Cabaret Travels: Cynthia's Written Assignment #3

Coolly Subverting the Gender Binary: Marlene Dietrich’s Impersona in Morocco

German actress Marlene Dietrich’s first American movie, Morocco, brings together many threads of our Cabaret Travels project: situated at the intersection of German and American cultural production, the film includes several representations of cabaret scenes, non-normative sexuality and gender play, and is set in an exotic “Oriental” locale.  For the purposes of this response, I chose to focus on the infamous tuxedo-wearing cabaret scene. 

I found Elizabeth Ann Taylor’s analysis of Dietrich in Morocco somewhat simplistic; she seems determined to see female empowerment no matter the situation and overly reliant on Amy Allen’s work as a theoretical model.  Nevertheless she does provide some interesting description, contextualization, and interpretation of the scene, and I will situate my reading of the scene in relation to hers.

As a viewer who enjoys gender subversion and queer desire, Dietrich’s performance brought me pleasure.  Elegant old Hollywood high feminine glamour meets top hat and tuxedo-wearing masculinity, combined with a narrow waist, full bust, and feminine singing voice.  But most of all, I’m drawn to Dietrich’s economy of gesture, imperviousness to audience boos or accolades, the coolness and aloofness of Dietrich’s gaze and performance.    I am reminded of the tawaifs’ strategy of controlling the gaze of the rasika/patron, renegotiating a male heterosexual gaze by making a male viewer come to you, emotionally, by not giving too much.  In connection to my previous research on the Harlem cabaret, I’m also reminded of Shane Vogel’s characterization of cabaret singer Lena Horne, whose impersonal style was atypical:

She offered not love but hostility, not warmth but aloofness, not presence but absence, not immediacy but hesitation, not touch but distance, not an old friend but a stranger.  She did not seek her listener out in the anonymity of the concert hall, but compelled her audience to come after her.  This aloofness characterizing her early career could be understood within the theatrical and gendered discourse of the diva. (Vogel, 167)

Vogel goes on to say, “[]Horne withheld herself in performance and contradicted the expectation of the cabaret stage as a place of performed plenitude” (169).

            Vogel characterizes Horne’s performance as an “impersona” (167) that evacuates the self, and I would tend to read Dietrich’s performance in this scene in the same way.  This directly contradicts Taylor’s reading, which interprets the scene as a “a way to express her true self” (73).  Taylor reads the female beloved addressed in the French song that Dietrich/Jolly sings as a confession of Jolly’s bisexuality.  Dietrich’s aloof impersona, in addition to the fact that this scene is narratively framed as a cabaret performance and not, for example, as a confession of sexual attraction to a female beloved, makes this interpretation interesting but somewhat suspect to me.  Interestingly, Taylor argues that the performative frame may have been what allowed for the provocative content of the scene to pass film censors:

Even Gaylyn Studlar agrees that the notion of performance allowed for the censors to let this controversial scene pass. "We can only speculate that perhaps these sophisticated, wordless hints at the transgression of gender and sexual norms were tolerated because they were contextualized as being part of the heroine's performance. (Taylor, 71)

This reminds me of the transgressive role that song and dance sequences can play in Bollywood films.  Song-and-dance sequences often depart from or rupture a film’s plot; according to Gayatri Gopinath, they are also subject to less rigorous state control than the rest of a Bollywood film (100).  Gopinath theorizes that the very “fragmented and episodic” nature of Bollywood’s film genre allows “[q]ueer spectators to seize on the numerous ruptures, slippages, and inconsistencies produced by the cinematic text’s heterogeneity in form and address to produce pleasures and identifications that may not necessarily be authorized or condoned within the ideological framework of the text itself” (98).

            Taylor reads Dietrich’s performance as a cross-dressing towards power, empowering a female subject by taking on male mannerisms, clothing, and thus male power.   She claims that Dietrich/Jolly’s “donning of male garb gives her the ability to move and function powerfully among men” and that “[t]he tuxedo indicates role reversal as a means of female empowerment, not merely androgynous appeal” (Taylor, 69-70).  She situates this in relation to Simone de Beauvoir’s formulation that

the definition of woman as female and man as human being forces woman into a position of male-imitation at those times when she most wants to be viewed as a human being (Taylor, quoting DelGaudio, 70-1)

From my position as a 21^st century feminist aware of 3^rd wave, transgendered and genderqueer challenges to the gender binary, this statement gives me pause.  For one thing, is it not possible to be an empowered, fierce femme?  And isn’t there a difference between embodying masculinity and male-imitation?  At this moment, my predilection is to read this scene as a pleasurable defiance of gender binaries, not as a woman imitating a male because she wants to be a human being.  Indeed, I wonder whether it’s necessary to read Dietrich/Jolly as a female at all in this scene.

