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.
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 19th
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 20th 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:
embracing the conflict (contrariety, difference, dissonance)
polycentrism/polyrhythm
high-affect juxtaposition
ephebism (vital aliveness, power, drive, attack, flexibility, ass. with youth)
- 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
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).
