Cabaret Travels: Cyn's Written Response #1

Since cabaret is a pretty different topic than my normal research focus and creative practice, I cast the net pretty wide for this opening round.  I decided to focus on cabaret in the United States, specifically the Harlem cabaret scene, and I did some reading on the female blues tradition.  

Multiple Genealogies of American Cabaret

Associated with performance forms as disparate as sketch comedy, minstrelsy, drag balls, and jazz, cabaret is notoriously difficult to define.  Indeed, one can compellingly argue that cabaret is “a site, rather than a form, of cultural production” (Tenorio, 34) whose combination of late-night dining (usually with alcohol) and performance invokes particular modes of spectatorship and participation. I have found it useful to trace some of the multiple genealogies of cabaret as it developed in the United States in relation to European and African-American influences.  My writing on this is largely indebted to Shane Vogel’s The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance.[1]

            
The official “origin” of modern cabaret performance is the Chat Noir in the Montmartre district of Paris, a bohemian tavern founded by poets and artists in 1881: "Distinguishing themselves as a cabaret artistique, the Chat Noir and subsequent imitators adapted minor forms of entertainment -- popular songs, shadow plays, marionette shows,  pantomimes, dance, and skits -- and endowed them with an oppositional edge in modernist performances of political and social satire, cultural commentary, and aesthetic critique" (Vogel, 45).  Common cabaret conventions included the combination of tavern and performance stage, a collage-like rather than single-narrative approach to performance, physical proximity of audience and performers, and literary wordplay and irony (Vogel, 45).  Cabaret artistiques soon spread to “Barcelona, Berlin, Vienna, Zurich, Munich, and Moscow” and strongly “shaped the institutions and aesthetic principles of the Continental avant-garde in the decades” before the First World War” (45). 

          
In 1911, Jesse Lasky, a vaudeville impresario and Hollywood mogul, created the Folies Bergère in New York, which he claimed to be the first cabaret in the United States.  Named after a famous Parisian music hall, the Folies Bergère was meant to emulate European sophistication for a white, middle-class, mixed-gender American audience.  Lasky’s endeavor points out a key distinction between European and American cabaret: "While European cabaret was distinguished from popular amusements by its association with the modernist avant-garde, its performances of political satire and cultural critique, and its bohemian audience, cabaret in the United States was initially associated with commercialism, spectacle, and popular consumption" (Vogel, 46).  This distinction, however, can easily be over-reified: certainly American cabaret can contain political critique, while European cabaret can have commercial aspects.  Lasky’s Folies Bergère typifies a common historical understanding of American cabaret performance: "a tangential, even strictly nominal, relationship to European cabaret; an image of middle-class sophistication and consumerism; the cultivation of intimacy between performers and spectators; an emphasis on architecture and spatial practices as a way of characterizing the cabaret; performances that borrowed from the styles of vaudeville, music halls, and other popular amusements; and an excited self-consciousness about the new and modern character of the night.  American cabaret was thus imagined as an institution of cosmopolitanism" (Vogel, 40).

            
Despite Lasky’s claims, Vogel notes that European immigrant communities in the United States had formed cabarets in ethnic enclaves throughout New York as early as the late 1800s-early 1900s.  Moreover, many black, working-class traditions from the late 19^th century have deeply shaped American cabaret.  Investigating these predominantly African-American traditions, which include the concert saloon, the jook joint, the professional club, and the black and tan saloon, offer a very different genealogy of cabaret in the United States than a Eurocentric one. 

          
The concert saloon of the 1860s-90s was an urban phenomenon, a male-oriented drinking establishment with “waiter girls” that had musical and at times theatrical performance (Vogel, 50).  Its rural counterpart was the jook joint, “a central institution of secular black dance and music [that] developed during and after Reconstruction by rural sharecroppers and migratory workers in the South” (Vogel, 51).  These two contexts were connected through the “Great Migration” of black southerners to northern cities in the early 20^th century, as well as traveling black performance circuits that moved between urban and rural locations.  The professional club was geared towards performers in the business for their own after-hours entertainment (Vogel, 52), while the black and tan saloons were “working class concert saloons or bars that encouraged black-white social mixing and opportunities for interracial dancing” (Vogel, 53).  This family of African-American pre-cabaret performance practices emerged in the historical moment of post-slavery (made illegal in 1865) where Jim Crow racial segregation was widespead.