            The most provocative part of the scene, where Jolly plucks a flower from behind a giggling female audience member’s ear, kisses her, and then tosses the flower to Tom Brown is also, for me, the most politically ambiguous part.  Given the cabaret context, I feel unsure whether Jolly’s kiss expresses queer desire or is merely for shock value.  Interestingly, this connects to my research on the women-loving blueswomen, who operated in a realm where bisexuality (as opposed to lesbianism) was seen as titillating and adventurous, and where, according to Angela Davis, many famous blues singers “purposefully seemed to present the images of themselves as bisexual, or purveyors of same-sex female relationships, in order to spark the interest of their audience” (37).  In addition, the sequence of events, where plucking a woman’s flower (a possible metaphor for taking her virginity) only to give the flower to a man, concludes with a heterosexual frame.  How differently would the scene have read if the sequence was reversed, and Jolly had plucked a flower from Brown’s buttonhole, only to give it to a woman along with a kiss, before sauntering offstage, hands in pockets?

            In relation to my previous research, both Dietrich in this scene and the queer blueswoman engaged in performances of non-normative sexuality and gender play.  Indeed, Gladys Bentley’s tuxedo and top hat outfit is strikingly similar to Dietrich’s clothing in this scene.  A key difference, however, is that the blueswomen engaged in self-representation that expressed the complexities of African-American working class women’s experiences, while I do not see this film, which was directed by a male director, Josef von Sternberg, as a instance of Marlene Dietrich’s self-representation, though I am sure Dietrich exercised agency within the parameters of the role.  In connection to our creative work for Cabaret Travels, it makes me wonder at the potential of impersona and coolness as a performative tactic that occupies a different space from performing the self and performing the other.

References

Taylor, Elizabeth Ann.  2009.  Dietrich and Sternberg: From Cabaret Performance to Feminist Empowerment.  MA Thesis, San Jose State University.

Gopinath, Gayatri.  2005.  Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press.

Davis, Angela Y..  1999.  Blues Legacies and Black Feminism.  New York: Vintage Books.

Vogel, Shane.  2009.  The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Cabaret Travels: Research assignment 3 - Performance of Empowerment

1.  Choose 1 of the following chapters of the thesis Dietrich and Sternberg: from cabaret performance to feminist empowerment by Elizabeth Anne Taylor (or watch the movie that the chapter is about): 

Chapter 3 "A Frolich towards Empowerment": Naughty Lola and her Resistance to Domination. pp 37-57

This chapter describes the film The Blue Angel, which according to Lisa Appignanesi's book, The Cabaret*, was a quite accurate portrayal of the Weimar Republic Kabarett and even included a few Kabarett stars from that time in it.  In the Blue Angel a cabaret star, played by Marlene Dietrich, flips the gendered narrative of dominion and resistance and "empowers herself through the cunning use of the performance of her sexual confidence"  causing the downfall of a moralistically judgmental professor (Taylor, p. 30).

Here's a the actual German movie with English subtitles: Der Blaue Engel

or

Chapter 4:  "For She's a Jolly Good Fellow": The performance of Independence. pp 57-77

This chapter describes the film Morocco about a cabaret performer, also played by Marlene Dietrich, who leaves her past to go to Morocco. "What transpires within the exotic locale are cinematic moments in which Dietrich's costumes mimic male bravado, empower her choices, and uplift her sexual prowess." (Taylor, p. 57)

Here's the movie: Morocco (a famous scandalous scene where she is dressed in a tuxedo and kisses a woman starts around 14 min in)

 2.  Within the reading/film you have chosen, focus on 1 scenario portrayed and the tactic/s for female empowerment used in that scenario.

Some questions that I am wondering about that you may answer if you are interested...
-do you feel this/these tactic/s was/were successful?  explain.
-do you feel this/these tactic/s is/are problematic for any reason?  explain.
-would this/these tactic/s  work similarly or differently in the area of your previous research?
-would this/these tactic/s be useful to us as female performers today?


