What the Eye Hears, page 57
This enthusiasm for the American art of tap, and the identification with it, wasn’t happening only in Europe, though. It was happening all over the world. It had started before tap was called tap, as American dancers beginning with the minstrels took American percussive dance abroad; when tap was at the core of American popular culture, the movies had spread it farther. In each locale—in this chapter, I’ll fly over a few—it found, as Slyde would say, a different niche in history. Tap revealed something about each place, and each place revealed something about tap.
AMERICANS IN PARIS
American tap dancers had always found appreciative audiences across the Atlantic. African-American tap dancers in particular, like African-American entertainers in general, found in Europe a level of respect that was rarer back home. They didn’t escape racial prejudice altogether. There were instances, especially in England, of black performers being denied accommodations or being insulted, often by traveling Americans. But European stereotypes of blackness largely worked in their favor as performers, making them exotic and in demand. Juba was celebrated as a “genuine nigger” but also as a “genius.” In the thirties, when Buddy Bradley immigrated to London, he had to put up with asides about how “dancing is as natural to a darkie as breathing” in articles about his great success as a dance director, but he also had the success and the credit.
The entire careers of some American tappers transpired in Europe. The career of Louis Douglas exemplified how black dancers could be received there. A Philadelphia-born contemporary of Bill Robinson, he served his childhood apprenticeship in England and Germany. By 1910, he was on his own, crisscrossing Europe on the variety circuit, usually as the only black performer on a bill. Promoters called him König der Negertänze, King of the Nigger Dances. A Danish critic remarked that one expected niggers to be good dancers, but this one was special, musical, combining grotesque humor with technical virtuosity. In London, Douglas was “an established favourite.” In Paris, he played on the same bills as Mistinguett and Maurice Chevalier, and there, in 1925, he made history as the choreographer and lead dancer for La Revue Nègre.
This was the production that transformed Josephine Baker from a St. Louis kid who crossed her eyes comically in Shuffle Along into a chic black Venus. Baker and Douglas were both clowns. She did her cheerful bump-and-grind topless only at the insistence of a French producer and only for the final number, a colonialist fantasy called “La Danse Sauvage.” But it was that final number that French audiences found threatening and tantalizing, the end of civilization or an escape from civilization’s dead end. Although French critics considered Douglas amusing, he didn’t incite what Baker did—le tumulte noir, a rage for the Charleston and the Black Bottom, hers most of all. Unerotic, Douglas’s tapping was of inherently less interest to the French.
The most intelligent, condescending response to La Revue Nègre came from the Russian émigré André Levinson, who attempted to draw from the production “the essential characteristics of Negro dance.” This he did by sharply contrasting Negro dance with classical ballet. Ballet, he noted, is silent. It’s an exclusively visual expression of music. Negro dancing, by contrast, conflates sight and sound; the dancer is a musical instrument. Where the ballet dancer seeks the illusion of flight, the tap dancer pounds his weight into the floor, pursuing rhythms. Levinson considered such rhythmic fantasy “an innate gift, not a conscious art—a gift that has become more or less atrophied in the cultivated human being.”
Here was primitivism in its most cultivated form. To say that “the undeniable rhythmic superiority of these Negro dancers is nothing less than an adjunct of their irrepressible animality” is one way to handle undeniable superiority. Levinson could not consider the Negro dancer an artist because he did not consider rhythm to be art. Art required something to happen between the beats, something visual. Thus Levinson could make an exception of Josephine Baker, whose personality, he wrote, “transcended the character of her dance.” He could turn her into a symbol, whereas black tap dancers disappointed him as “mere professionals.” He found it ironic that Europeans doing the Charleston were, from his point of view, regressing toward the primitive, while the black tap dancers were moving—progressing, on his scale—toward softness and subtlety. Levinson did not know that he was watching the soft shoe, a refinement that had nothing to do with the black dancers’ recent exposure to Europe.
