Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston (review)

In Anthea Kraut's words, hers is a "recovery project [which] also became a case study of invisibilization – an attempt to understand the conditions that enable certain subjects and performances to be forgotten – as well as an inquiry of the implications of restoring those subjects and performances to the historical record" (x). The subject is Zora Neale Hurston the choreographer, rather than, yet also intertwined with, Hurston the anthropologist and author. The performance recovered is her 1932 Bahamian dance production in New York, The Great Day, including its various restagings and transformations (under different names) in Chicago and Florida over the next five years. The implications of the restoration are various, involving an expanded understanding of the range of Hurston's talents: her seminal contribution to the development of dance in America; her remarkable multidisciplinary, intellectual understanding that allowed her to collect and translate anthropological fieldwork into artistic commodity; and her ability to choreograph rhythmic movement in such a way as to present and perform what Kraut calls the "complicated picture of the relationship between primitivism and diaspora" (146), including the ways in which various intraracial tensions could be read as embodied in the relations among African, Caribbean, and African American folk and urban dance styles. Consequently, The Great Day emerges in Kraut's book as a performance consistent with Hurston's writings, which would themselves be at risk of disappearing if it were not for the recovery work of Alice Walker and subsequent critics.

The implications involve recognizing how "racialized notions of artistry and authenticity . . . that insisted on essential, immutable differences between black folk performers and white 'creative' artists" (210) limited the insight and discourse of Hurston's reviewers and critics, precluding any recognition then or for posterity of the artistic work and worth of The Great Day. To amplify her point, Kraut includes a final chapter that focuses on white female dancers who were influenced by Hurston's choreography, either intimately and in person (Ruth St. Denis), by working with singers and dancers who appeared in The Great Day (Mura Dehn, Irene Lewisohn, Helen Tamiris), or by restaging dances first presented in The Great Day but with nary a mention of Hurston (Doris Humphrey). White critics' reviews gave credit to these white dancers for innovative work, dismissed the Bahamian dancers' "primitivism," and barely mentioned Hurston's role, even though any innovation that emerged did so from the intersection of all three.

The implications of restoration, however, must also be concerned with issues of method, intention, and effect; for if ideological notions invisibilize events almost entirely as they are recorded, then recovery and restoration cannot magically and by definition escape that same dynamic. This is to say that, while the ethical imperative and intellectual skills at work in Kraut's study are immensely laudable, what she chooses to restore with care is not all that is revealed in the material she presents.

Part of Kraut's goal is to attain for "Hurston a status she was not afforded in her own time" (62), that of choreographer in addition to stager, director, producer, or impresario. Doing so "is a deliberate tactic, designed to bring to light certain aspects of her stage practice that have gone underappreciated or altogether ignored" (62). The tactic is effective for another of Kraut's objectives, which is situated in relief: challenging dance scholars' investments in the term "choreography" (55), which over time has acquired rarefied and exclusionary significations that fail to match actual practice. Such investments can invisibilize the importance of dancers' collaboration and improvisation, for instance. But between the repetitive assertion of Hurston as choreographer and the more collaborative definition the term may afford, another sense of choreographing persons and events begins to emerge – that of manipulation and a talent for constructing artifice.

Peppered throughout materials that demonstrate Hurston's skilful artistic choreography are accounts of those who resented her manipulations for various reasons, including economic and artistic exploitation, with...