Periodizing Performance in Hurston's Life and Work

Hurston's early encounters with religion galvanized her twin passions for theatre and anthropology. Growing up in Eatonville, Florida, her father was a Baptist preacher. From her first experiences in church, Hurston developed an appreciation for the preacher's craft, calling preachers “the first artists, the ones intelligible to the masses.”Footnote ¹⁰ Artists such as these profoundly shaped Hurston's views of Black American performance, but she herself was more inclined to dream of the proscenium than the pulpit. When she enrolled at Barnard in 1925, becoming the school's first Black student, she listed her primary interest as “dramatics” and declared a major in English before shifting her focus to the study of anthropology under the mentorship of Franz Boas.Footnote ¹¹ In later years, Hurston would continue to approach drama and anthropology as reciprocally informed pursuits.

En route to Barnard, it was the theatre that provided Hurston's ticket out of the South. In 1916, at the age of twenty-five, she took a position working as a maid with a traveling Gilbert and Sullivan troupe, where she was employed by the troupe's leading actress, a white woman whom Hurston calls only “Miss M——.” In her generally unrevealing autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston withholds most details of her young adult life, yet devotes a full chapter to her time with the Gilbert and Sullivan players.Footnote ¹² Hurston's travels with the troupe eventually took her to Baltimore; from there she moved to Washington, DC to enroll in Howard University, where she began writing in a variety of genres, including plays composed while studying with Thomas Montgomery Gregory.Footnote ¹³ As Hurston navigated American landscapes and American narratives, then, she arrived as a writer through the routes of theatrical performance; but these early migrations on southern and mid-Atlantic theatre circuits have often been erased from Hurston's writing career.Footnote ¹⁴

Scholars engaging with Hurston's work in the theatre have tended to focus on the prolific decade following her arrival in New York at the height of the Harlem Renaissance.Footnote ¹⁵ This fruitful period saw Hurston immersed in theatrical activity, forging connections with other major players in the Renaissance while developing an independent reputation for her creations on the stage. During these years, Hurston presented work on Broadway and in regional theatres; she also performed on Broadway herself.Footnote ¹⁶ She made multiple visits to Florida and other fieldwork sites, including the trip to Eau Gallie during which she transcribed Lovelace's sermon, and she drew on this material in her plays as well as in other writing. Her theatrical renown reached a peak with The Great Day, an elaborate pageant that opened in 1932 and was staged in various iterations over subsequent years, fueling her reputation as a leading figure in Black performance. However, Hurston's investments in the theatre changed significantly after her patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason—who legally owned the rights to all that Hurston wrote during the period when she supplied financial support—prohibited her from undertaking future ventures in the theatre. After Mason cut off all of Hurston's funding in 1933, leaving Hurston technically free to pursue her own creative priorities but in an even more financially precarious position than she had been under Mason's patronage, she faced increasing obstacles to undertaking major projects for the stage.

Hurston's interest in performance did not diminish during the later 1930s, however, but rather found new directions of expression.Footnote ¹⁷ During this time, her growing distance from the scene of Harlem theatre correlated with a more expansive view of performance traversing multiple sites and venues. Her reputation as a theatre artist grew among the public and, significantly, within the field of higher education. In 1939, Hurston was invited to start a new drama program at what was then called the North Carolina College for Negroes.Footnote ¹⁸ Papers such as the Chicago Defender reported on Hurston's appointment, while the New York Times mentioned her work in its gossip column on plays and playwrights.Footnote ¹⁹ The fact that Hurston was hired specifically to develop a program in drama—not as a general member of the English department—speaks to the importance of Hurston's theatre to her position within communities of her own time.

Another transformation was underway in Hurston's work in the later 1930s, one that had profound implications for her theories of performance. During these years, Hurston broadened her interest in a wide variety of religious practices, as practiced both in Christian churches and in other religious traditions of the Atlantic world. Hurston's interests in drama and religion were closely entwined, such that her encounters with religion shaped her view of performance, and vice versa. Although Hurston had composed dramas and essays about religion from the start of her writing career, in the late 1930s these interests opened new pathways for her to track the movement of embodied cultural practices across the African diaspora. In 1937, she embarked on an extended ethnographic study of Haitian Vodou, presenting it as a world religion in comparative perspective and undertaking a Vodou initiation ceremony. From 1939 to 1940, while working at North Carolina College, Hurston conducted ethnographic research on the Sanctified Church movement, framing this fieldwork as a potential source for her dramatic writing.Footnote ²⁰

Shifting our attention to the later 1930s confronts us with the question of how Hurston's dramas about religion relate to her studies of religion as performance. Hurston's work during this period helps to clarify that her interest in performance was not confined to producing plays in the theatre, but rather extended more broadly to dance, music, film acting, and ritual as well as scripted drama. These years of Hurston's writing life emphasize the role of religion not only as source material, but as an ongoing font of fascination that offered Hurston a means of thinking through the collaborative dynamics of performance making in everyday life.

Backstage Dramas: Hurston Acting the Observer

Hurston was in step with her Harlem Renaissance contemporaries in identifying theatre as an especially charged form of Black expression. For many Renaissance writers, theatre was a familiar metaphor that served to capture the performative dimensions of racialized identity in the United States. Du Bois famously wrote of the “double-consciousness” that resulted from the rift between the two halves of his dual identity, as an American and a Black man; this “sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others” requires a continuous performance and a constantly evolving awareness of one's audience.Footnote ²¹ In Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem “We Wear the Mask,” the speaker assumes a “mask that grins and lies,” concealing interior suffering from the gaze of spectators.Footnote ²² Similarly, Hughes represents a rift between the performing subject and the inner self in poems such as “The Jester,” “Minstrel Man,” and “The Black Clown.”Footnote ²³ Each of these writers evokes the theatre in order to dramatize how racial difference is staged within a white supremacist culture. Theatre is figured as compounding social harm by forcing the subject into a self-alienated position, estranging their social performance of self from their authentic identity.

