from all those dancers who remained in the US during the early 20th Century, shimmying, shaking, innovating, and messing around, even though they were the "wrong" skin color to be given places onscreen and on prestigious stages.

So we shall have to revel in the few who were able to be seen, like Josephine Baker.

True, there are aspects we can find to criticize in this tale. Even amidst her triumph as a Black female who rose to the top of acclaim and wealth at a time when Jim Crow was the norm, there is still Blackface and stereotypical exotification in her Paris shows. But it's a step in the right direction. If we look at it from the 1920-30s lens, not our own, it's more than a step. It's multiple milestones beyond having to bow and scrape through back doors and use separate fucking toilets.

Also true, with her Rainbow Tribe of twelve adopted children from numerous nationalities and skin hues, the question has been raised around child exploitation, because she charged admission for people to come see this social experiment — she wanted to prove that "children of different ethnicities and religions could still be brothers."

But sheesh, at least somebody was trying to foster a vision of harmony between all peoples decades ago.

If she hadn't been so swept under the carpet — both as one of those "dastardly exotic dancers" and as a Black, bisexual, interracially married, sexually liberated ex-pat female — more people like me could have been inspired by her examples so long ago.

Who knows where we'd be now?

I sure don't. All I know is that, amidst yet more racially-driven travesty and atrocity, I'm glad my original drafting of this entire dance series got interrupted by the long-overdue explosion that inspired such a sharp change of trajectory in my country’s mindsets regarding these things.

We’ll see what happens with the reactionary blowback, but hey. New people like me got educated and caught up. For me, those rosy-colored glasses can never be put back on.

These posts about the influences that shaped the styles of dancing I've melded together into this thing I do…

all these revolutionary dancers who broke the ballet mold
the unapologetically sensual and sexually awakened women who paved the way for me and dancers like me
the boundary defiers
the chain breakers
the brave visionaries who not only dreamed of equality and harmony but used their skills and resources to affect change in a positive direction...

I am so grateful that I have the awareness now of so many missing Black Muses and dance predecessors. It gives me a richer and more inspiring understanding of why I dance the way I dance, and which artistic lineages I come from.

Don't let the skit throw you. Seriously. Stick with this thoughtful young woman all the way through if you want to understand why I have a new she-ro, besides what Josephine Baker did for dance and entertainment.

Extra Bonus for y'all: A dancer of our own time who continues this tradition of breaking the old boundaries, mindsets, and ballet molds — by BEING a ballerina at a time when she still has to personally tint her pointe shoes from "European Pink" to match her skin tone.

Such an inspiring course, even (especially) for those of us who suck at ballet, or don't even dance.

UP NEXT: FROM SHIM-SHAM TO SHIMMY - The threads of Tap & Swing in my (and others’) belly dancing.

Tinkerings of an Elemental Alchemist

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