In Search of Missing Black Muses
The shock of learning just how much was omitted from my earliest dance history instruction.
When I first published this post for my Olde Blog in 2021, I had really hoped to get it out during Black History Month because — whoooah, me?! Actually hitting a societal marker?
But no, these topics are too important to shove onto the table half-baked. I had originally started drafting it early in 2020, but I kept tumbling deeper and deeper down this rabbit hole. It was so huge that I kept having to cull topics and only scratch surfaces and let things settle and go again. Therefore I didn’t get it out until March 2021.
Ultimately, it was better that I missed the deadline. By giving this piece the time it deserved, I learned so much more—about this topic, about myself, about my dancing, and about those who inspired it—rather than attempting to blend with the herd and get it out in the societally “designated time period for talking about these things” because maybe the algorithm will favor me and show it to people if I posted it at “the right time.”
🤨
Is there ever a time of the year NOT to talk about these things?
Kinda like my beef with saving up all our most demonstrative romance for that one annoying day in February. For several decades, I have boycotted Valentine's Day. Instead, I celebrate Anti-Valentine's Day on February 13. Sometimes on the 15th. Occasionally on the 14th just to be a contrary little shit. It's super cool. It's a 364-day holiday, all about love and kindness and affection and...
I know. What a concept.
That's probably why The Monthly Focuses aggravate me and I almost never play. "Oooooh, shweet! I did my part. I thought about Black people for a whole month! I'm awesome! Now I can move on to..."
No.
I am glad the honoring and celebrations are there. I am glad the reminders are there. I am hacked off that we need to make special reminders and apologetic hat-tips of "so sorry for the centuries/millennia of devaluing, exclusion, and abuse."
But we do need it.
So even though I missed both Black History Month and Women's History Month this year, I'm going to gush and swoon about one of my later dancer-crushes who should have been one all along.
This illustrious performer had immense influence on the styles I've inherited, but I've only just discovered her in the past few years. Why? I doubt it was because she danced topless in a banana skirt. If I had been exposed to this woman's dancing in the past, that's probably all I would have known about her.
In contrast, I've heard the name Mata Hari since I was a kid.1 These two women had many things in common. They were both exotic dancers in Paris and spies in a World War. Mata Hari wasn't as successful in either role, yet she's the one I've heard tons about, read books about, seen movies and documentaries about for decades.
We’ll come back to her. Rest assured, she’s one of my baby-belly dancer Muses. But today we’re diving into a rabbit hole that wasn’t even mentioned in my earliest years learning to shimmy.
Should have been.
Wasn’t.
I have no doubt that my belated clue-bus has to do with my upbringing and initial education in predominantly white communities (Northern Minnesota, don’tcha know), and my boycott (for...reasons) of the Vintage and Roaring 20s wave that struck the fusion belly dance world around 2010.2
I bet the dancers who participated in those fun escapades know all about Josephine Baker.
But my study of dances like the Charleston took place in the early 90s, way before YouTube, and even before Google when I only had email through dialup internet. I learned these dances in cultures dominated by the "quintessential looks" of the 1930s-50s white kids.
This movie came out the very year I became a professional belly dancer, and a year before I first studied Swing Dance:
Back then, nobody I learned from talked about the controversial roots of these dance forms. They only talked technique and tricks.
As such, there is no doubt in my mind that the diminishing of Josephine Baker's importance in my dance education had a lot to do with the fact that she was:
Black
Bisexual
Interracially married at a time when people from this side of the pond "just didn't do that"
And a sexually liberated female ex-pat who broke through an iron ceiling.
The HIStorical repression, exploitation, denigration3, and shaming of women's sexuality is a topic we will come back to over and over on this blog.4 Okay, on all my blogs.5
The particular slants that it's taken regarding African-American and other Black women in the US is a huge part of why Josephine Baker wasn’t a dancer I obsessed about from my earliest dance days.