Hurston carved out her own distinct approach to theorizing Black performance, resisting this equivalency between theatre and inauthenticity. She disputed the idea that Black people engaging with majority-white culture inevitably enact social performances that estrange them from themselves. In her iconic essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (1928), Hurston famously asserts that “I am not tragically colored,” a statement that, on its surface, affirms the values and pleasures of Blackness.Footnote ²⁴ In another layer of meaning, however, this assertion rejects the theatrical genre of tragedy as a model of racial identification, implying that race does not accord with the generic logics of the stage. Hurston goes on to explain that while sometimes she “feels” her race, “through it all, I remain myself”; thus, she is able to address multiple audiences without risking inauthenticity.Footnote ²⁵ Hurston's essay models this form of plural address to white and Black readers, in that it presents simultaneous and sometimes contradictory messages about the effects of anti-Black racism.Footnote ²⁶

The framing of “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” harnesses the narrative technique of plural address by introducing a work of theatre in which Hurston both performs and writes the script. The essay begins with a theatrical scene recalled from Hurston's childhood: perched in what she calls the “[p]roscenium box” atop the gatepost to her Eatonville home, the young Hurston would “enjoy the show” of white and Black travelers passing on the road.Footnote ²⁷ Only when the white travelers urge her to perform for them, tossing her dimes in compensation, does she register their difference from herself. The drama of this scene arises through a reversal in observer–participant relations. Roles are swapped when Hurston, once a spectator enjoying the best seat in the house, is called upon to become a performer—while the white travelers, erstwhile and unwitting actors, become her paying audience. Even so, Hurston denies that she was conscripted into performing for the white spectators, insisting that, unbeknownst to the white audience, her songs and dances were performed for her own pleasure. Hurston is able to avoid self-estrangement by scripting the rules of her own game.

Despite Hurston's important departures from the viewpoints of Du Bois, Dunbar, and Hughes regarding the compatibility of performance and authenticity, she aligned with these writers in her belief that performance is embedded in the everyday lives of African Americans. In her innovative and somewhat controversial essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression” (1934), Hurston lists “drama” as the first of several aesthetic attributes that she claims are intrinsic to Black American culture.Footnote ²⁸ Just as “Characteristics” uncovers drama in the ordinary lives of African Americans, Hurston herself experienced new dimensions of everyday life through her work with the Gilbert and Sullivan players. Hurston was the only Black person among the company; it was her first time living and working in a majority-white space. This experience enabled Hurston to gain certain forms of mobility and freedom as she navigated new geographic, intellectual, and interpersonal terrain, but it also left her increasingly cognizant of the structures of racism that were less fully manifest within the self-governed African American community of her childhood. As Hurston explores in Dust Tracks, the Gilbert and Sullivan theatre troupe introduced Hurston to new dramas of everyday life.

Composed in 1941, Hurston's memoir is the work of an adult writer, now an experienced anthropologist, looking back on her early encounters with performance through what we might call a kind of autoethnography. In Dust Tracks, Hurston shows that during her time working for the theatre company, behind-the-scenes dramas often proved more compelling than the plays presented onstage. In particular, Hurston's time in the theatre revealed to her that the roles of actor and spectator are flexible and easily reversed. Thus the grown author of Dust Tracks observes events in which the young Hurston participated, while perennially troubling the distinction between participation and observation and between action and spectatorship.

Dust Tracks flips the perspective between actor and spectator by attending to Hurston's physical position behind the scenes. Arriving at the theatre for the first time, Hurston recounts being dazzled by the aesthetics of the auditorium, which she first approached from the rear door. She recalls that “My feet mounted up the golden stairs as I entered the stage door of that theater. The sounds, the smells, the backstage jumble of things were all things to bear me up into a sweeter atmosphere.”Footnote ²⁹ The “golden stairs” of the stage door suggest imagery that Hurston elsewhere used to describe the threshold of Saint Peter's gate; for example, in her play Heaven, a stage direction indicates that “A flight of golden stairs ascends from the orchestra pit in midstage” as it rises up to heaven's entryway.Footnote ³⁰ In Dust Tracks, the architecture of the theatre also has a heavenly quality, lifting Hurston into a “sweeter atmosphere.” Hurston represents the Gilbert and Sullivan theatre as a heavenly space; similarly, in her play Heaven, the terrain of heaven itself resembles a theatre, as we see when the character of Saint Peter peeks through a peephole in the pearly gates to listen to a man playing the mouth organ. Heaven's scene of covert performance appreciation anticipates Dust Tracks’ account of Hurston, newly arrived at the theatre, listening in on a “matinee performance of H.M.S. Pinafore” from backstage.Footnote ³¹

Dust Tracks devotes particular attention to the fact that the backstage space of the theatre initiates Hurston into the erotics of race.Footnote ³² Upon joining the troupe, Hurston is conscripted into a set of erotically charged games, yet she also stands outside these processes as an observer. She is perennially subject to the whims of the company's performers, which alternate among various modes of harassment. At first Hurston is “welcomed . . . like, or as, a new play-pretty,” “stuffed with ice-cream sodas and Coca-cola”; then she becomes the target of “good backstage gags” that “played on my ignorance” by conscripting her into sexually suggestive jokes intended to shame Hurston by implying her sexual availability.Footnote ³³ As soon as the actresses finish taunting Hurston, they reverse course and usher her into their bedrooms. Their pranks are followed by solicitous overtures of intimacy: as Hurston writes, “I was welcome in everybody's coach seat and the girls used to pitch pennies to see who carried me off to their hotel rooms.”Footnote ³⁴ Soon Miss M——, Hurston's employer, objects to Hurston being “carried . . . off” by other actresses and begins to require that Hurston stay in Miss M——'s own room when she goes to bed. Hurston's description of being treated as a “play-pretty”—as if she were not a person, but an object—shuttled among the troupe's young actresses broadcasts her sense of the erotic vulnerability that attends her position as a participant observer.

