In Choreographing the Folk, dance historian Anthea Kraut breaks new terrain by exploring Hurston’s efforts during the 1930s to stage and present traditional African American and Bahamian music, movement, and dances in new contexts. Noting the interdisciplinary scope of Hurston’s scholarship, Kraut addresses Hurston’s little-known contributions to dance and theatre and seeks to examine, re-write, and recover Hurston’s legacy in these arenas. Methodologically, Kraut strives to “recover embodied practices from the archive” and to reconstruct Hurston’s stagings of African American folk culture and dance by examining letters, archival programs, contemporaneous critics’ reviews, and Hurston’s own autobiographical and ethnographic writings. She also seeks to account for factors which have obscured Hurston’s groundbreaking contributions in theatre and dance. Kraut supports her research with copious notes, informative references, and two appendices detailing Hurston’s known performances of the show and listing members of the Bahamian ensemble, all which enrich the reading immensely.
Using archival documents to reconstruct performances of a specific production most commonly known as The Great Day (or sometimes, From Sun to Sun), Kraut investigates the barriers, resistance, and trials Hurston faced in order to mount her re-presentations of traditional African American dance and song. Kraut also examines the African American and Bahamian performance ensembles whose performances were featured in various configurations and venues of this production. Through her analysis, Kraut differentiates Hurston’s stagings from contemporaneous productions of black concert and jazz dance and from musical theatre of the 1930s. Hurston’s productions, shaped by a different goal, differed in that she contextualized black traditions in order to present a vision of African American rural folk based in the ethnographic truths of the Deep South and the Bahamas that would neutralize stereotypes. Hurston presented African-derived folk traditions as an art on par with the excellence of Western classical arts by choosing non-traditional performance formats and venues. From Hurston’s perspective, African-derived folk arts did not need to be “elevated” to be of value and should not be stripped of their contextualized meanings for commercial purposes. Instead, Hurston aimed to highlight some of the diversity within black folk traditions in the United States by juxtaposing Bahamian traditions with U.S. based traditions. Kraut problematizes Hurston’s stated positions and actual situations. Working in a cultural and social environment that frequently did not accept African Americans as full human beings, Hurston was frequently forced to negotiate and compromise on her plans for these performances. In the end, Kraut concludes that multiple cultural and personal factors have worked synergistically to make Hurston’s legacy invisible.
Laying out her chapter framework in the preface, Kraut explains how she has drawn on the archive as a methodology to research embodied performances and uses it to begin to problematize and contextualize Hurston’s definition of “the folk.” Kraut concludes that Hurston used the term to refer to the “unlettered class of African Americans and West Indian peoples of the same class” with whom she had done fieldwork (17). Hurston challenged contemporary views of black people as a homogeneous mass, but her distinctions were not recognized by white audiences. This section of the book would have been stronger had Kraut incorporated ethnographic perspectives to the notions of folk identified by literary studies and dance studies to guide her discussion.
In chapter 1, Kraut challenges the trope of authenticity which Hurston used to market her productions. While Hurston attempted to distinguish her presentations of “real” black traditions from the culturally appropriated and distorted black images in minstrel traditions, Kraut demonstrates that Hurston was forced to rely on the appropriative trope to market her productions in New York. As a result, her choreography was misinterpreted as the “natural” unadulterated singing and dancing of “primitives.”
In chapter 2, Kraut delineates the tensions between Hurston’s claims of authenticity and naturalness and those of her authorship and the allocation of credit for her artistic creativity. Recognition for her scholarship and artistic creation meant access to prestigious funding and appreciation. Kraut argues that Hurston’s work should be recognized as choreography in a nontraditional sense. However, Kraut concludes, the power of historic stereotyped racial images, white patronage, and Hurston’s promotion of authentic performances, contributed to her artistic and ethnographic contributions being overlooked.
Through an analysis of race, class, and gender, Kraut examines the production of The Great Day in chapter 3, and in chapter 5, the final climax of the show, The Fire Dance, to illustrate the challenges Hurston faced in trying to maintain artistic and ideological control of her productions. Kraut documents how Hurston shaped her productions despite being confronted with constraints from limited resources, white patronage, black gatekeepers, cultural appropriation, and unethical competition from other researchers of black music and dance. Furthermore, she delineates how The Fire Dance simultaneously reinforced popularly held imagery of primitivism while also demonstrating an alternative view of black traditions within the diaspora. Unfortunately, Kraut’s anachronous application of the late-twentieth-century notion of Afrocentricity to Hurston’s work falls short of the insightful level of analysis that is evident in the rest of the book.
In chapter 4, Kraut addresses an area of Hurston’s work most familiar to folklorists. Kraut examines the ways Hurston has relied on the expressive use of African American aesthetics to communicate her understanding of the diversity and connectedness of African-derived traditions and illustrates how Hurston highlighted the aesthetic dimensions of the tradition to delineate her ideological stances on the connectedness of black cultures.
Kraut argues in the final chapter that Hurston provided a fundamental influence on the early days of modern dance through her production of The Great Day and reveals the degree of cultural appropriation of Hurston’s artistry by white modern dancers of the 1930s. She also details a range of performance opportunities for the Bahamian ensemble to perform Hurston’s arrangement of The Fire Dance without credit to Hurston.
Exploring the racial and cultural dynamics that obscured this performative portion of Hurston’s legacy, Kraut’s well-written book provides a major scholarly contribution and portrays Hurston tackling issues which continue to be of central concern to folklorists today.
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[Review length: 993 words • Review posted on February 26, 2010]