So let's kick off these topics by hearing from some individuals who know way more about this subject than I do. Yes, let’s Listen To Black Women on MadameNoire:
MY MISSING MUSE
Perhaps the name Josephine Baker was mentioned in my university Dance History course. Perhaps. If so, she was probably listed among "many other" famous entertainers in (that dastardly scene we Twue Dancers only talk about through the corners of our mouths while squirming and moving swiftly along:) Parisian Vaudeville, although her name is pretty much synonymous with that scene. (2)6
Alas, in the United States — the country of her birth — her reception was quite different. This was the early 20th Century, so even when she was invited to star in a Broadway revue after making a huge success in France, she couldn't so much as sit down in a restaurant and order a flippin' cup of coffee.
But this was a revolutionary era and she was one of its movers and shakers. As we’ve covered previously, in performance dance the rebellion to expand beyond the rigid code of Ballet took two main tracks:
The classical track which opened the way for such forms as Modern, Free Dance, and Expressionism — definitely my dance great-great-grandmothers on one side. (2)7
The other side of my inheritance revolves around the entertainment industry of the circus, music and dance clubs, vaudeville, and burlesque. Not only have I personally gravitated toward the humor, characters, and showstopper dramatics of this scene because it fits the Entertainer aspect of my personality, but belly dance in the United States got its start on those types of stages, rather than classical stages and theaters designed for so-called "real art." (2)8
For many years, this was my dance mission: to raise awareness and appreciation of my chosen dance forms up from the gutters of "merely folk dance" and "that icky stuff that only sluts do."
My dance lineage is rather like that rebellious child of the self-made New Money Infiltrators marrying the Ribald Saloon Dancer. And let me tell you, this is a pure love-match that refuses to be parted in spite of being disowned and exiled for it.
Then this dastardly duo decided to become openly polyamorous with Martial Arts.
As such, twelve hells broke loose.
Ahem.
Where were we?
Oh, yeah. History.
In the first half of the 20th Century, while native dancers in British-occupied Egypt were filtering in Ballet and choreography, and bringing their performances to the stage, nightclubs, and cinema in costumes more appealing to the "Western eye," audiences in the United States and Europe were thirsting for the "Exotic East" and the "Erotic Savage."
We'll be diving into all sorts of Orientalism in future segments.9 These harem-fantasy issues and their black-skinned variants still cause problems to this day. So along with all the sexy & silly, we'll be making frequent descents into the ugly and very serious, because they exist hand-in-hand: the awesome, fun, gorgeous art and entertainment...and its horrifying undercarriage that too often gets swept under the rug.
UGLY UNDERCARRIAGES
For example, Black erotification — specifically the hypersexualization of Black women — has a version of nastiness particular to the United States. Did you know that once upon a time, it was propagated by the American judicial system that "the Black female was unrapeable"? They didn't prosecute interracial rape either. Highly convenient for slave owners if it was "impossible" to commit this felony upon her because she was, "by her very nature, so licentious" and "always wants it".
Yeah.
They didn’t cover that one when I was a History Major in college. Definitely didn’t cover it in the American History portion of my high school studies, so for a long time, I didn't know that.
Now we do.
🔥🖕🤬🖕🔥
That doesn't mean the stigma has—POOF—disappeared.10
With that in mind, there is pain in my heart as we dive into this type of covetous dehumanization that has been thrust upon the stage and slathered in glitter for entertainment purposes. It's called the "Jezebel" stereotype, and my Muse today was one of its icons.
All too often, being pigeonholed into this single-dimensional portrayal is one of the only ways a Black woman could even be an entertainer anywhere outside of segregated stages for "her own kind." (The other roles are the "sweet ole Mammy" or eventually the "raging, roaring Sapphire".)11
Simultaneously, we get the opposite types of abuse in erasure.
Therefore, today (and for the next segment of posts) I want to tip my top hat to a population that gets sorely overlooked in their contribution to what belly dance became in the US.
You can't study this aspect of dance history without acknowledging the influence of vaudeville, burlesque, and the faire/circus scenes on both the American Cabaret styles that I learned, and the Renaissance Faire legends who would give birth to the many Tribal Belly Dance styles that came out of California.12
You also can't study Modern and Jazz Dance history without acknowledging those same roots. Both of those dance forms carve swaths of influence upon belly dance in the US, from the wing, skirt, and veil dance inheritances of artists like Loie Fuller and Isadora Duncan, through the Orientalists like Ruth St. Denis and Maud Allen, to the footwork, isolations, shimmies and pizzaz of Jazz. (2, 7, 12)
Finally, you can't study Vaudeville and Jazz without acknowledging the descendants of African slaves in the United States.