Hurston's education in the precarious erotics of race deepens when she transitions from the backstage space of the theatre to the “backstage” time that follows the end of the troupe's scheduled performances. Once again, Hurston portrays the interpersonal scale of participant–observer relationships as a zone of transformation, danger, and possibility. During the two weeks between the conclusion of one production's run and the start of Miss M——'s next rehearsal, Miss M—— invites Hurston to follow her home to Boston. There Hurston discovers “some things which I did not want to know, particularly.” Hurston finds that when she and the actress are alone, Miss M—— swings wildly in her moods, from times when she is “playful as a kitten” to others when she “would be gloomy, and keep me beside her every minute.”Footnote ³⁵ To ease her moods, Miss M—— concocts a bizarre game called “Jake,” conscripting Hurston as a participant in a drama they enact in their room together. As Hurston writes of Miss M——:

The blue and red paint that Hurston and Miss M—— wear during the game of “Jake” facilitates a perverse reenactment of race, or what the scholar Adrienne Brown has called a play of “tribal bodies” engaged in “racial and gender drag.”Footnote ³⁷ In the privacy of Miss M——'s domestic space, the actress compels Hurston to reenact their racial difference as a kind of primitivist role-play. The game of “Jake” uses the performative techniques of the theatre to rationalize violence as a response to difference, even as it explores the artificial construction of racial identity. Dressed in red and blue makeup and swathed in sheet-robes, Hurston and Miss M—— seem to be ghosts of the American flag, even as their bedsheets echo the familiar iconography of the Ku Klux Klan.Footnote ³⁸ In their tribal guises—which simultaneously recall costumes donned to perpetuate racial terror in the United States—the two women forgo language, “growl[ing]” and “ambush[ing]” each other in the bedroom.

Just as striking as the complex racial performance enacted in the game of “Jake” is its potent erotic charge. The racial reenactment of “Jake” facilitates a particular form of physical contact, a “romp,” which transpires while Hurston and Miss M—— are clothed in “sheet-robes.” Far from the mannered interactions of an actress and her lady's maid, the vigorous touch licensed by the game provides a kind of emotional release: the two “laughed and yelled until [they] were exhausted.” Miss M—— is portrayed as “excessively playful,” almost hysteric, in a description that recalls nineteenth-century accounts of women's excess of sexual energy. The game of “Jake” becomes an intimate ritual for two, enabling forms of conduct and contact that lie outside the everyday—in particular, a kind of queer contact between a white woman and a Black woman. In Brown's analysis of this passage, she shows how such acts of play “briefly suspend relational scripts.”Footnote ³⁹ Having once been a backstage observer of Miss M——'s performances, Hurston finds that the behind-the-scenes space of the actress's home transforms into a theatre in its own right, such that Hurston becomes a costar in the production that Miss M—— envisions.

Both in its structure and its origins, the game of “Jake” destabilizes the relationship between observer and participant. While “Jake” seems to have been a sui generis invention born in Miss M——'s hotel room, it resonates with the plot of a popular film, A Florida Enchantment, which was released in 1914 after previously circulating as both a novel and a stage production.Footnote ⁴⁰ A Florida Enchantment narrates the story of a northern white woman and her Black maid who consume magical seeds from Africa and are transformed into men, enacting a racialized process of gender transition. The game of “Jake” echoes A Florida Enchantment in several respects, including the fact that the names given to the maid—Jane and Jack, respectively, before and after her transition to a male body—closely resemble the game's title. Miss M—— would have been too young to catch the 1896 stage version of A Florida Enchantment, but she may well have heard of it, since the show starred a well-known blackface performer from the vaudeville circuit.Footnote ⁴¹ In any case, Miss M—— might have seen the film when it was distributed shortly before Hurston joined her theatre company. We might speculate that the game of “Jake” was a form of performative fan fiction scripted by Miss M—— in collaboration with her Black Floridian employee. Viewed in this light, “Jake” traces a performative feedback loop circulating across theatre, film, and the everyday.

Within Dust Tracks, Hurston uses the game of “Jake” as an occasion to theorize racial performativity. Her description of the game recalls the forms of masked performance imagined by Dunbar and Hughes, but the currents of desire between Hurston and Miss M—— rely on acts of impersonation that traverse the boundaries of both gender and race. Moreover, Hurston's “Blue Jake” reflects the mask back on the person who compels Hurston to wear it, acting as a mirror of Miss M——'s own racial fantasies and desires. Acting together as Blue and Red Jake, Hurston and Miss M—— embody a split subjectivity; however, in contrast to Du Bois's theory of double-consciousness, that split is not located within Hurston's own self, but rather made visible in the space opened up by their reciprocal performative relations. “Jake” becomes a drama insofar as it stresses the flexibility and risk of such relations, exposing how intimate backstage spaces open into interior performative scenes.

