For the arts in Europe the 1920s were a time of so-called negrophilia (see Clifford Reference Clifford and Hollier1989, 901–908), characterized by fascination for African-American forms, such as jazz and the Charleston, and art forms developed on the African continent. In both the production and the reception of art, the complexity of cultures on the African continent was not regarded in a differentiated manner and transatlantic African-American culture was not perceived with any degree of specificity. Two parallel phenomena can be observed during this period: (1) European theater obsessively incorporated/cannibalized the “foreign” (Haitzinger and Hauser Reference Haitzinger and Hauser2010, n.p.), and (2) everything that was connoted as “black” and/or appeared as such was equated with the imaginary realm of Africa. France was (still) one of the most important colonial powers in this period. In the late nineteenth century, after the Berlin Conference (1884–1885), France, in competition with other European countries, had established a colonialist state encompassing over twenty million people in the western and equatorial African areas. The Berlin Conference, also known as the Congo Conference, organized by the first chancellor of Germany, Otto von Bismarck, regulated European colonization and trade in Africa during the imperialist period.
Theoretically revisiting historical works of the 1920s that developed within such a negrophilic framework alongside contemporary pieces that relate to such works can be viewed as an attack on this very framework, an attempt to “unlearn” the Eurocentrism inherent in its cannibalistic processes. Such a revisiting allows for acknowledging that Africanistic contributions may bring about the appearance of more pluralistic views of Africanistic presences. Here, the term “Africanistic draws on Brenda Dixon Gottschild's viewpoint, which rejects a narrow territorial or implicitly colonial understanding of a “black” continent or a “black” race and instead takes into account the multilayered and complex resonances and presences of Africas, both concrete and imaginary (Berliner Reference Berliner2002; see also Gordon Reference Gordon2009):
I use it here to signify African and African American resonances and presences, trends and phenomena. It indicates the African influence, past and present, and those forms and forces that arose as products of the African diaspora, including traditions and genres such as blues, jazz, rhythm and blues and hip hop. It denotes the considerable impact of African and African American culture on modern arts and letters. … In sum, the term denotes concepts and practices that exist in Africa and the African diaspora and have their sources and practices from Africa. (Gottschild Reference Gottschild1996, xiv)
The contemporary focus on the (empowering) Africanistic acknowledges the complex entanglements of cultural influences in (historical and contemporary) choreography.
In this article, I will first analyze two contemporary works—La Création du Monde 1923–2012 (2012) by Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula and one mysterious thing said e. e. cummings (2002) by Portuguese choreographer Vera Mantero—both of which take up signature pieces dating from the 1920s and can be seen to critique and challenge the negrophilic framework those works were created in. Paradoxically, I will demonstrate that the Africanistic as plural, nonessentialist/essentializing features can be identified in the very productions that Linyekula and Mantero criticize: both productions, I will argue, are examples of Africanistic presences in the 1920s. Following the analyses of Linyekula's and Mantero's works, I will then sketch out an image of Africanistic presences in the Ballets Suédois's La Création du Monde 1923–2012 (1923) and in La Revue Nègre (1925), the show in which Josephine Baker most famously appeared. Both might be considered signature pieces of their time, marginalized in the canon of dance historiography until their rediscovery by contemporary dance artists such as Mantero and Linyekula, by scholars, predominantly from the United States, working in cultural studies and historical disciplines (Baer Reference Baer1995; Cheng Reference Cheng2001; Henderson Reference Henderson2008; Bennetta Reference Bennetta2007; Lepecki Reference Lepecki2006; McCarren Reference McCarren2003), and by exhibition projects in the visual arts.