*For interesting audio of "Cabaret Talk" given by author Lisa Appignanesi check out: https://soundcloud.com/southbankcentre/lisa-appignanesi-cabaret-talk
Lots of talk of Brecht and the creativity coming out of European Cabarets in the 20s-30s.

Cabaret Travels: Shyamala's Written Assignment 2

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Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the most apathetic of them all?

These readings gave me a greater appreciation and understanding of what actual performances in European cabarets might have looked like from 1890-1940.  Thus, I was able to better understand the importance of cabaret’s lineage in relation to American dance and also the films Cabaret and Victor Victoria that I wrote about in my first assignment.   In terms of American dance, I knew that modern dance or expressive dance (in Germany) had roots in cabaret performances, but had never quite understood the depth of artistic creativity that was going on in these venues.  I had imagined cabaret performances consisted of can-can dances and burlesque shows that were merely there for voyeuristic purposes.  While these were certainly a part of it, there was much more going on.  For example Valeska Gert (Gertrud Samosch, 1892-1978), a dancer in Berlin, described “I performed theater, I longed for the dance; I danced, I longed for the theater.  I was in conflict until the idea occurred to me to combine them: I wanted to dance human characters.  I invented an intricate fabric, one of whose strands was modern dance-pantomime; another strand was abstract dance; other strands were satiric dances, dances to sounds, expressionistic dances” (p. 15 Senelick, Volume 2).  She also claimed to have created the first socially critical dance-pantomime by creating a dance portraying a streetwalker.  Another well known dancer, Anita Berber (1899-1929), created dances named Horror, Depravity, Ecstasy , and Cocaine.  The words (1922) and description (1931) of the performance of Cocaine by Anita Berber (p 11-13, Senelick, Volume 2). sound very much to me like they could be from a contemporary dance performance or experimental performance art piece today.

And there was quite an awareness and dialogue about voyeurism itself.  Some progressive groups hailed nudism as “healthy living” and voyeurism as “legitimate entertainment” during desperate times of post-war depression (P. 7).   For some, the nude dancing was legitimized by the story of Salome, the dancer who was considered femme fetal because she requested, on behalf of her mother, the head of the prophet John the Baptist (p. 9, Senelick, Vol 2).  It is unclear to me if this was legitimized as a moral tale, or as the staging of a biblical tale, or just giving a reason and context for a nude dance.   On the other hand, there were critics of the nude dancing who made written and/or performed commentaries on how the rich could afford to enjoy the delights of voyeurism in the nightclubs while the poor, the prostitutes, and the wounded war vets were all in dire circumstances outside the walls of indulgence.  These are the very tensions that the movie Cabaret represents in Berlin in 1931, just before the Nazi take over.  In the song “Money” that I commented on in my first assignment this satirical commentary is present.  Here are the contrasting lyrics with one verse talking about the rich and the next about the poor.

“Money” verse about the rich (All is the man’s text unless noted as woman)

If you happen to be rich,

Woman:.......Ooooh
And you feel like a
Night's enetertainment,
Woman:...Money
You can pay for a
Gay escapade.
Woman: Money money money
If you happen to
To be rich,
Woman:….Ooooh
And alone, and you need a companion
Woman: ...Money
You can ring-ting-A-ling for the maid.
If you happen to be rich
Woman:.......Ooooh
And you find you are left by your lover,
Woman: ...Money
Though you moan and you groan quite a lot,
Woman: Money money money
You can take it on the chin,
Woman:.......Ooooh
Call a cab, and begin
Woman: ...Money
To recover on your fourteen-Carat yacht.

“Money” verse about being poor (this part the man and woman both sing in canon, except where noted)

If you haven't any coal in the stove
And you freeze in the winter
And you curse on the wind
At your fate
When you haven't any shoes
On your feet
And your coat's thin as paper
And you look thirty pounds
Underweight.
When you go to get a word of advice
From the fat little pastor
He will tell you to love evermore.
But when hunger comes a rap,
Rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat at the window...
Woman: At the window...
Man: Who's there?
Woman: Hunger!
Man: Ooh, hunger!

See how love flies out the door...