As a memoir, Dust Tracks is the result of studied self-observation. Hurston brings an anthropologist's eye to the culture of theatre making, unveiling its structural logics and unruly performances. Flipping the script of interpersonal relationships between participants and observers, Hurston demonstrates the permeability of theatrical and everyday performance. Whether describing herself listening to H.M.S. Pinafore from the wings of the theatre or playing “Jake” in a hotel room, she continually slips between performances enacted and performances observed.

Traversing Ethnographic and Dramatic Writing in Hurston's Religious Plays

Upon Hurston's arrival in New York, she began to develop what would become her signature approach to performance making, in which she expanded representations of Black life in the theatre by exploring the intersections between ethnographic and dramatic writing. Hurston's theatrical representations of religion bring into focus the extent to which she incorporated ethnographic practices in her works for the stage. Hurston was attentive to the wider contexts of staging Black religion, often for the exoticizing gaze of white spectators, and she sought to ground the performances she created in the lived experience of Black people. Aware that her productions were performed for mixed audiences, she worked to realize her own vision for Black theatre as she migrated performance forms from homes, streets, and churches onto the stage. Like many of her contemporaries, for example, she took an interest in staging African American spirituals, and some of her dramatic sketches included spirituals that were widely known; however, Hurston criticized the practice of arranging spirituals for solo performance in concert halls, deeming this to be a false representation of a musical form that had arisen through communal participation in religious practice.Footnote ⁴² Always bearing in mind the performances of everyday life that were staged outside the theatre's walls, Hurston used her plays to center diverse modes of Black ritual.

As she conducted more extensive fieldwork and wrote more frequently for the theatre, Hurston began to repurpose material from her ethnographies for her plays and novels. Hurston's Heaven reveals the process by which she transferred material across multiple forms of writing. In 1928, Hurston had traveled to Florida to collect stories for her research on Black folklore, which was published in Mules and Men in 1935. Mules and Men opens with Hurston's arrival in Eatonville, where a figure named James Moseley tells a story about a man who died in the historic Johnstown Flood and found himself at Saint Peter's gate.Footnote ⁴³ Two years after her trip to Eatonville, Hurston was back in New York composing Heaven, a sketch in which a character called Jim shows up in front of heaven's pearly gates and boasts that he has just died in the Johnstown Flood. Heaven lets us in “behind the scenes” of Hurston's writing process, recalling the moment when she was present at the story's telling. When Moseley narrates his story in Mules and Men, he calls the main character “John,” a generic name used in many tales from African American folklore; but when Hurston writes the script of Heaven, she names this character “Jim,” evoking the person of “James Moseley.” This act of naming transports the knowing reader back to the interpersonal encounter between “Zora” and “Jim,” showing how drama is activated through an exchange between a storyteller and his audience.

In the play The Sermon in the Valley, Hurston's transposition of ethnographic material from the field to the theatre is even more direct. Premiering one year after Heaven, The Sermon in the Valley reflects Hurston's desire to re-create a church service in the theatre. While Heaven selectively alters several details of James Moseley's tale, The Sermon in the Valley aspires to complete fidelity to Hurston's sources in the field. These plays differ significantly in their representational strategies: whereas Heaven materializes a folkloric story, The Sermon in the Valley stages the process of narrating one. Heaven derives its comedy from the uncanny transposition of dramatic realism into the space of the imaginary; The Sermon in the Valley attains dramatic power through its claims to represent the real. In the latter play, then, the focus shifts from the story itself onto the storyteller and his audience, casting a spotlight on the dynamic exchange between performers and their audiences.

The central place afforded to religious and ritual practices in Hurston's ethnographic drama is not limited to Christian narratives and iconography. Rather, these plays reveal Hurston's comparativist approach to religion, which she honed through her research across multiple fieldsites. For example, Hurston had intended to include a “Conjure Ceremony” in her revue The Great Day, which was to be based on her research on Vodou practices.Footnote ⁴⁴ The planned conjure scene was removed at the behest of Charlotte Osgood Mason, who objected to Hurston including any material in the revue that had been collected on the research trips that Mason had funded; she also specifically rejected the idea of staging any material related to Vodou.Footnote ⁴⁵ Accordingly, when Hurston presented a revised version of the same revue, retitled From Sun to Sun, for a single performance at the New School for Social Research in 1932, she replaced the “Conjure Ceremony” scene with another sketch entitled The Fiery Chariot. This replacement play consists of a humorous scene in which a man tries to evade God's attempts to carry him off to heaven; like the play Heaven, it is based on a story that Hurston heard during her fieldwork in Florida, which was later published in Mules and Men.Footnote ⁴⁶ By implicitly asserting the parallels between Christianity and conjure, Hurston recognizes the practices of Vodou, often maligned and misunderstood by white Americans, as a textured cultural practice akin to Christian worship. More broadly, Hurston's observations suggest her view that both Christianity and conjure can be explained as sophisticated forms of cultural performance.

Plays such as Heaven, The Sermon in the Valley, and The Fiery Chariot unsettle the notion of a solitary author, instead broadcasting traces of their collective composition and processes of transmission. This repertoire of plays on religious themes draws us closer to Hurston's ethnographic practice, just as her ethnographic practice reveals her broad interest in performance. By synthesizing ethnographic research as theatrical performance, Hurston emphasizes that culture is assembled through diverse, collaborative, and distributed modes of enactment.