La Création du Monde 1923–2012: Polemic
In 2012 Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula—recognized as a central figure in European contemporary choreography and known for his critical practice—produced a piece titled La Création du Monde 1923–2012, referring to the 1923 production of the same name by Les Ballets Suédois, which has been referred to as a “ballet nègre” and was recreated in 2000 by dance scholar Millicent Hodson and art historian Kenneth Archer.Footnote 1 The piece begins with Linyekula's own forty-minute choreography, danced by twenty-four dancers from the Ballet de Lorraine as a so-called prologue, followed by a polemically formulated rhetorical accusation on the part of the only dancer of color on stage against the audience and Les Ballets Suédois, in which the artists of historical modernity are accused of staging a “nigger ballet without niggers” (German Dance Congress Reference Congress2013). The reconstruction of the original piece from 1923 is then performed. In the end, the figure performed by the dancer of color rebels against historical “blindness in relation to the wound of Africa” and the suppression of the “similarity of the suffering experienced” in Europe during the First World War and in Africa as a result of colonial violence (German Dance Congress Reference Congress2013). This is a lament permeated by rage that makes reference to the current situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in the cultural memory of which the trauma and wounds of colonial rule seem merely replaced by a neocolonialist situation through the exploitation of natural resources by the Western world.
In certain ways, Linyekula's artistic approach is reminiscent of the programmatic aims of the francophone politico-literary negritude movement, founded in the 1930s by Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Léon Damas as well as of the 1950s Pan-Africanistic movement, which aimed to strengthen a “black” identity and community on an artistic and political level. In order to provide a basis for political programs, both these movements were based on an essentialist view and universal ontology of “blackness” (Butler Reference Butler and Wirth2002, 317). In the Congo of the 1960s, this black-white dichotomy was intensified by the so-called authenticity program of the corrupt dictator Mobutu Sese-Sekos, whose aims were directed at autonomy from the imperial West and the nationalization of state identity. Congolese anthropologist and literary scholar V. Y. Mudimbe writes about these historical phenomena: “the alienation caused by colonialism constitutes the thesis, the African ideologies of otherness (black personality and Negritude) the antithesis and the political liberation the synthesis” (Mudimbe Reference Mudimbe1988, 93). In other words, the construction of a black-white dichotomy and “racial order” is an immediate consequence of colonialism that established a “colonial membrane”Footnote 2 (Kentridge Reference Kentridge2015) between cultures, which is still effective today.
In Faustin Linyekula's production and reflections—as presented in a videotaped panel discussion at the German Dance Congress (2013)—such dichotomous essentialisms become recognizable in the following four ways: first, the positing of a “black” outsider figure with whose representation Linyekula identifies: “I did not need to recognize myself physically on the scene. I needed a black body” (German Dance Congress Reference Congress2013). In conversation with the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, Faustin Linyekula considers the figure of Kazadi, a “black servant” characterized by certain movement qualities such as pulsation, “a vibrating in the hips” (German Dance Congress Reference Congress2013). Second, the (uni)formation of the “white” corps de ballet. Third, the simplistic historical quotation of La Création du Monde 1923–2012, rendered stereotypical through its decontextualization and not followed by a recontextualization. Fourth, the rhetorical polemic against the ballet nègre, spoken by the only dancer of color in the production, Djodjo Kazadi, to further stress the importance of his difference and of the final scene, prior to this speech. In that scene Kazadi is primarily seen in the position of an observer, only sporadically taking part in the work's activity.
In the prologue of Linyekula's choreography, the dancing figures are initially recognizable as singular but subsequently are transformed into a uniform group—a process, as I will show, in direct opposition to what happens in the Ballets Suédois's work—by means of a uniform movement vocabulary from the repertory of contemporary ballet and dance techniques as well as through a repetitive choreography. The costume designs of tight, shimmering jerseys intensify the impression of uniformity and “whiteness” of the dancers. Kazadi is staged as an outside figure, he is not part of the collective, and his hip movements are overemphasized.