Oh, wait. What am I saying?
Of course you can. We've been doing that for more than a century.
Which is why, when I went hunting for the earliest ways in which I filled in the gaping abyss left by the belly dance instruction I was missing13 — specifically while researching the cross-pollination between flappers, vaudeville, and belly dancing—I found myself tumbling down a rabbit hole that ended up where it always ends up:
Orientalism
Black Lives Matter
All Lives Matter
Exotification
Erotification
Appropriation
Appreciation
The Big White Weenie
And We White Dancers.
My unearthing journey started with that bread-and-butter of a belly dancer’s vocabulary - THE SHIMMY.
UP NEXT: BEAUTIFUL, SEXY, SILLY, SAVVY - I search for origins of The Shimmy and discover the Black Bottom & Josephine Baker.
© 2021 Hartebeast
The Wikis to scratch surfaces. If you find a topic that lights up your eyes, go. Search. Delve. Dive down rabbit holes. They’re worth the time:
Are you a word-nerd like I am? Do a search for this article that I can't link to because it only pops up from Google as a PDF: "Shedding Light on Denigration: Its Etymology and Uses" by Kaitlin Anne O'Neill.
Think about that for a second..."de-NIGRA-tion." So when I use that word here, I also mean it quite literally.
When God Was a Girl - a documentary about the repression of ancient goddess-worship, the systematic obliteration of its history (HERstory), and the impact that these religious changes had on women's sexuality.
I kept hoping there was a segment that covered boys in big boats with Bibles, and the cultures of the Pacific, the Americas, and the rest of Africa beyond the northern coast. Alas, not in this series. It doesn't cover much past the "dark ages."
But trying to squeeze this entire topic into three hours? Yeah, it's a quick and cherry-picked overview. If this is a new concept, even Part 1 should get you started. This issue is directly related to the other one we're talking about today, and that we’ll come back to over and over: Dark = Bad; Light = Good.
The First Black Superstar - documentary on Josephine Baker
Josephine Baker - the inventive WWII spy and decorated member of the French Resistance
My previous posts about the influence that Ballet, Modern, and Jazz dance had upon me can be found in the DanceStory Section of this publication. This rabbit hole about Jazz, Vaudeville, Swing, and Tap will take us straight back to the Modern Dance Pioneers, Expressionism, and Orientalism, because these are thick, intertwined topics with a lot of influences on why I dance how I dance. For example:
American Cabaret Belly Dance - although I began studying belly dance in 1992, I did so in northern Minnesota, and then honed it in central and southern Colorado. Both of these places had significant lags in adopting the cutting edge trends of the US coasts. (No YouTube or Amazon in those days.) So this is absolutely the way I was taught to dance—and was expected to do so until shortly before my big car wreck in 2000. We’re talking the 45 minute sets where dancers pulled out every stop, stoplight, and even the kitchen sink to keep audiences focused on their show instead of getting back to their conversations and their (growing-cold) supper. I eventually talked my restaurant owners into letting me chop it up into two 20-minute sets with a costume change and a dance party at the end. Because…American attention span, man.
I hadn’t even heard of American Tribal Style until 1997 when I traveled to the largest medieval reenactment event in the world, out in Pennsylvania. There I encountered a group of West Coast dancers in towering turbans, rippling, multi-tiered skirts, and (gasp!) bare midriffs—something “only jingle-bunnies and sluts did” at these events in the early 90s. ATS had been around for a decade already, with its precursors hailing back to the 70s. But that was California, and I was a still a hick from the sticks of Minnesota. So I certainly didn’t know about:
The Salimpour Legacy that branched in both the American Cabaret and Tribal Belly Dance directions, and which has roots in both the circus/faire scene and in classical Western training like Ballet and Jazz Dance, as well as Tap and Boogaloo.
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