Performance Theories of Academe

The value that Hurston placed on performance as a collaborative enterprise led her to build relationships with academic institutions that could help foster her vision for the theatre. She forged connections with arts faculty at various colleges and universities, in part through the national tours of her theatrical productions. In the later 1930s, Hurston accepted invitations to found and direct drama programs at multiple academic institutions. During this period, Hurston's interest in college-level theatre, first expressed at Howard and Barnard, materialized as she herself was placed in charge of college drama programs. Of all the dimensions of Hurston's creative life that critics have explored, her roles as a faculty member and theatre instructor—let alone as an academic program director—have seldom been considered formative. However, these roles provide crucial insights into Hurston's evolving theories of performance, in that they left her with a deepened appreciation for the ways in which performance requires the coordination of material and imaginative resources behind the scenes. Through her involvement in college-level drama, Hurston became attuned to the flexible relationships between participants and observers that unfold at an institutional scale.

A full account of Hurston's achievements in university theatres requires us to acknowledge her leadership within these institutions and within the field of theatre and performance studies, even as we reckon with the many ways that academic spaces failed to recognize and support her creative voice. Hurston's teaching appointments offered broad exposure to undergraduate learning in the arts, extending her knowledge of the academic landscape beyond her own studies at the elite institutions of Howard, Barnard, and Columbia. She taught in a wide variety of academic settings, including Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, which served white students, as well as Bethune–Cookman College and North Carolina College, both historically Black institutions. Hurston also pursued, but was never granted, a teaching appointment at Fisk University in Nashville. At Bethune–Cookman, North Carolina College, and Fisk, discussions about Hurston's academic role involved the promise of launching a new course of study in drama. The administrations of these institutions recognized Hurston as a major figure in Black performance and, at least initially, valued her contributions to arts education. Yet Hurston departed each of these appointments after less than a year, signaling an imperfect alignment between her own creative process and the institutional parameters she was afforded in these academic spaces.

Teaching theatre to undergraduates transformed Hurston's views of performance during a critical period in which she transitioned from making theatre on commercial stages to theorizing performance across multiple venues and forms. During the academic year 1939–40, while working at North Carolina College, Hurston had repeated occasions to formulate her views of performance in talks delivered in academic settings. The public profile of these talks was bolstered by Hurston's credibility as the founder of a dramatic arts program; in turn, her faculty position shaped the theories of performance that she discussed. Hurston's term-bound university appointments may not have led to an ongoing career in university teaching, but they deepened her understanding of the forms of academic bureaucracy that can attend the study of theatre in higher education. Some critics have viewed these short appointments as evidence that academia was too confining for Hurston.Footnote ⁴⁷ Certainly, the fact that Hurston declined to conform to institutional expectations testifies to her unassailably independent spirit, as well as the practical and affective constraints imposed within these spaces. But Hurston's choices were also affirmative demonstrations of her commitment to working with others, in which she chose to prioritize working practices in which individuals are bound together in fair and consenting relationships. The frustrating bureaucratic experiences that Hurston encountered in academia sharpened her attention to performance and its collective potentialities, becoming an inseparable aspect of her theories of performance beyond academe.

Hurston's involvement in college drama programs also helps to provide a more complete picture of the reciprocal relationships between university theatres and commercial stages during the 1930s, especially for Black performance. Recent scholarship on the theatre and dance of the Renaissance has shown how it was animated by a transnational network of Black performers traversing sites in Europe and the Caribbean.Footnote ⁴⁸ However, the internal migrations of Black theatre artists across venues in the United States have received less critical attention.Footnote ⁴⁹ Received narratives of Black performance have positioned New York stages as independent of the expanding university theatre circuit, despite the fact that Alain Locke, himself a faculty member at Howard University, called for the revivification of Black theatre in terms that explicitly identified the importance of universities to this vision.Footnote ⁵⁰ Hurston's drama makes clear that Black performance networks were strengthened through relationships to university faculty and university stages. Her own productions passed through both commercial and university theatres. The circulation of these shows facilitated her connections to the institutions where she later held academic positions, while her faculty appointments broadened her opportunities as a dramatist.

The most important factor in Hurston's acceptance of these positions was the fact that they offered a valuable platform for sharing her vision for the Black performing arts. Upon her arrival at North Carolina College, Hurston sought to expand her involvement in the theatre by making full use of her regional connections. In 1939 and 1940, Hurston corresponded actively with Paul Green, the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright who was based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and she participated in a writing workshop that Green hosted at his home. During this time, she also became connected to UNC's repertory theatre, the Carolina Playmakers, delivering talks on drama at Playmakers and elsewhere.Footnote ⁵¹ In October 1939, for example, she gave a talk at UNC's Playmakers Theatre on “Making a Negro Folk Theater,” describing that “our drama must be like us or it doesn't exist.”Footnote ⁵² In the claim that Black drama should be “like us,” we may hear an echo of Du Bois's injunction that Black theatre should be “about us,” “by us,” “for us,” and “near us.”Footnote ⁵³ In showing that Black drama should also be like us, however, Hurston asserts the need for authentic representations of Blackness on the American stage, revealing Hurston's theory that drama emerges by galvanizing the relationship between the actor and the spectator.

During this period, Hurston also sharpened her sense of theatre as a technical art that requires the specialized skills of an array of arts practitioners. Writing to the president of North Carolina College, Dr. James E. Shepherd, Hurston offered recommendations for new paths of study in the dramatic arts program: “I suggest a course in playwriting, a course in play direction, a course in play production which would include, lighting, scenic designing, construction, costume designing, etc. These courses are not only basic and necessary, they are irreducible minimum if anything at all is to be accomplished.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Hurston's recommendations for the North Carolina College drama program lay out a bold agenda, anticipating curricular changes instituted decades later in many American theatre programs. The technical aspects of theatre making that Hurston mentions, while already familiar to her from her work on the commercial stage, rose in significance when considered as an essential aspect of theatre pedagogy. Hurston's experience with college instruction thus reinforced the value she assigned to the collective labor of performance that transpires behind the scenes.