Levinson only gestured at what many French commentators cried out against: the supposed moral contagion of black dance. When La Revue Nègre played in Berlin, the German critics also wrote about animals and the black conquest of civilization. They wrote about speed and rhythm devouring harmony. But they had as much to say about Douglas and his “Paganini virtuosity of the feet” as about Baker and her behind. They marveled at the way, in Douglas’s number “Les Pieds Qui Parlent,” he danced his voyage from New York to Europe: sounding out the stormy seas, the railroad, a horse race. “Mister Douglas is a genius,” wrote the great theater critic Alfred Polgar. “He dances entire biographies … His feet are a phenomenon of language. They can persuade you of whatever he wants … Nothing like this has been heard before, which is to say, seen.” Maybe not in Berlin.
In 1930, a cameo in the German film Einbrecher preserved some of Douglas’s art. As an entertainer at a Negerball, a mixed-race cabaret with a jungle decor and images of apes, Douglas is handsome in a tuxedo, debonair but humble. While sampling traditional steps, he’s graceful: a class act. In the 1931 German film Niemandsland, he’s once again a cabaret artist, a tap dancer named Joe Smile. His act is a stair dance, similar in outline to Robinson’s though much more eccentric. Set during the First World War, the film introduces five soldiers—one each from Britain, France, and Germany, plus a Polish Jew, and Joe Smile as a recruit for the French colonial army—and throws them together in a cellar between enemy lines, in the no-man’s-land of the title. Only Joe speaks everyone’s language. He laughs at their nationalist arguments and mocks the din of incoming shells with the sounds he makes with his feet. Niemandsland is a pacifist movie, and its moral center is a black tap dancer. No wonder the Nazis would try to destroy all copies of the film.
Douglas seems to have spent most of the thirties in France, sometimes touring with a mixed-race troupe. Years before, by marrying the daughter of the composer Will Marion Cook, he had wed into the royalty of African-American show business, and the connection had brought him back to America periodically. When he staged dances for the 1927 Ethel Waters revue Africana, the black critic for The Pittsburgh Courier found Waters “distinctly racial” and Douglas “absolutely foreign.” As war loomed again in the late thirties, Douglas returned to America, appeared in a few unsuccessful revues, and directed a for-the-people troupe founded by Langston Hughes. In his country of origin, Douglas was mostly unknown and archaic. His death from illness in 1941 was barely acknowledged.
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Throughout the thirties, you could find reports in the black press about tap dancers who toured overseas and stayed for years. As one dispatch from Paris about the Five Hot Shots explained, “Good tap dancing, so commonplace in America, is rare here.” That group’s circuit extended past Europe, through Egypt to India, Singapore, China, and Japan before hopping to Hawaii and the West Coast. The seventeen-year-old Mackey Twins, Sam and Jim, followed the route in reverse, and in a series of articles for the Baltimore Afro-American, the twins’ white manager, Irene West, recounted the trouble caused by all the young ladies attracted to her boys and by the American servicemen who objected. Langston Hughes caught the Mackey act in Shanghai, and he found them talented, “uneducated colored boys trying to get some fun out of life.” When West returned home, the twins chose to stay in Paris, and when the war came, she lost touch with them, it seems for good: a common story. After the war, damaged Europe remained a refuge. The Four Step Brothers played the Lido in Paris for a year as Les Step Brothers, 4 Merveilles Noires, then toured other countries hungry for black marvels. Harold Nicholas spent the years 1958 to 1964 in France, where he transformed himself into a soigné nightclub single, recorded two albums, and married a Frenchwoman.
When Jimmy Slyde first toured Europe in 1966, he was moved by the respect shown him there as a jazz musician. So when he was invited to appear in a French documentary, he was happy to accept. The film was called L’Aventure du Jazz (1972), and it was directed by Louis Panassié. (This was the son of Hugues Panassié, who, in 1934, had written one of the first books of jazz criticism, a book that in taking jazz seriously helped not just Europe but America do the same.) A tour of France as a live counterpart to screenings of the film led to more jobs. In 1974, Slyde recorded a tap album in Paris—further confirmation for him of the superiority of the European outlook. (He wouldn’t allow it to be sold in the United States.) Except for visits home to his mother, he stayed in France for the next half-dozen years.