Affective and Spatial Practices of the (Harlem) Cabaret

If it is difficult to identify a distinct stylistic genre of cabaret performance, then what makes the cabaret unique?  Vogel argues that “public intimacy” is crucial to the cabaret (41). Spatially, spectators and performers in a cabaret are in close proximity with the audience seated at tables close to and surrounding the stage, which often doubles as dance-floor.  Rather than the frontal view and fourth wall of a theatrical proscenium stage, in the cabaret, spectators’ and performer’s gazes are directed in criss-crossing, scattered sightlines that create multiple foci and a “play of looks” between spectators, between performer and spectator (64).  The “official” performance is always in competition with the “other” performance of sociality between the spectators.  As such, the cabaret is characerized by a spectatorship of distraction and interruption.  According to Vogel, "It is this interplay of closeness and distance, acceptance and refusal, connection and disconnection, concentration and distraction that shapes the cabaret as an intimate formation, the perpetual disorganization and reorganization of sound, bodies, sightlines, and feelings as the performer competes with the audience itself for its attention" (Vogel, 70).

In this context, performers developed strategies of “creating direct, fast connections with the audience” (70) -- think of the strategies that stand-up comics and emcees use to engage audiences.  “Not ordered by the logics of realism or the codes of bourgeois theater, cabaret is a nonrepresentational, nonmatrixed performance,” one in which performers represent themselves and “occup[y] the same time and space as the audience” (Vogel, 29).

But what does Vogel mean by intimacy?  He posits the public intimacy of the cabaret “as a kind of trespass,” intimacy as temporary and provisional, intimacy that enables “social and sexual contacts that were transient, contingent, non-normative, and emergent” (Vogel, 22).  These are “criminal intimacies,” as formulated by Lauren Berlant and Michael Warne, that "‘bear no necessary relation to domestic space, to kinship, to the couple form, to property, or to the nation’" (Vogel, 22).  As such, the queerness of the cabaret’s intimacy-effects lie in its challenge of normative structures: "Intimacy, in other words, threatens (promises?) to undo the routines and routes, the familiar patterns and rote narratives, that organize psychic and social lives.  For those already excluded from dominant narratives and normative systems of kinship, family, and social belonging, the rewards of such risks in forging public intimacies can be nothing less than a vital mode of existence" (Vogel, 42).

Tenorio contends that the cabaret, as a queer counterpublic, enabled race-mixing, class-mixing, and gender play (40).  These convergences, however, were not a straightforward defiance of segregation, but shot through with uneven power relations.  They included the practice of “slumming,” or whites attending “black cabarets” in search of adventurous bohemian experiences, and the “segregated cabarets” (of which the Cotton Club is one famous example), where white audiences watched black performers in performative spectacles that were often scripted and staged by white writers, composers, and directors (Vogel, 82).

The Women-Loving Blues

At this point, I’d like to shift gears and zero in on a specific performance tradition associated with the cabaret, the blues.  In particular, I’m intrigued by the feminist and queer resonances that the songs, performances, and lives of African-American blueswomen such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith seemed to embody. 

             
According to Angela Davis, “the [blues] musical genre is called the ‘blues’ not only because it employs a musical scale containing ‘blue notes’ [flattened or bent notes] but also because it names, in myriad ways, the social and psychic afflictions and aspirations of African Americans” (Davis, 33).  In her eyes, the blues reflected the changed living conditions of black Americans post-slavery, who were still subject to institutional racism, economic impoverishment, and political disenfranchisement, but who could exercise a new freedom in terms of sexual self-determination and individual travel (Davis, 8).  The female blues tradition gave voice to the realities of working-class African-American women, with “[l]yrics often explicitly address[ing] sexual self-determination, extramarital relationships, homosexuality, working-class experience, and women’s social oppression” (Vogel, 170).  Privileging a raw perspective on love and sexuality that was at odds with the middle-class, heteronormative romantic love glorified in popular music, "[t]he blues women openly challenged the gender politics implicit in traditional cultural representations of marriage and heterosexual love relationships.  Refusing, in the blues tradition of raw realism, to romanticize romantic relationships, they instead exposed the stereotypes and explored the contradictions of those relationships.  By doing so, they redefined women’s ‘place.’  They forged and memorialized images of tough, resilient, and independent women who were afraid neither of their own vulnerability nor of defending their right to be respected as autonomous human beings" (Davis, 41).

The women portrayed in the blues were usually portrayed as independent women – rarely as wives and almost never as mothers (Davis, 13).  In addition, certain blues women portrayed nonnormative sexuality and gender in their lyrics, performances, and lives, specifically “women-loving women,” the term used within the community to describe working-class black women who engaged in same-sex sexual relations and the “bulldagger, a term used to describe a masculine women-loving woman” (Tenorio, 34).  It is possible that this portrayal was at least partially strategic, for bisexuality (which was considered more acceptable than lesbianism) was seen as being bold and adventurous by many audiences.  Acccording to Davis,"[s]uch famous blues singers of the time like Bessie Smith, Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey, Gladys Bentley, and Alberta Hunter purposefully seemed to present the image of themselves as bisexual, or purveyors of same-sex female relationships, in order to spark the interest of their audience’ (37)

          
Perhaps the most famous example of a queer-inflected blues song is Ma Rainey’s “Prove it on Me Blues” (1929), whose original advertisement includes a large, masculine-presenting women flirting with two women on the street while the police surveil the scene from the background.