Moreover, Hurston's experience teaching drama revealed to her that institutions of higher education can themselves be spaces of pomp, performance, and inauthenticity. In her essay “The Rise of the Begging Joints,” which voices a thinly veiled rebuke of Shepherd's leadership, Hurston skewers the piety of faculty who condescend to their students and potential donors. When such professors tout their contributions to education, she explains, they “tootch out the mouth to say this so that it oozes out in an unctuous tone of voice. There is also a ceremonial face-making, with eye-gleams, to go along with the sound.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Hurston has no sympathy for these insincere performances by the professoriate, and captures her disdain by mimetically representing the voices of sycophantic university leaders as they boast about their “g-r-e-a-t institution.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Taken as a whole, the essay shows Hurston becoming an observer of an institutional situation in which she had been a participant, exposing and critiquing an uneven balance of cultural power in university environments. By making a spectacle of the faculty and aligning herself with an observing audience, Hurston shows how drama's capacity to reassign flexibly the roles of observer and participant delivers its social force. “The Rise of the Begging Joints” thus enters into dialogue with Hurston's earlier essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” in that Hurston's account of faculty performances recalls the scene of the young Hurston watching passersby from the “proscenium box” of her Eatonville home. When those in power attempt to compel her to perform, Hurston plays along only insofar as it sustains her own pleasure, always recognizing who is really putting on the show.

Sanctified Performance

During the late 1930s, Hurston expanded her theories of performance through immersion in forms of religious practice enacted in Black Protestant congregations in the South. Having revealed the critical role of offstage actors in the making of performance, and having emphasized the flexible interrelationship of performers and spectators, Hurston now extended her explorations to explore the continuity between theatre and religious observance, blurring the boundaries between performance onstage and in everyday life. While working at North Carolina College, Hurston became absorbed in a new ethnographic project revolving around a Sanctified Church congregation in the Sea Islands city of Beaufort, South Carolina. At least initially, Hurston imagined this ethnographic labor to be closely tied to her work as a theatre practitioner, explaining to playwright Paul Green that the “research in religious experience” that she was conducting in Beaufort could provide “a great deal of raw music” that she and Green might “work up from time to time” in theatrical collaborations she hoped they would undertake together.Footnote ⁵⁷ The project continued Hurston's technique of sourcing theatrical material from her ethnographic research, and especially from sites of religious observance; significantly, however, Hurston's study of the Sanctified Church recognizes religious acts as a form of theatre in themselves. By the year 1940, then, Hurston was not only importing religious practices from the church to the stage, but also demonstrating how the conventions of the theatre were already manifest in religious observance.

Hurston had developed an interest in the Sanctified Church some years before she arrived in Beaufort, and in studies of the movement she describes it as a form of theatrical performance for the masses. In her 1938 essay “The Sanctified Church,” Hurston discusses the populist orientation of the movement, describing the church as a “protest against the highbrow tendency in Negro Protestant congregations” as well as a rejection of the more staid forms of worship in white Protestant churches.Footnote ⁵⁸ As Hurston shows, the Sanctified Church's aesthetics of communal participation reflect its populist orientation. Services in the church unfold through an improvised public performance: the preacher is answered by the congregants, who play a role that is “something like a Greek chorus.” The preacher's audience, Hurston elaborates, “‘pick him up’ on every telling point and emphasize it,” a process that is also called “bearing him up.”Footnote ⁵⁹ In this essay, the sensations of being borne up that Hurston cites as a formative technique of worship in the Sanctified Church resonate with her description of entering the Gilbert and Sullivan theatre for the first time.

Hurston's essay on the Sanctified Church reveals her attention to the drama of participant–observer relationships as they unfold at the scale of communal enactment. Her analysis situates the church service as a locus of Black cultural and aesthetic expression that must be understood as a collaborative performance piece. Church, for Hurston, is not only a site of devotional practice and community building, but also of imagination, improvisation, and artistic creation that stokes other aspects of Black expressive life. While the service might appear to consist of a single performer—the preacher—addressing his audience from the pulpit, Hurston's essay shows that the drama of the Sanctified Church service arises through reciprocal exchanges among all present at the event. The cumulative effect, Hurston explains, is that “the service is really drama with music.” Unlike at most Black Protestant churches, the Sanctified Church service is not a “set thing” but rather a “framework upon which to hang more songs,” such that “[e]very opportunity to introduce a new rhythm is eagerly seized upon.” Through the use of the passive voice in this passage, Hurston draws attention to the distributed agency that brings such songs and rhythms into being. Hurston also emphasizes that worship in the Sanctified Church consists not of performing songs already in existence, but rather of collective composition: as she exclaims, “The whole movement of the Sanctified church is a rebirth of song-making!”Footnote ⁶⁰ The entire congregation brings the Sanctified Church service into being; as the preacher's voice rings out from the pulpit to the pews, the congregation becomes his “chorus,” converting the church space into a theatre.