While many cabaret artists fled to America during the Nazi regime, they had little luck for their satirical work didn’t translate well to the de-politicized American  public (for example see P. 252, Senelick, Volume 2).  However, according to Scott Miller in his writing “Inside Cabaret” for New Line theater (a political musical theater group in St. Louis: http://www.newlinetheatre.com/cabaretchapter.html), the musical Cabaret appeared in various forms in the U.S. during certain politicized moments. “The novel appeared at the close of World War II; the non-musical stage version debuted during the McCarthy era; the stage musical opened during the Vietnam era; and the movie musical opened in the midst of the Watergate era. Each of these times has also been a turning point in regard to the social standing of American women and gays.” He notes that each of these versions had revisions in the script and content of the show, making it more and more political, sexually explicit, and gay friendly each time.  He claims that the original musical reflected the director Hal Prince’s, “desire to break through to a new kind of socially responsible musical theater.”  So it makes perfect sense that recreating a politicized theater in Europe, would be a strong parallel for the politicization of arts in the U.S. during its own political crises. 

Miller sees the money song in Cabaret as commentary  “to the fact that people will do almost anything – including abandoning their morals – for money,” like the politically indifferent main character Sally Bowles.  And he sees the over-all purpose of the play/film is to warn the audience against this kind of apathy.  He thinks that Cabaret is situated in 1933 because it is a moment in time where if more people took a stand against the Nazi’s that perhaps Hitler’s extermination of the Jews, arts and homesexuals could have been prevented.  In fact, in one staged version of Cabaret, he says that there was a giant mirror that was facing the audience in order to imply that “the people of Germany, who allowed the Nazis to take power, were very much like us, just ordinary people who found their country in trouble and looked for someone to fix things, to offer easy solutions. If we had lived in 1930 Berlin, the mirror suggests, we too would have been cajoled into believing the Nazis could save the country. It also says that we – the populace – are as much to blame for such horrors as corrupt politicians. Whatever happens in our country, we allow to happen.”  (http://www.newlinetheatre.com/cabaretchapter.html)

Of course, considering my own experiment with the mirror, in my first creative assignment, I am interested to hear about it used in this way. Another similarly interesting method to note in the readings, was the making visible of the inner workings of theater, like the piece where the stage is representing backstage, and the audience is where the actors are imagined to be rehearsing. (p. 76, Senelick, Volume 1). This relocating of elements and implicating of the audience as a part of the action is a tool that could be played with more with the use of the mirror.

Finally, tying back to my research of cross dressing and gay culture in Victor Victoria, the dancer Anita Berber, who had created the piece Cocaine, seems to have been an open lesbian and apparently created a new trend in fashion of women wearing tuxedos and monacles.  Victor Victoria was set in 1934 Paris, while Berber created her dance “Cocaine” in 1922, and while Julie Andrews doesn’t wear a monacle, she certainly sports a fine tuxedo.  There are many more gay and cross dressing elements that could be commented upon and Miller has some very interesting opinions on gay rights in relationship to the rise of Hitler and to the present day rhetoric of the Christian right in America today that are worth checking out: http://www.newlinetheatre.com/cabaretchapter.html

But for now, I would like to close emphasizing the strong political commentary that was present in the European cabarets.  It was particularly surprising to me to discover that Bertolt Brecht, a seminal figure in the field of theater as social commentary, performed original songs in German cabarets early in his career before fleeing Germany, like so many other artists because of the rise of Hitler. 

Cabaret Travels: Cynthia's Written Assignment #2

German Kabarett: Disruptive Sexualities and Embodying the Other

Perusing these excerpts from Laurence Senelick’s books on cabaret performance in Europe feels a bit like window-shopping in a foreign city: walking/reading my way through the street/text, seeing little glimpses into diverse textures and colors of performance, arrested in writing.  Primary texts (original scripts or, more often, performance descriptions by contemporary observers or fellow artists) are briefly framed by Senelick’s succinct historical contextualizations.  It is an engaging scholarly style that is very different from the critical theoretical frames that I am used to.  As a result, I am unsure what Senelick’s agenda is and unable to summarize his central argument, if there is one. 