Among those most affected by seeing him perform was a Parisian named Sarah Petronio. She wasn’t a native. Her parents were Sephardic Jews from Burma who fled during World War II to India, where Sarah was born. When she was nineteen, her family emigrated to Brooklyn, where she married an American. She loved jazz and tap, but when a friend took her along to a Jerry Ames class, she wasn’t impressed. When she and her husband moved to Paris in 1968, the tap she discovered there was even less to her liking. Tap in France was a recreational activity, a music-hall novelty you could learn in a few lessons. In one studio, she found the students dancing with their necks craned up, tapping by number from instructions on the ceiling. On a trip to New York, she investigated Henry LeTang, but his graduated routines also struck her as overregimented and impersonal. Already, she was teaching les claquettes américaines in Paris. Practicing alone, she tried to find a sound she wasn’t sure existed. And then, in 1974, she went to see L’Aventure du Jazz, and during the intermission, the sound danced onstage in the form of Jimmy Slyde. She asked him to be her “guru.”
A young white woman learned from an old black man, and the seventies tap renaissance came to France. This apprenticeship was not overregimented. Months passed before Slyde first called her, more months before he dropped by her studio. “He never arrived when he was expected,” she would recall, and he left “when least expected.” If Petronio asked a question, Slyde answered with another. The most definite thing he told her was not to dance like him. Instead, he invited her to dance with him, improvising a conversation together, along with a band. She also began working solo in Paris jazz clubs, and, still teaching, she established the American Center of Paris as “le temple du claquettes.”
They called their duets “It’s About Time.” Unlike Honi Coles and Brenda Bufalino, the two members of this odd couple danced at the same cool temperature. Yet Petronio had listened to Slyde’s counsel: she had her own style, kin to his yet distinct. Musically, it was alive with pauses and rhythmic displacements. Digging in, throwing her body around and bobbing her head, she looked at once like someone dancing to make rhythms and like someone dancing to the rhythms she was making. When she tossed in a high kick as a sop to Folies Bergère expectations, the irony in the gesture was apparent, but her cool-cat attitude could verge on affectation. The saving grace was playfulness—with other dancers, with musicians. She invited her audiences in close.
For five years in the nineties, Petronio lived in America, teaching in Chicago and dancing in South Side jazz clubs where hers was often the only white face. But she was part of the American tap festival circuit from its beginning, adopted as a flat-shoed sister by Brenda Bufalino and Lynn Dally even while her French short-shorts attracted feminist flack. A Parisian when in America, she brought a cosmopolitan flavor to tap shows stateside. An American when in Paris, she could feel isolated. But in France she stayed. Her daughter, Leela, was raised among tap dancers. When she grew up, she had no trouble adapting her mother’s dancing to the hip-hop of her own generation (French hip-hop—more overtly intellectual, less overtly angry). Yet when Leela dances with her mother, it’s obvious that she is part of a lineage, a lineage that is now international.
AUF DEUTSCH
In Europe, as in America, the films of Busby Berkeley, Astaire-Rogers, Eleanor Powell, and Shirley Temple packed dancing studios in the thirties. Powell’s films were especially popular in Germany. To the National Socialists, the popularity of such films was an embarrassment. Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels took it as a challenge. The premier German film studio, Universum Film AG (Ufa), produced its own Hollywood-style musicals and developed its own tap-dancing stars, with varying success. Gradually, Nazi authorities choked off the American competition, until, in 1939, they banned it outright.
Carmen Lahrmann, who dubbed Shirley Temple’s voice into German and then attempted to duplicate her in German-made films, wasn’t much of a dancer, and she had no Bill Robinson. The German public did not warm to her, but it did to Marika Rökk. Rökk’s parents were German-speaking Hungarians. She had learned her craft on the international circuit, first in Paris with the Gertrude Hoffman Girls and then in New York at Ned Wayburn’s school. Rökk’s lunges, acrobatics, and multiple, if sometimes wobbly, turns bespoke a training like Eleanor Powell’s, but her tapping could be clunkier, closer to the style of Ruby Keeler. She tossed her legs around with more force than either American and molded her face into a wider array of pouting, lip biting, and eyebrow raising. She was an Austro-Hungarian Betty Grable, flirtatious, feisty, and ultimately accommodating. Her characters tended to give up their artistic ambitions for married contentment. “Women Are Dangerous” was one of her songs, but she wasn’t threatening—not to men, nor to the Nazi regime.