Hurston's observations on the performative nature of services in the Sanctified Church return to themes addressed in her earlier essay “Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals,” in which Hurston argues that the performances of Black spirituals popularized by figures such as James Weldon Johnson are not authentic representations of the form. Hurston asserts instead that spirituals must be understood as collectively created art forms composed through the congregation's improvisatory participation. In this essay, which addresses Black Protestant churches more generally rather than the specific practices of the Sanctified Church, Hurston shows how the soundscape of religious observance adheres to a cohesive set of aesthetic principles. As she describes, the preacher's service is comprised of “definite forms” that require “technical artistry.”Footnote ⁶¹ These elements reveal that “the religious service is a conscious art expression. The artist is consciously creating—carefully choosing every syllable and every breath” (871). The “art expression” that Hurston names as a defining feature of the sermon is emphasized in the essay through parenthetical notations that refer to the preacher's embodied craft. Portions of the essay read like stage directions, with expressive parenthetical phrases that index embodied actions related to the sermon's performance. Identifying the characteristic sounds of the preacher, for instance, Hurston writes that “Instead of permitting the breath to drain out, when the wind gets too low for words, the remnant is expelled violently. Example: (inhalation) ‘And oh!’; (full breath) ‘my Father and my wonder-working God’; (explosive exhalation) ‘ha!’” (872). The parenthetical “inhalation” and “exhalation” summon the reader into an embodied reperformance of the preacher's lines, while emphasizing the “technical artistry” achieved through the manipulation of the breath. Like an opera singer, the preacher hones his vocal performance such that he can swing into “an accelerando passage” that Hurston compares to “a solo at the Metropolitan” (873). These portions of “Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals” read like a sequel to the play The Sermon in the Valley, as if Hurston were annotating a transcription of the sermon for the stage.

While likening the technical skill of the preacher to that of a performing artist, the “Spirituals” essay also shows how the preacher thinks like a director by considering the spatial arrangement of the church as if it were a stage. Hurston describes a convention of the sermon in which the preacher lays the scene, presenting what she calls the “dramatic setting” as the service commences. This moment involves “the artist calling attention to the physical situation of himself and the church” (873) in order to orient the congregation within their shared space. The sonic structure of the sermon mimetically represents these spatial arrangements. The preacher's “accelerando” delivery brings him to a “height” of solo performance that also emphasizes his raised position in the pulpit, while other moments in the service harmonize the sounds made by the preacher and the congregation, shifting attention to the larger space of the church (873–4). Hurston concludes that “the prayer is an obligato over and above the harmony of the assembly” (874), evoking spatial and musical aspects of the service to reveal the interdependency between the preacher and his audience.

These two essays indicate that Hurston had already arrived at an understanding of religious observance as performance before she arrived in Beaufort in spring 1940. Her stay in South Carolina, however, proved formative to Hurston's evolving theories of religious performativity, in that through this research visit, she situated her own embodied enactments within the performative milieu of religious practice in this community. Hurston's emergent insights about the flexible participant–observer relationships that are channeled through religious performativity are particularly evident in an ethnographic film produced during Hurston's research stay in Beaufort. Created by Hurston with the assistance of two white collaborators, as part of an ethnographic research project directed by Hurston's friend and fellow anthropologist Jane Belo, the film includes footage of several services at the Reverend George Washington's Commandment Keeper Seventh Day Church of God and also shows Hurston participating in these services.Footnote ⁶² The team managed to generate more than forty minutes of footage using a hand-cranked camera and produced several sound recordings captured at a different speed.Footnote ⁶³ The existence of this film helps to elucidate connections between Hurston's ethnographic research on the Sanctified Church and her performance practice.Footnote ⁶⁴

The field footage of the Commandment Keeper Church reveals Hurston's thoughts on participant–observer relations in their most complex and tangled arrangements at the scale of the community. The film explores the reciprocal dynamic between the Reverend Washington and the members of this congregation, but it also widens its view to consider the relationships among the congregants and Hurston, the white filmmakers assisting her, and other white members of the local community. Each shot of the film offers a new angle from which to consider the changing configurations of observers and participants in this form of religious observance, showing how drama arises through their concentric levels of participation in the service.

Within the film's innermost circle of attention, the camera explores the relationship between participants and observers by following the interactions between the Reverend Washington and his congregants. In one segment, the camera enters the confined space of the church interior as the Reverend delivers a sermon before approximately a dozen worshippers. Consistent with Hurston's observations in her essays, the film shows how the church service turns on acts of collaborative composition. The preacher and the congregants sing and pray simultaneously, collectively bringing the sermon into being; the camera shows multiple focal points within the room, often panning from one participant to another to demonstrate that there is no central figure orchestrating the event. The film also shows worshippers entering into states of religious ecstasy or trance, illustrating how this amplifies the energy circulating between the preacher and the congregation; the preacher's sermon helps to bring on these trances, even as they spur the preacher into more fervent states of prayer.

The film also attends to Hurston's place within this scene, showing how, as an ethnographer of this event, Hurston slides between the categories of observer and participant. The camera calls attention to Hurston's simultaneous status as an insider and outsider at the church gathering; she participates in the worship service and appears among the congregants in most shots, yet she is set apart by her demeanor and her clothes.Footnote ⁶⁵ Hurston participates fully in the service by making music and praying, but she appears to have a less intensely pious approach to the service than the residents of Beaufort. In one sequence of the film, for example, the congregant Julia Jones is shown in the foreground as she begins to experience religious ecstasy, her limbs and torso convulsing in apparently involuntary movements.Footnote ⁶⁶ Eyes closed, Jones rises to dance, her feet and limbs keeping time to music played by the congregants; the camera pans down to focus on her feet, emphasizing the polyrhythmic and body-percussive sounds reverberating in this space.Footnote ⁶⁷ Hurston appears in the shot behind the dancing Jones, smiling broadly with pleasure as she rattles her shakers.