Moving among the fragments, many details jump out to me, suggesting some half-formed observations: a self-conscious meta-framing aesthetic, reminiscent of Brechtian alienation; an anti-bourgeoisie streak and an avant-garde desire to mobilize and refine the energy of “popular” art, which for some reason smacks of privilege to me.  While my task is to connect these readings to my prior research on Harlem cabaret and the women-loving blues, I am most immediately reminded of the American postmoderns, with their tendencies towards deconstruction, inter/multidisciplinary intersections, and their wish to unite art with everyday life – “democratic” tendencies historically undermined by often unacknowledged cultural appropriations and racial and class exclusions.  I found myself wondering whether there were any people of color or working class artists as part of the German kabarett scene.  Or was it all white dissident intelligentsia?  It is hard for me to tell from these readings.  When Senelick mentions that “tangos, foxtrots, one-steps, and Bostons were introduced weekly” “imported from America” (1993: 7), I found myself wondering: through what circulation of bodies?  What corporeal contact occurred that is not tracked here?  I know that dancer Josephine Baker (the “Black Pearl” or “Creole Goddess”) was huge in Paris, as were African-American jazz musicians.  Did they also circulate in a German context?  And who brought the tango over from Argentina?

One theme that recurs throughout the writings, which are divided between the period of 1890-1920 and the post WWII period of 1920-1940, is that of an unbridled female sexuality. In 1897, Otto Julius Bierbaum wrote “Manifesto for a Cabaret Theatre,” in which he says: "Beautiful costumes, beautiful arms, bosoms, legs, gestures -- that's what counts...solve for me the problem of emancipation from tights – that’s what I need.  And if you must write verses, make sure they are sung by beautiful girls whose corsets embrace more than the void…" (1989: 69).  I read this text, particularly since it was written by a man, as putting sexual objectification of women’s bodies hand in hand with breaking down bourgeois respectability.  In the post-war period, a hedonist sensibility pervades the cabarets, a “post-war release” that Senelick calls a "reaction against the prudery of the Wilhelmine era and release of tension in the wake of wartime depression" (1993: 7).  Valeska Gert, creator of “the grotesque dance-pantomime” that Lotte Goslar and Pina Bausch practiced, physically embodied images of “whores, procuresses, down-and-outers, and degenerates" (1993: 15).  In Canaille, which Gert self-proclaimed to be “the first socially critical dance-pantomime” (15), she performs an “alienated” “coitus” (1993: 16).  Her movement description is interestingly similar to Sandra’s last cabaret study: "I wiggle my hips provocatively, hoist the black, very short skirt, and for an instant show white flesh above long, black stockings, pink garters, and high-heeled shoes…Then I bend my knees slowly, spread my legs wide and sink down" (1993: 16).  Doubtlessly these images, which seem to hover uneasily between sexual objectification and empowerment, challenged respectable, bourgeois constructions of women’s sexuality.  In this respect, they have something in common with how blueswomen in the Harlem cabaret challenged heteronormative constructions of sexuality and gender espoused by racial uplift ideology and the educated black middle class.  Indeed, the infamous nude dancer of the German kabarett, Anita Berber, was known for being a lesbian who went out in a tuxedo and monocle, a similar gender presentation to blueswomen like Gladys Bentley.  However, the blueswomen’s practices are seen by most scholars and audiences as grounded in self-representation, while the German kabarett performances of sexuality documented here seem to rely partially upon embodying the other, whether it be the “whores” and “degenerates” that form the shadow opposite of the respectable bourgeois woman in terms of class, or an exotic cultural other.

In terms of embodying an exotic cultural other, it seems that the phenomenon of naked dancing which pervaded Berlin in the post-war period was shot through with an Orientalist streak.  Introduced by Celly de Rheydt, “mistress of an army officer,” Senelick notes that “almost every cabaret and nightclub featured unclad dance, often with Salome as a pretext (1993: 7).  In a footnote, he explains that Salome dance was inspired by Maud Allan’s “The Vision of Salome,” which she performed in London in 1908 (1993: 6).  Allan was a white Canadian-born dancer who grew up in San Francisco and later lived and performed extensively in Europe on the variety show circuit.  In a move similar to American modern dancer Ruth St. Denis’ appropriation of Orientalist imagery in her 1906 Radha (see Desmond 1991), Allan’s “identification with Orientalist imagery” allowed her to “articulate new models for middle-class white femininity” (Wong 2010: 43-44).  According to Desmond’s article, St. Denis was able to capitalize on images of the Oriental dancing girl to invoke an imagined exotic blend of spirituality and sensuality that offered a liberating alternative to the Victorian mores that bounded her as a white American woman.  From the following bejeweled, scantily clad images, I suspect that Allan’s choreographic tactic was similar*:

 

The widespread imitation of Allan’s Salome Dance, including sadomasochistic versions such as "the whip dance called 'A Night of Love in the Harem'” (1993: 7), suggested that her embodiment of the Orient struck a chord in German kabarett performers and audiences.  Given the ongoing struggle with the exotifying gaze that Sandra contends with in Germany, it leads me to wonder to what extent this legacy lives on today.  And given European cabaret’s influence on Bollywood item numbers, it makes me wonder how Euro-American Orientalist images have been translated by Indian artists in the Bollywood film industry.

* Interestingly, Allan had a long-term relationship with her female secretary and lover, Verna Aldwich, which makes me wonder about the connections between her performances of Oriental sensuality and her own lived queer sexuality.

REFERENCES

Laurence Senelick.  1989.  Cabaret Performance, Volume II Europe 1890-1920   New York: PAJ Publications.

------.  1993.  Cabaret Performance, Volume II: Europe 1920-1940.  Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Desmond, Jane.  “Dancing Out the Difference: Cultural Imperialism and Ruth St. Denis’ Radha of 1906.” 

Wong, Yutian.  2010.  Choreographing Asian America.  Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

IMAGES

http://queercult.com/2010/11/30/maud-allan/

http://womenshistorynetwork.org/blog/?p=208

http://thebestofhabibi.com/vol-19-no-2-sept-2002/oscar-wildes-salome/

Cabaret travels 1: Shyamala's response Cabaret in American Films

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Cabaret in American Films: Bob Fosse, German and Indian influences, and fluid sexualities.

In researching cabaret I found myself interested in how the genre is portrayed in American films.  I started with two films that I am familiar with: Victor/Victoria (1982) -which I watched frequently as a youth, and Cabaret (1972) - which has always left an impression on me even though I had only watched it once as a child. 

Cabaret is directed and choreographed by Bob Fosse, whose seminal style of subtly gritty jazz is famously recognizable with isolations of the hips, shoulders, inverted knees and the notorious jazz hands.  Cabaret is about a performer in a cabaret, played by Liza Minnelli, who is taken by a rich man who has an affair both with her and her male friend/lover.  Victor/Victoria is also about a woman performer, played by Julie Andrews, posing as a man who is a female impersonator and often performs in cabaret settings.  It is choreographed by Rob Marshall with strong influences from Bob Fosse (but a more sanitized version of Fosse’s movement in my opinion).  Like many copycat choreographers of Fosse, Rob Marshall maintained the signature movements but is missing the darker undertones and subtle sexual tension of Bob Fosse.  Instead it is just big recognizable movements without any character or nuance.  In several sources Fosse’s former dancers emphasize how he was always saying to pull back and tone things down, that “less is more.”   Partially this is attributed to his move from the stage to film where the camera can focus in on the smaller gestures and isolated movements. (http://www.dancespirit.com/2011/10/legendary-moves-nov-2011/, http://youtu.be/cl9Xivexrps, and  http://youtu.be/hcAgZn7rnR8)

 “Money makes the World Go Round” from Cabaret exemplifies the Fosse style of emotion (in this case sexual tension) simmering under the surface with small almost understated movements:

Cabaret takes place in Germany in a kabarett (cabaret).  Like in France, where the cabaret form originated, German kabarett was a variety show in a restaurant/bar, with satirical political commentary along side musical/dance entertainment and was often a place of meeting for artists, intellectuals and revolutionaries.  What was unique about German kabarett was “gallow’s humor” or dark humor around morbid topics such as war and disease.  The movie Cabaret portrays the 1930s with the tension of the Nazi Party on the rise. (http://www.stanford.edu/dept/german/berlin_class/archives/glossary_cabaret.html)

Bob Fosse’s dance style is very compatible with the dark, sensual world portrayed in Cabaret.   While he actually came from vaudeville, from what I understand vaudeville was a stage variety show and thus similar to a cabaret. As Louise Quick, one of his former dancers, demonstrates in the following video: his movements had underlying meanings and subtexts and so knowing the history and context of where they come from is cruxial to getting to the depth of his style. 