There are moments of an apparent but not yet effective subversion of form in Linyekula's choreography that is coordinated and regulated in terms of movement technique. The movement forms do not contribute to the subversion of an order; rather, transgression takes place through the rhetorical gesture of anger in the epilogue. Linyekula polemicizes against what he perceives as the Ballets Suédois's “blind spot”—the company's conception and realization of an African ballet without dancers of color and its artistic production/staging of a phantasmagoric Africa—by articulating an accusation following the presentation of the “original” as reconstructed by Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer without any recontextualization. The piece leaves me as a spectator with a feeling of incompleteness due to its polemical attitude contained within words and, paradoxically again, to its obvious uniformation of bodies and the representation of an outside figure, rather than differentiated choreographic structures. The homogenous group refers to the tradition of an exclusively “white” European corps de ballet against which Linyekula polemicizes.
one mysterious thing said e. e. cummings: Melancholy
In 1996 Portuguese choreographer Vera Mantero staged a production with an unusual title: one mysterious thing said e. e. cummings. Seventy-two years after Josephine Baker's danse sauvage in the finale of the 1925 Parisian Revue Nègre, and twenty-five years after the Portuguese Carnation Revolution (1974) and after the end of the Portuguese colonial wars, a figure appears on stage that seems to resemble the 1920s dancer. The piece starts in a completely dark theater, where the audience hears for some moments undefined knocking noises on the wooden floor. Suddenly there is complete silence; someone/something seems to be positioned center stage. In a tightly focused light cone, a masklike female face wearing music-hall-style makeup (artificially white skin, glittering blue eye shadow, long artificial eyelashes, and a bright red mouth) gradually becomes apparent, her facial expression calm yet alert. The act of a poetic speaking through the body is initiated: words are repeated with varying accentuation in utterance and gesture, the physiologically marked phonology resembling that of a tragic lament.Footnote 3
An intolerance
A non-vision
An inability
A desire
An emptiness
An emptiness
An emptiness
An emptiness
A tenderness
A fall
An abyss
A joy
(Mantero Reference Mantero1996)Footnote 4
The rest of the body progressively becomes more visible; in contrast to the face, and with the exception of the hands, the body is covered in brown makeup. On the forehead, the typical curl refers to the stage(d) figure of Josephine Baker. The simultaneous appearance of a white-and-black body renders the phantasm of the essentialist racial construct transparent. The third aspect of the “costume,” initially audible, then perceptible as a result of the instability of the figure, and finally visible, are goat hoofs, on which Vera Mantero stands on demi-pointe: “The doubly racialized woman uncovers yet another trap of colonialistic, patriarchal, and choreographic subjectivities—her body is also bestial” (Lepecki Reference Lepecki2006, 115). Mantero's mise-en-scène and choreography does not only refer to the dance of Josephine Baker, but also to E. E. Cummings's article on revue theater and Josephine Baker's Vive la Folie, published in 1926. It is no coincidence that the title of the piece is a modified borrowing from Cummings: “a mysterious unkillable Something” becomes “one mysterious thing”—this is only one of several links between Cummings's text and Mantero's piece.Footnote 5 In the unfolding of the performance, sweat leaves traces on the painted body. These become visible as white scars. Movement is limited to a standing on the goat hoofs: the dancer's motor activities consist only of a constant shifting of body weight to maintain a precarious balance and of a specific articulation of arms, hands, and fingers to form poetic gestures characterized by a high variability in the expenditure and distribution of energy.
Photo 1. Vera Mantero in one mysterious thing said e. e. cummings, Reference Mantero1996. Photo by Jorge Gonçalves, courtesy of Jorge Gonçalves.
In one mysterious thing said e. e. cummings, we can observe the simultaneous appearance of three imagines (a concept interweaving the notions of image and imagination) that may be situated in the “melancholic field of European postcoloniality”: the colonized slave's body, the sexualized body of the revue theater, and the instrumentalized ballet body—three body types that share the experience of pain (Lepecki Reference Lepecki2006, 122). Mantero's corporeal, poetic lament becomes the expression of the radical isolation of a plural figure, permitting a transsubjective view of the (political and aesthetic) cruelty of colonialism. A second essential aspect is the—shaded—elucidation through Vera Mantero's dancing body of the comedic and parodic qualities of Josephine Baker's performance style as a means of subversion of clichés and stereotypes.
