The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy

6. Akimbo Culture: Dance and the Participatory Pleasures of the Body

6 Akimbo Culture Dance and the Participatory Pleasures of the Body The . . . affective axis of the [African American dance] apparatus involves its celebration of the body as the site of pleasure—in its transformation of identity into style, in the centrality of rhythm and dance, and in its courting of sexuality and sexual practices. The musical practice itself is inserted into the apparatus at the site of the body: it is a music of bodily desire. There is an immediate material relation to the music and its movements. . . . The body becomes the site at which pleasure is restructured and desire potentially redirected. —Lawrence Grossberg, “Another Boring Day in Paradise” This chapter explores the musical information that can be derived from visual depictions of blackface dance (particularly those by Mount himself), and works backward from that evidence to further reconstruct performance practice and the impact of performance practice on minstrelsy ’s sound and experience. Historically, this chapter links theatrical blackface with the street performance idioms that were its predecessors, by locating prototypical blackface dance vocabularies and rhythmic practices in vernacular art works of the earlier nineteenth century. I argue that it was precisely the interplay of music and motion—rhythm and dance—between performers and audience, that accounts for minstrelsy’s remarkably immediate yet enduring popularity and influence. The sight of dancing evokes a physical response in the viewer, whether that viewer is “passive” observer or active participant; in dance, the body provides the vehicle for participatory, interpersonal connection via the sharing of “liminal” (boundary) experiences . Smyth says “Something happens as normal perceptual information comes in which relates it to the movement system of the observer. . . . The perceptual input links to the motor command system, which becomes active and somehow gives rise to sensations which actually are from the observer’s body.”1 174 chapter 6 Music and dance, especially in tandem and especially in groups, have the capacity to create communitas, a cognitive phenomenon that cultural anthropologist Victor Turner describes as “a strong, total communal experience of oneness in which an individual senses . . . a merging of awareness. . . . In group performance, where members are competent, the concept of communitas can overtake the group and, in these circumstances, an orchestra [or other ensemble of performers] may seem to be a living organism . . . this is a sensation which every group performer knows . . . In such a moment , each performer can become acutely aware of everything happening around him/her, while s/he automatically performs her/his part.”2 Communitas has been identified by Allen, for example, in gospel quartet performance; she calls communitas “a moment of spiritual communication,” and says that “analogous parallels can be found in many other African American popular music idioms.”3 This interconnection, a physiological and cognitive link between observers and participants, was the source of blackface’s remarkable popularity and longevity. The music-and-dance of the creole synthesis, both on the boards of the blackface stages where it became famous and on the streets and wharves from which it originated, became the first American popular music craze precisely because it was capable of creating participatory communitas: because, like the Afro-Caribbean dance musics that were among its most vital sources, it made possible a body-driven, syncopated experience of shared spiritual communion. This chapter demonstrates the presence, and thus the influence, of Afro-Caribbean bodily vocabularies in visual depictions of African American and blackface dance, and thereby shows the “creolization” of North American bodily vocabularies.4 This hypothesis is not without surface challenges: the attempt to reconstruct a sounding rhythmic and musical language from the “silent,” static, two-dimensional medium of painting and drawing may seem perverse or impossible. However, both pragmatism and philosophy necessitate the undertaking : pragmatically, because any attempt to recover details of historical dance music benefits from study of iconography and period descriptions of performance practice, along with study of intent, reception, and related dance traditions. In any dance music, the relationship between rhythm and the body is essential: a musicological investigation of dance music that neglects the body, or the iconography of the body, therefore omits relevant rhythmic information. However, philosophically, to ignore participants’ own linkage between music and movement would be to fundamentally disregard those participants’ own agency and intent. Akimbo Culture 175 Minstrelsy’s movement languages were perceived as transgressive.5 Both its presence in public spaces and its specific physical vocabulary embodied resistance: resistance to middle-class control, to...