Interestingly, Victor/Victoria also has a strong German connection for it is an adaption of a 1933 German film called Viktor und Viktoria (Victor and Victoria).  Plot summary is here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0024736/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl

One of the famous music and dance numbers in Victor/Victoria is “Jazz Hot” where Victoria does her first female impersonation and reveals herself as a man during the bow.   Here you can see the Bob Fosse inspired movements starting around 1:15min:

Also note the “jazz hands” forming a sort of Hindu God like multiple armed image around 1:50min.  Is this a coincidence?

Perhaps not: an interesting theory about jazz hands by a blogger named Minai was brought to my attention by Cynthia.  Minai writes: 

“A nagging theory of mine remains.  One of Bob Fosse's characteristic moves was ‘Jazz Hands.’  Some have said ‘Jazz Hands’ originated from African dance, but was their popularity influenced by Jack Cole's use of Bharatanatyam hand gestures like the alapadma?  Could the ‘Jazz Hands’ derivative ‘Spirit Fingers’ have been popularized by inspirations from classical Indian dance?  A girl can dream! ;)”-cinemanrityagharana.blogspot.com/2011/12/choreographerdancer-jack-cole-and-hindu.html (Dec 18, 2011)

While I was intrigued by this thought I didn’t take it seriously at first.  But, according to several of his former dancers in the following talk, Fosse took movements from Jack Cole and then minimized them, thus making them own, while Minai’s blog clearly maps out the influence Indian dance had on Jack Cole and shows examples of the numbers he choreographed for movies such as Kismet which show that he had strong training in some kind of Indian dance, likely Bharatanatyam. (cinemanrityagharana.blogspot.com/2011/12/choreographerdancer-jack-cole-and-hindu.html (Dec 18, 2011)

Here the dancers talk about Jack Cole influence from 4:53min:

So, I took a closer look at the jazz hands to see what I thought.  The opening number of Pippin’s “Magic to do” exemplifies the jazz hands that were eventually popularized. Here is a version of “Magic to do” (also discussed in Louise Quick’s talk reference above).  I’m not sure this one was choreographed by Fosse but clearly it is influenced by his style. Check out the first 1min 20 sec:  

 As you can see these hands are quite fluid and have a lot more variety then just the wide fingered jazz hand that I often think of, and does have a potential connection to alapadma. 

And perhaps there’s other loose connections as well.  As another of his dancers wrote: “Fosse dancers must be able to isolate everything, right down to their eyeballs, elbows and fingers. When a Fosse dancer learns to focus her energy in stillness, she can grab the audience with a simple flutter of her fingers.” ( http://www.dancespirit.com/2011/10/legendary-moves-nov-2011/ )  These same words could easily be a description of Indian dance.  And in one of the comments for this Legendary Moves article, Donna McKechnie says “I'll never forget rehearsing the Coffee Break number in How To Succeed.......(with Gwen acting as dance captain) rehearsing eyeball movement in unison! Wonderful.”(http://www.dancespirit.com/2011/10/legendary-moves-nov-2011/ )  Not only could “rehearsing eyeball movement” be a description of an Indian dance style, but I have never heard a description of any western dance (except a post modern one) as emphasizing eye movements.  And this could be a coincidence, but Louise Quick also described his style as having lines going on into eternity (6:25min: http://youtu.be/XqNIRxsi-pc).  I have definitely heard Bharatanatyam described in this way and it is probably applicable to other Indian dances as well.

Along the Indian connection, I found the following clip from the 1995 stage version of Victor Victoria.  Rob Marshall was still the choreographer, but this time he showed a little more of the sexual innuendo in the Bob Fosse style movement he portrayed.  And is it just me. or is her costume more orientalist then the film version with the diagonal garment like a sari over the shoulder? And is it too much of a stretch to say that from 4:32-4:40 min that the side and diagonal arm movements are reminiscent of Bharata Natyam?  Check in out: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xgsfg_victor-victoria-le-jazz-hot-live_music#.UZ6RTOtyRS4

So, if Jack Cole was so clearly influenced by Indian dance -Minai makes a very compelling documentation of this, and if Cole was a strong influence on Fosse as his dancer describes, then its likely that Fosse’s work also has elements of Indian dance in it (of course African origins are clearly traceable as well).