The contemporary productions of Faustin Linyekula and Vera Mantero are marked by acts of formalization and sharpening of figures in a postcolonial narrative. But while one mysterious thing said e. e. cummings establishes a discursive capacity in dance itself, in La Création du Monde 1923–2012 dance's capacity to generate ideas and polemicize vanishes into a “series of quotations”—of the outsider figure “of color,” of European dance techniques, and of historical recreation.Footnote 6
Transgression of Form and Decomposition: The Ballets Suédois's La Création du Monde 1923–2012
La Création du Monde 1923–2012 (The Creation of the World) was produced in the Paris of 1923 by Rolf de Maré, founder of Les Ballets Suédois (1920–25) and the second great impresario of modern ballet after Sergei Diaghilev and his more well-known Ballets Russes. Four European artists worked on the elaboration of the ballet, which is based on African creation myths: writer and librettist Blaise Cendrars, composer Darius Milhaud, visual artist Fernand Léger, and choreographer/dancer Jean Börlin. La Création du Monde 1923–2012, according to Fernand Léger the “only possible Ballet Nègre in the world” (Baer Reference Baer1995, 27), was based on Cendrar's Anthropologie Nègre, a collection of retold myths and fairy tales from Africa published in 1921. In the adaptation for the libretto, insects, mammals, birds, and, finally, man and woman, are seen to emerge from an initially formless entity; three magical deities are also present. The work was situated in the context of the Ballets Suédois's orientation toward a choreographed and rhythmical “image theater” (it is not coincidental that Blaise Cendrars writes as a tribute to Jean Börlin: “You don't know how to dance”).Footnote 7
Through Hodson and Archer's reconstruction—even if changes were introduced, such as the “improvement” of the costumes, which were made of wood and cardboard in the 1920s, by means of new technologies that expand the dancers’ movement range—it is possible to make some observations about the original ballet. The choreography is based on the execution of a simple repertory of steps and gestures. The motor activities of the figures are limited to rhythmical movements in space (walking, jumping, turning) in combination with extensive gestures that are specific to the respective characters (Gods, their messengers, magical figures, birds, monkeys, insects), and the gestures are designed correspondingly. Hence, the comic monkeys are acrobatic while the birds move en pointe. A second striking observation is the symmetry of the choreographic order after the first scenario of formlessness and chaos, a symmetry further underlined by the pairing of twenty-four figures overall (with the exception of the three Gods). The finale—the so-called “spring of humanity”—is, finally, staged as a collage of popular dances from the 1920s.
In La Création du Monde 1923–2012, the instrumentalization of the body takes place through the emphasis of functional and representational characteristics of movement. From a movement-analytical perspective, there are no specifically charged movement motifs (such as rhythmical hip movements) that would have carried stereotypical African connotations in the work's reception in Europe at that time. It is through spatial figurations and rhythmic structures that an image is constructed, or rather a phantasm created, evoking in the act of aesthetic perception something of a preracist, precolonialist image of Africa. The “only possible ballet nègre” (Fernand Léger quoted in Baer Reference Baer1995, 27) is to be understood as transgressing traditional forms and decomposing the figure in the sense of an overmechanization (consider the large hommes-décors, mechanically moving figures, a hybridization of body and object). This capacity of the ballet to transgress its surrounding stereotypical attitudes—and even to anthropologically, ethnologically, and ethnographically approach the concept of ballet as a cultural artifact and, as it were, a Europeanized ethnic product—can be understood by looking at its creators’ attitudes toward the Africanistic, that is, at the presence of African culture as a pluralistic influence in their work.
