A Tale of Two Cities: Akimbo Body Theatrics in Bristol, England, and Spanish Town, Jamaica

Dale Cockrell’s seminal blackface study Demons of Disorder begins with working-class street dance, an 1842 account from the flash paper the Libertine describing a gladiatorial contest between two prostitutes, Nance Holmes and Suse Bryant, on Boston’s Long Wharf.¹ Cockrell unpacks this event as iconic of antebellum street culture’s challenge to existing power, class, and economics. Public music and noise, its close cousin, have often exhibited contested, gendered, or sexualized associations, particularly when in the hands of marginalized social groups. We may think of the charivari of medieval weddings and “shivaree” of the American South, the masked and costumed noise of Carnivale, the gongs and firecrackers of China’s Tai-ping Rebellion, even the vuvuzelas of twenty-first-century sporting events; in each case, “noise” becomes a tool for simultaneously creating subaltern group cohesion and contesting economic or political regulation.

Between the Revolution and the Civil War, the Louisiana Purchase (1803) nearly doubled the nation’s territory; the development of navigable waterways, culminating with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1826, accelerated economic activity and westward expansion; urbanization drove economic rifts between agrarian, slave-holding South and industrializing, free-market North (exemplified by the Missouri Compromise of 1820); and the extension of the franchise to working-class whites, nearly complete by 1840, transformed the political landscape. New cross-cultural popular arts idioms reflected and furthered these transformations.

The concomitant enclosure of formerly public zones was a direct response to shifting social hierarchies and class distinctions as modernizing trade, communications, and geopolitics transformed the demographics of the sailors, pilots, masters, and harbor workers who worked the windjammers and steamers, which in turn transported global consciousness. Such populations exhibited much greater diversity of ethnicity and experience than did land-bound society. On decks and docks, black slave or free pilots and captains commanded white or mixed-race crews, as deckhands and officers exchanged songs, tunes, stories, handcrafts, and a wide array of expressive culture. In time, these more egalitarian maritime perspectives came ashore to influence and mutate social conduct in port and river cities.²

Vernacular music was an especially portable, influential, and ubiquitous medium for exchange as “creolizing” expressive arts spread widely. Hence, the frenzied cultural popularity that followed New York’s blackface troupe, the Virginia Minstrels, on their first 1843 tours of the United States and Britain, during which they played Liverpool, Manchester, and London. They paved the way for future tours by other American troupes and left a host of banjo-strumming imitators in their wake before disbanding unexpectedly. But these groups were hardly a completely “new thing under the sun,” as some called them. Quite to the contrary: a better interpretation is to see the rise of theatrical minstrelsy as a story of creole street performance idioms appropriated, imitated, and re-created on the stage for both working-class and bourgeois consumption.

Thus, in order to more completely understand the fervent response to theatrical minstrelsy, the very explanations for its portability, popularity, and resiliency, we need to situate the idiom within wider and earlier networks of stage and street genres. Theatrical predecessors will be discussed below; as for street festival behaviors implicating music and dance, while the annual festival of Carnivale (Brazil) / Kanaval (Haiti) / Mardi Gras (New Orleans) was best known in the Spanish and French Caribbean, two other examples from English-speaking communities even more effectively enrich our understanding of the transition to the stage. The Afro-Dutch spring holiday of Pinkster, which originates in the German holiday of Pfingster, or Pentecost, is found across the Northeast in the early eighteenth century and is particularly well documented in New Jersey and upstate New York.³ Dancing, athletics, music, food, alcohol, and other festival behaviors evidently exerted a powerful attraction for white onlookers and participants.⁴ From Boston in the 1760s, for example, Shane White quotes a doggerel report of whites and blacks mingling: “There all day long they sit & drink / Swear, sing, play paupau, dance and stink.” Combining music, dance, drink, feasting, and the crowning of a...