Fosse’s style of dance is considered one of the major building blocks of jazz dance and jazz dance is often described as one of the off-springs of American cabaret.  So perhaps Indian dances influenced jazz dancing and how we know it today!

A final observation about the movies… Both films represent sexuality quite fluidly which was new in the 70s when Cabaret came out, but Victor/Victoria was part of a “breathrough cycle of mainstream Hollywood studio movies featuring gay parnerships and drag characters” in the early 80s. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084865/trivia)

William Luhr and Peter Lehman wrote a very interesting article on gender and sexuality in Victor/Victoria.  Here is one dance moment at a cabaret they highlighted: 

Four performers—two apparently male, two apparently female—dance slowly onstage, facing the audience and the camera. Suddenly, continuing the dance, they turn around, but we do not see their backs as expected; rather, the males have miraculously become females and the females males in face and costuming. We soon realise that the dancers are made up and costumed in such a way as to present completely different sexual identities from the front and the back—they wear masks on the back of their heads to present a different sex than their faces indicate, and their costumes change, front and back, to maintain the illusion. It is jarring to see them whirl around because the sexual change is so instantaneous, and it takes time to realise which “male” or which “female” is a mask and which is a made-up face. We never actually learn the sexual identities of the performers. During the number, the group of four at times splits into two “couples”. When the tempo is slow, the audience can begin to fix the sexual nature of the façades of the performers they see, but suddenly the tempo speeds up, and the performers whirl wildly about, making the number a crazed emitter of conflicting sexual cues. All certainty is gone. Then the tempo slows and the illusion of a measure of certainty returns.

Only in this number does Edwards significantly undermine the sexual perception of the film’s spectator…

-http://www.screeningthepast.com/2011/04/%E2%80%9Ccrazy-world-full-of-crazy-contradictions%E2%80%9D-blake-edwards%E2%80%99-victorvictoria/

They write more about many more ways that the film brings forth the complexity of gender and sexuality and reveals the performance of them both for people who do drag, but also the everyday performance of those trying to maintain their closeted identities, and even the performance of gender and sexuality for everyone and the powerplays involved in that performance.  

Cabaret, as mentioned before, also deals with sexuality with a love triangle between a woman and her two male lovers who also have slept with each other.  I don’t know if these themes are inherent to cabaret performances in general, but perhaps the cabaret as a place of political satire and performance may have allowed a space for non-conforming identities?  Perhaps it depends on which cabarets in which communities. 

For a plot summary of Victor Victoria go to: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084865/plotsummary

For a synopsis of Cabaret  go to: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068327/synopsis

For a biography on Fosse go to: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/broadway/stars/bob-fosse/

Anj's Cabaret Assignment #1

I am interested in the depiction of Cabaret dancers in Bollywood, specifically looking at the famous Bollywood dancer/actress Helen. As I googled Cabaret in Bollywood, Helen kept popping up as one of the most popular Bollywood dancers (especially in relation to Cabaret). This really struck a personal note for me, as I grew up watching Bollywood films and always remember her numbers and my mom specifically talking about how beautiful a woman and dancer Helen was. I always wondered why her name was "Helen" and I loved watching her in the films. Now after a few google searches, I learned she is half burmese, quarter Anglo and quarter Indian and sort of happened upon the business after a very tough childhood fleeing Burma. I also learned her "breakthrough" film was when she sang and danced "Mera Nam Chin Chin Choo". This was one of my all time favorite old Bollywood songs and it was so interesting to see the video via you tube after just singing the song for all these years (not really knowing the meaning). I never knew Helen was up front and Geeta Dutt was only her background singer. Anyhow, my interest is piqued in wanting to learn more about what was permissible and what was not in terms of depicting female sexuality through dance in night club settings. Apparently, from what I read, Helen was a classy Cabaret act and though she was sexy, she was never considered vulgar. Her dance training was also eclectic, which reminds me of our very own PN collective members that grapple with being sexualized and perceived as exotic for being ethnically ambiguous. Was she sexually empowered or objectified vixen? I am also interested in researching if there was an actual Cabaret scene in Mumbai, India or if was only depicted in Bollywood Fantasy land. Here are a few links that I found and I'm excited to learn more. http://post.jagran.com/Cabaret-Queen-Helen-celebrates-72nd-birthday-1319116432 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVKEMOenP-o http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WX5D_bxSRQ

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).