At the very moment of Europe's impending loss of its colonies, artists proclaimed the discovery of new “continents.” Cendrars's recourse to the vocabulary of colonialist expeditions—he describes Börlin as resembling “the seamen, the soldiers, the mulattos, the negroes, the Hawaiis, the savages.” (Le Quellec Cottier Reference Le Quellec Cottier2005, 467)—is in effect no coincidence. After the shock of the First World War, during which the author lost an arm and found himself in the midst of ruins in a wounded Europe (tellingly, in 1919, under the title of La Fin du Monde 1923–2012, he wrote a narrative permeated by hopelessness), in the 1920s the myth of Africa became a projection toward a new era. We may see this as an experience that has little to do with the actual situation of the multilayered and complex cultures of the African continent but that blocks out the narrative of Western imperialism as a history of violence in terms of race, as a history of occupation and colonization that led to genocidal wars and the transatlantic slave trade. In accordance with an “evolutionist aesthetic” (Gordon Reference Gordon2009, n.p.), as opposed to anthropological-racist distinctions prominent at the time, the artists of Les Ballets Suédois assumed that prehistoric Europe could be discoverable in contemporary Africa, which “henceforth figured as a residuum for undisguised creativity, as a topos of desire or as the beginning of art” (Leeb Reference Leeb2013, 18).
For Milhaud, work on the topos of the ballet nègre opens up “the long-desired possibility of making use of the elements of jazz, to which I have dedicated so many studies. I [Milhaud] took over the same orchestration as in Harlem, with 17 solo instruments, and consistently made use of the jazz style, in order to express a purely classical feeling” (Milhaud Reference Milhaud1953, 148–49). The European equation of urban Afro-American jazz cultures on the one hand and the imagined “original” music and dance cultures of Africa on the other is symptomatic of the time. In Milhaud's perception, jazz music has “its roots in the dark corners of the black soul, in the last traces of Africa” (137). The Charleston especially established itself during this period as the most popular ballroom dance. From its appearance in Afro-American revues, via Broadway shows, it was finally discovered by the Parisian avant-garde with its fascination for the popular. The rhythmical dance, which can be executed solo or in couples, embodies jazz and ragtime music through the execution of kicks, bouncing movements, and leg twists.
It is, finally, Fernand Léger who is responsible for the visual appearance of the stage and who intended to “shock” with his designs of the mobile hommes-décors and the radicalism of the Africanistic image-world in movement. Leger brings his fascination for the metropolis, technology in the modern world, and popular art forms, such as music hall, revue, and the circus to La Création du Monde 1923–2012: in an Afro-Futurist approach, the imaginary realm of the origin of the world connoted as African becomes a space of possibility for the future. By means of the logic of a rigorous constructivism making use of mechanical gestures and the hommes-décors moved by dancers, Léger pushes toward the dissolution of the individual expressive body (Levinson Reference Levinson1929, 393). The dancers are required to accept their role as “moving decor”;Footnote 8 under Léger and Cendrars's collaborative direction, figures and set design are understood as equal.Footnote 9
Cendrars, Léger, Milhaud, and Börlin collaboratively worked on form and its transgression in their respective arts (poetic, visual, musical, and choreographic/dance-based), creating a synthetic form for La Création du Monde 1923–2012. (The ballet-oriented critic André Levinson perceives this as the dancer's “capitulation” to the visual arts, as a pastiche of the arts, and even considers the new “hybrid genre” as “hérésie”: “everything appears more as directed than choreographed” [1929, 397].) La Création du Monde 1923–2012 is based on a “primitivistic fantasy,” to cite Hal Foster, “that the other, usually assumed to be of color, has special access to primary psychic and social processes from which the white subject is somehow blocked” (Foster Reference Foster1996, 175). By means of borrowing and appropriating forms, the dancers are to incorporate these energies.Footnote 10 The crisis of art in Europe and the heroization of Africa with its seemingly different pulse make the production of the form-obsessed La Création du Monde seem like a radically new artificial world.Footnote 11
Transgression of Form and Decomposition: Josephine Baker in La Revue Nègre