The lyrics, which Hazel Carby describe as “vacillat[ing] between the subversive hidden activity of women loving women [and] a public declaration of lesbianism” (Carby, 16) are as follows:

Went out last night, had a great big fight
Everything seemed to go on wrong
I looked up, to my surprise
The gal I was with was gone.

Where she went, I don't know
I mean to follow everywhere she goes;
Folks say I'm crooked. I didn't know where she took it
I want the whole world to know.

They say I do it, ain't nobody caught me
Sure got to prove it on me;
Went out last night with a crowd of my friends,
They must've been women, 'cause I don't like no men.

It's true I wear a collar and a tie,
Makes the wind blow all the while
Don't you say I do it, ain't nobody caught me
You sure got to prove it on me.

Say I do it, ain't nobody caught me
Sure got to prove it on me.

I went out last night with a crowd of my friends,
It must've been women, 'cause I don't like no men.
Wear my clothes just like a fan
Talk to the gals just like any old man

Cause they say I do it, ain't nobody caught me
Sure got to prove it on me.

Another blueswoman, Gladys Bentley, was known for wearing masculine attire, top hat and tails, during her performances: 
 
In addition, “B.D. Women’s Blues” (1935) by Lucille Bogan, aka Bessie Jackson, also gave voice to the bulldagger or bulldyke of the era in the classic AAB blues lyric structure.  Her lyrics envision a time when men will no longer be necessary ("they ain't going to need no men"), where B.D. women embody masculine traits of physicality, roughness, independence, working and earning money.

Comin' a time, B.D. women they ain't going to need no men
Comin' a time, B.D. women they ain't going to need no men
'Cause the way they treat us is a lowdown and dirty sin

B.D. women, you sure can't understand
B.D. women, you sure can't understand
They got a head like a sweet angel and they walk just like a natural man

B.D. women, they all done learned their plan
B.D. women, they all done learned their plan
They can lay their jive just like a natural man

B.D. women, B.D. women, you know they sure is rough
B.D. women, B.D. women, you know they sure is rough
They all drink up plenty whiskey and they sure will strut their stuff

B.D. women, you know they work and make their dough
B.D. women, you know they work and make their dough
And when they get ready to spend it, they know they have to go 

Creative Assignment Ideas:
(1) Figure out a way to formally translate the criss-crossing glances, distracted spectatorship, and public intimacy of the cabaret into a dance-for-camera work.
(2) Create a choreographic study set to a "queer" blues song that combines abhinaya and Indian dance vocabulary with some of the Africanist aesthetic principles as outlined by Brenda Dixon Gottschild:

1. embracing the conflict (contrariety, difference, dissonance)
2. polycentrism/polyrhythm
3. high-affect juxtaposition
4. ephebism (vital aliveness, power, drive, attack, flexibility, ass. with youth)
5. the aesthetic of cool

Bibliography

Carby, Hazel V.  1999.  Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America.  London: Verso.
Davis, Angela Y..  1999.  Blues Legacies and Black Feminism.  New York: Vintage Books.
Dixon Gottschild, Brenda.  2001.  "Stripping the Emperor: The Africanist Presence in American Concert Dance." In moving history/dancing cultures, eds. Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 332-341.
Tenorio, Samantha C.  2010.  "Women-Loving Women: Queering Black Urban Space during the Harlem Renaissance."  In The UCI Undergraduate Research Journal.  http://www.urop.uci.edu/journal/journal10/06_tenorio.pdf
Vogel, Shane.  2009.  The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
"Harlem Rennaissance."  Encyclopedia Brittanica.  http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/255397/Harlem-Renaissance

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[1] In his 2009 book, The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance, Vogel utilizes performance and literary theory to analyze the performative practices of the 1920s-30s Harlem cabarets in New York and the literary production of the Cabaret School of the Harlem Renaissance.  The Harlem Renaissance, according to the Encyclopedia Brittanica, was “a blossoming (c. 1918–37) of African American culture, particularly in the creative arts, and the most influential movement in African American literary history” (http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/255397/Harlem-Renaissance).  With a distinctly queer lens that is keenly attentive to issues of race and class, Vogel argues that the Cabaret School offered critical alternatives to both the primitivism of the Negro vogue and racial uplift ideology. The 1920s ‘Negro vogue’ reflected “[g]rowing white and corporate interest and engagement with black music and culture” (Vogel 2009: 2) and was associated with “black sensuousness, exhibitionism, primitivism, and sensationalism” (Vogel 2009: 3).  On the other hand, uplift ideology “of the early twentieth century sought to ground the struggle for racial equality and the struggle against white supremacy in the material and moral achievements and possibilities of the black middle class” and was associated with Victorian-inflected notions such as “self-help, racial solidarity, temperance, thrift, chastity, social purity, patriarchal authority, and the accumulation of wealth” (Vogel 2009: 4).