While continuing to focus on the woman experiencing the trance, the shot pivots to take in the dancing woman and Hurston as an assemblage, positioning Hurston at the center of the frame. As the shot pans up, it appears as though Hurston's body merges with that of the dancing woman. Hurston's shakers gesture outward, seeming to be extensions of Jones's arms as they swing from her elbows. Like Hurston's account of the game of “Jake” that she once played with Miss M——, this shot enables us to witness the charged proximity between these women's bodies, which have unequal power to alter to the rules of the game and yet mirror one another in performance. However, the scene also expunges the exploitative shadow of “Jake,” in that it shows Hurston and the dancing congregant sharing in an exuberant performance in which two consenting actors enjoy their bodies’ free range of movement within a space that centers their creative expression.

A third excerpt of the film, shot during an outdoor service at the Commandment Keeper Church, presents a less sanguine view of the conditions of observation that govern the performative encounter of religious observance. In this segment, the congregants arrange themselves in an arc, indicating that they recognize the worship service as a performance for an audience, although no members of that audience are shown within the camera's frame. Hurston appears in the scene once again, playing the drums; here too her difference from the other congregants is marked by her dress and demeanor, disrupting the participant–observer divide. While the other worshippers look out at the audience, Hurston keeps her eyes on other congregants or turned down to the ground. This camera angle is held for several minutes without interruption, until the shot cuts to reveal the audience for whom the congregants have been performing all along: a group of young white men lounging on the grass, laughing with each other and clutching their knees as if the service were a leisure activity. As the service concludes, the Reverend Washington extends his hat to the boys, asking them for contributions; several boys turn from him disdainfully, almost smirking, while another puts money in the hat with a gesture that emphasizes the imbalance of power between him and the preacher. Like the dimes tossed at the young Hurston in her “proscenium box,” this exchange produces the white spectators as an audience with the power to determine the parameters of the performance. The camera's revelation of the worshippers’ inhospitable audience retroactively assigns meaning to Hurston's downward-glancing eyes, which decline to meet the boys’ indifferent or derisive gaze.

This uncomfortable scene grows even more unsettling when the camera cuts yet again to show four men in suits and hats who, it seems, are also present at the scene of worship. Three men who appear to be white face the camera; two of them stand beside a car, while the third steps from its driver's seat. The fourth man, who is Black, faces the other three, holding out what may be an inverted tambourine in which he is collecting change. At first the white men obstruct the Black man's path; after a pause, during which one of the white men gives him a coin, they allow him to pass. These white outsiders seem to lend the service only partial attention, as if they could bring the performance to an abrupt conclusion at any moment by exercising their racial power to control Black bodies in space. Standing apart, these men may be more invested in observing the white boys’ performances of derision as they interact with the preacher than in watching the service itself. The white boys, thinking themselves observers, also become participants in this racial drama, finding an audience in the adult men who enforce the outer boundaries of this playing space.

The Commandment Keeper Church film reveals how Hurston transitioned from rendering ethnography as performance, as in the play The Sermon in the Valley, to positioning herself as a performer in her own ethnography. In the Sanctified Church, as in Hurston's plays about religious practice, the interchange between observer and participant generates a dramatic situation. The film foregrounds the space of encounter created through the Commandment Keeper Church service in order to reveal how this scene is produced through collective cultural artistry. It also exposes how white spectators, through their transactional engagements with the participants in the service, reinscribe a separate space of cultural power. Further, the film demonstrates how the relationships among participants and observers in this service are always cascading, such that individuals who at first seem to be members of the audience turn out to be performers when we adopt a broader view of the scene. Hurston's work in Beaufort thus presents her creative work from an array of angles: as an ethnographer, filmmaker, congregant, audience member, musician, and actor. Performing her role in the church for both sides of the camera, Hurston shows how her creative labors are sparked by her ability to traverse the space between observation and participation, freely crossing the threshold of the scene.

Participating in Performance Theory

The confluence of these experiences in religious observance and theatrical practice enabled Hurston to formulate a theory of performance that spans religious and secular stages. This theory rests on the reciprocal engagement of participants and observers: when these groups become interdependent, a dramatic situation emerges. Crediting Hurston with this fundamental insight into performance enables us to name her contributions to performance theory avant la lettre. Much of the work that has shaped the field of performance studies—from that of anthropologist Victor Turner to works by Dwight Conquergood and E. Patrick Johnson—hangs on this methodological interdependence of performance and ethnography, which Hurston was among the first to explore.Footnote ⁶⁸

Retroactively assigning Hurston the title of performance theorist, however, does little to recognize her pathbreaking routes within the academy or to remedy the biases that have resulted in her historical exclusion from the canon of performance theory. As Anthea Kraut has discussed in debating whether to describe Hurston as a “choreographer,” a title that Hurston herself never claimed, this dilemma “provides an opportunity to re-assess the very terms we use” to describe the production of performance and the theories that surround it.Footnote ⁶⁹ Hurston's work shows us that performance theory emerged in dialogue with—and in many cases, as an appropriation of—the work of transdisciplinary scholar-artists whose creative labor was not accommodated on the midcentury American stage.

Hurston's creative work traces the looping movement of performance across media and environments, from film to theatre to the performance of everyday life. Through her diverse experiences in in theatres, colleges, and churches in the late 1930s, her labors as an ethnographer and as a performer became increasingly entwined. These journeys in making and theorizing theatre were facilitated by her passage across religious and secular institutions. Hurston's work for the stage places religion in the foreground of theatre making, demonstrating the porous boundaries that separate scripted drama from the virtuosic embodied practices of religion's cultural performances.