Two years after La Création du Monde 1923–2012, following the suggestion of Fernand Léger, de Maré brought the Revue Nègre to the Parisian Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. The young Josephine Baker from St. Louis, who had literally stepped out of line in exhibiting her comic talent as part of her spectacular performances as a chorus girl in New York Broadway shows, first performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris. After the scandalous ballet nègre La Création du Monde 1923–2012, with its transgression of artistic forms and the futuristic Africanistic hommes-décors as protagonists of modern ballet and figures of a new era, it is not coincidental that La Revue Nègre caused a furor in the Parisian art world; it was even said to “infect,” as a “fever epidemic” of sorts, audiences at the climax of the era of jazz and the Charleston.Footnote 12 La Revue Nègre (1925) is conceived in the popular music-hall format, featuring twenty-five African-American actors. At the request of Rolf de Maré, the show, initially put together in New York, was reworked according to the Parisian aesthetic of the time by Jacques Charles, the latter having staged several revues at the Moulin Rouge. Alongside the frenetic and syncopated sounds of a jazz band, the show features a quick succession of seven vaudeville tableaux—among others, “New York Skyscraper,” “Mississippi Steamboat race,” “Charleston Cabaret”—with short, comic intermezzi by Josephine Baker. Her danse sauvage performance in the finale was to make make history (Benetta Reference Bennetta2007, 47). Josephine Baker was stylized in the revue as queen of the colonies and of the Charleston;Footnote 13 American poet E. E. Cummings considered La Revue Nègre a new model of aesthetic experience, fundamentally marked by the artificial figure/art figure, Josephine Baker.Footnote 14
The Revue Nègre transfers the relational energetic qualities of the (social) dances connoted as African into the now formal-aesthetic space of the revue. The genre is established as a substitute to a theater experienced as elitist by an avant-garde programmatically committed to showing the “garish, vulgar and vital” aspects of life” (Haitzinger and Hauser Reference Haitzinger and Hauser2010, n.p.) and privileging a shock aesthetic.
Josephine Baker's performance was a coup théâtral, temporarily overriding any classification or categorization. She is a “non-determinable being-figuration,” to cite E. E. Cummings, a “mysterious something that cannot be killed, simultaneously non-primitive and non-civilized, beyond time, similarly to how emotion is beyond that which can be calculated.”Footnote 15
In La Danse d'Aujourd'hui, André Levinson expresses himself critically in relation to the steps nègres Footnote 16 and simultaneously renders possible an analysis of Josephine Baker's dance that does not only exhibit her body as a surface for projections of Africa, but stages her as an embodied multiplicity.Footnote 17 Baker emphasized the dynamic and energetic effects of movement through the specific regulation of energy. When analyzing the available film excerpts of the dance, it becomes apparent that the concept of regulation is predominant in Baker's performance; this means that the dynamic and energetic effects of movement are emphasized. The arm and leg movements are simultaneous, strongly linked to the torso. The coordination in the articulation of the limbs is manifold but unspecific. The bouncing movement of the lower body is striking, as is the swinging of the limbs. Consequently, force and body weight correspond to one another and the impression of greatest possible elasticity is produced. The distribution of energy in the duration of motor activities remains the same, at the highest possible tempo.
One might speak of a contamination of style, for in a hybrid form of dance, Baker combined the movement vocabularies of the Charleston, African dance, elements of Caribbean and Latin-American dances, modern dance, step dance, cakewalk, and comical faces (cross-eyed expressions) as a parody of modern times (McCarren Reference McCarren2003, 160).
I can go on a carousel ride with my shoulders, I can play marbles with my eyes, I can pout like a crocodile, I can walk on my heels and on all fours when I want to, and shake off all stares. … I pronounce who I am with my hands, my arms. I paddle through the air, I swim through the air. I sweat and I jump, all that is who I am! (Baker Reference Baker1980, 71, my translation)Footnote 18
The vibrating hip movements and the exhibition of her backside, described by the artist herself as the activity of “shaking the hips, to the right, to the left, from one foot to the other, the butt playing, the hands waving” (Baker Reference Baker1980, 59),Footnote 19 are the only movement motifs that could be attributed to a typecast, essentialist “African” stereotype.