Rökk’s films—more than a dozen between Leichte Kavallerie in 1935 and Die Frau Meiner Träume in 1944—were escapist fare, morale builders treasured by the German public during the Depression and wartime for the same reasons that Americans treasured their own musicals then. “I don’t need millions,” sang Rökk in 1939, “I only need your love and music.” The increasing lavishness of the films—Die Frau Meiner Träume, in color, ends with a fifteen-minute Ziegfeld-style finale flitting all over the Axis—was a show of German capability, even though much of the German film industry’s greatest talent was in exile, immeasurably enriching the culture of the enemy. To an American, the dance numbers seem tamer and less imaginative than their Hollywood models in almost every respect. Rökk taps across the tops of pianos and up and down staircases and in front of a mass of bare-legged chorus girls without ever touching the extravagance of a Busby Berkeley number. In her memoirs, Rökk confessed to stealing steps from Powell films. She added little that an American tap dancer would want to steal back. Her ballroom squires merely twirled and framed her. She had no Astaire, no Kelly, and neither did Germany. The Third Reich put forth no male tap stars, and Ufa employed no choreographer of comparable artistry.
That the precision tapping of ensembles such as the Gertrude Hoffman Girls resembled military drills had long been a truism of theatrical criticism. The similarity between the marching of the Girls troupe in the 1939 film Wir Tanzen Um die Welt (We Dance Around the World) and the Nazi pageantry already glorified in Triumph of the Will was even clearer. Such orderly expression of group discipline fit easily into Fascist aesthetics of spectacle and power, maintaining the idealization of physical culture in cuter uniforms and sparkly boots. Same with the borrowings from Busby Berkeley. As propaganda, the Nazi musicals tended to be less overt than Ann Miller’s tapping to “Victory Polka.” You could argue—as penitent German film scholars later did—that less overt meant more insidious. Goebbels said that the best propaganda was the kind not recognized as propaganda.
Nevertheless, the American origins of tap dance required some explaining. Like jazz, tap trailed associations with Weimar decadence, blacks, and Jews. Herbert John’s 1940 Steptanz im Selbstunterricht (Teach Yourself to Tap) admitted that tap came from America, but insisted that the dance was not purely American. No, it had roots in old Nordic fishermen’s dances and the Bavarian Schuhplattler, and it did not have “anything to do with Niggers.” An official manual, released by the Reichstheaterkammer the following year, argued that tap was a universal impulse that each culture develops in its own way. “Today we also have German tap”—not “Americanized Nigger rhythms” but a dance expressing the German character and emphasizing melody instead of jazz syncopation. In 1941, the Deutsche Tanzzeitschrift went so far as to present a purely German story for the origin of tap: something about how young men, sitting around bored while girls spun fabric, began to tap their feet in rhythm. There were German tap dancers who didn’t buy any of this, who didn’t buy into the Nazi ideology at all. They emigrated or lay low. Jazz was never banned outright, but it was subversive. Jazz musicians and enthusiasts were co-opted or sent to the front or even to concentration camps. Tap dancers were likewise always in danger: of using the wrong music, of having the wrong style. It’s likely that the best German tap dancers did not make it into films.
The career of Evelyn Künneke fell between the official and the banned. The daughter of the operetta composer Eduard Künneke, she was another young German inspired by Eleanor Powell—and also by Charles Jenkins, an American tap dancer performing at Berlin’s Wintergarten. She was fifteen. Jenkins was twenty-two. She got pregnant. They got hitched. But Jenkins was not just American. He was Jewish, as was Künneke’s maternal grandmother. Jenkins took their daughter back to his own country, and Künneke never saw them again. She continued her career in Germany, tapping in nightclubs under the Americanized name Evelyn King. During the war, she reverted to Künneke and had a hit song. Her tap number with a giant Sally Rand feather fan in the 1942 film Karneval der Liebe is more imitation Powell, but Goebbels considered the number un-German and had it cut. In 1944, while Künneke was performing for the troops, her comment that the Red Army might triumph got her arrested, and she survived only through the intervention of fans in the SS.