In a diary entry of November 13, 1926, a contemporary witness, Harry Graf Kessler, speaks of the actors of the Revue Nègre as an “in-between product between jungle and high-rise. …Ultra-modern and ultra-primitive.”Footnote 20 It is the transgression of known modalities of representation and the corporeal violation of form to the point of the temporary formlessness of movement at a high tempo that rendered the dancer Josephine Baker so fascinating to audiences. The privileging of the regulation of energy creates new possibilities for an appearance of corporeal forms as unstable relations, as concrete openings. As intellectual audience members, Levinson and E. E. Cummings seem to have understood this immensely revolutionary gesture, even if they decode or recode Baker's performance according to dominant (aesthetic, cultural, and political) categoriesFootnote 21 understood by referring primarily to the collapse of forms and to the movement motif labeled as “African.”Footnote 22
Photo 2. Josephine Baker. Photo by Photo by Lucien Waléry. In: André Levinson, La danse d'aujourd'hui. Etudes – notes. Portraits, Paris: Editions Duchartre et Van Buggenhoudt, 1929, p. 257. (Copy made in University of Salzburg, with permission of Derra De Moroda Dance Archives, Signature of the book: DdM 345.)
La Création du Monde 1923–2012 and the finale of the La Revue Nègre resemble one another in spite of the fact that their appearance is entirely different. There is no resemblance of form, but of its transgression, profiting from the specific projection of the Africanistic. Neither La Création du Monde 1923–2012 nor La Revue Nègre create an ethnocentric aura or exhibit an essentialist Africa by means of their kinetic corporeality or their choreographic mise-en-scène. The internalization of Africanisms primarily serves the transgression of traditional forms and the decomposition of the figure. In a certain way, the artistic method differentiates itself from the anthropological differentiation, with its fundamentally evolutionist logic. In both productions, the Africanistic presents itself simultaneously as a surface phenomenon and as a deep structure.Footnote 23 Elements that may be assigned to the surface phenomenon include the narrative of an African creation myth, Josephine Baker's theatricalized dark skin and her presentation as the quintessential figure of so-called European primitivism and aesthetic modernity.Footnote 24 In terms of the deep structure, the Africanistic shows itself in a syncopated rhythmicization (jazz, Charleston) and in defiguration, in the decomposition of the human figure in dance, a process that becomes most evident in a becoming-thing (hommes-décors) in La Création du Monde and in Josephine Baker's becoming-animal (animalization) in the finale of La Revue Nègre (with a different weighting, both productions make use of both the processes of becoming-thing and becoming-animal).Footnote 25
Staging Africa(s) in the 1920s, I suggest, is not so much about a stereotyping of Africa but about plurality in the Africanistic sense. Paradoxically, the contemporary pieces mistranslate their historical references in a creative way: both, La Création du Monde 1923–2012 and one mysterious thing said e. e. cummings, articulate the complex relationship between arts and politics in our contemporary context more than being “faithful” to their historical artistic examples. Linyekula focuses on the historical wound of colonialism and accuses Les Ballets Suédois because of their staging of an Afro-ballet without dancers of color; the potential of “Afro-Futurism” beyond essentialism is not reflected in his polemical perspectivization of La Création du Monde.
Vera Mantero performs Josephine Baker by reducing her to a figure of melancholy without honoring the dancer as a symbol of a historical “mestiza.” Here, I adopt Gloria Anzaldúa's descriptions of “the new mestiza” or “mestiza consciousness”—the consciousness of a person positioned between two or more races, two or more cultures, and—even more important—in the midst of (colonial) power relationships based on cultural superiority and inferiority (Anzaldúa Reference Anzaldúa1999, 101–102). The hierarchical inequality of cultures—described by Stuart Hall as “The West and the Rest” (Hall Reference Hall, Hall and Gieben1992)—inextricably forms part of modernity and continues to determine contemporary art, sometimes influencing its productions. If one wants to develop a postcolonial reading of the cultural memory of dance,Footnote 26 it is necessary to historicize cultural differences, not to essentialize dichotomies, and to understand artistic modernity as an ambivalent project.
