The Robert A. Schanke Honorable Mention Essay, MATC 2019: Projections of Race at the Nouveau Cirque: The Clown Acts of Foottit and Chocolat

During the Belle Époque, a black Cuban clown by the name of Chocolat (ca. 1868–1917) was the star of one of the elite Parisian circuses of the time, the Nouveau Cirque. He paired alongside another migrant performer, the English clown George Foottit (1846–1921), forming one of the most popular and celebrated duos in history. The two developed a unique (and endlessly imitated) pairing of circus types: the white-faced clown and the auguste.¹ The dynamic between these types was built upon a basic, yet violent hierarchy: Foottit as the maniacal white-faced clown attacked the dim-witted black clown, Chocolat, tripping him, slapping him, spraying him with water, and shouting all manner of invective at him. Chocolat’s role as auguste was to serve as the cascadeur (stuntman), the one who falls, tumbles, and receives the slaps, kicks, and mighty blows. As Chocolat shook with fear, the Parisians roared with laughter. Their act was nationally, even internationally renowned. They performed for royalty, tourists, and famous socialites. Their faces adorned advertisements, toys, and posters. They were even memorialized in early films by Charles-Émile Reynaud and the Lumière brothers, making the pair among the first French performers to ever appear on-screen.²

Even though the clown/auguste pairing was built on circus archetypes, from a phenomenological point of view, the French could not help but watch the act with the performers’ race in mind. Made clear by the robust documentation of the act in the form of reviews, newspaper articles, biographies, posters, advertisements, and paintings, race superseded convention in the Parisian imagination, who interpreted the act in a colonial context. In that sense, Chocolat’s time in Paris shares in the pattern Harvey Young documents in his book Embodying Black Experience (2010). In societies founded upon white supremacy, an idea of “blackness” gets projected onto the black performer, who then has to contend with an image correlated with his skin color rather than his personality, talents, intellect, and body of work. “The result is the creation of the black body,” writes Young. “This second body, an abstracted and imagined figure, shadows or doubles the real one. It is the black body and not a particular flesh-and-blood body that is the target of a racializing projection.”³ Amid the foolish antics of his unique auguste, Chocolat gave Parisians an encounter with and inspired an articulation of a metaphoric blackness in the Belle Époque, one that was constrained by negative stereotypes: primitive, naive, victimized, and in need of civilization. These projections elided the quality and nuanced comic mechanisms of Chocolat’s clowning. However, my aim in this essay is to reveal through Chocolat’s example how the performer may find moments of adaptation, innovation, and subversion within the confines of comic and racialized stereotypes. Amid the commodification of his race, through moments of irony, deceit, and insubordination, he also created opportunities that undermined the black/white dichotomy within the clown/auguste paradigm.

In the acts with Foottit, Chocolat ostensibly repeated a comic version of his own oppressive childhood, subjugated and humiliated by a white superior. Unfortunately, Chocolat’s life before the circus has little in the way of documented evidence. Gérard Noiriel has done excellent historiographical work to parse out fact from fiction in the clown’s biography, which, prior to Noiriel, had been mired in half-truths and undocumented suppositions.⁴ We know only his first name, Rafael, because, born a slave in Cuba, he did not know his parents. When he was about eight years old, he was purchased by an Antillean merchant who brought Rafael to Spain. Eventually Rafael ran away from his master and began working in iron mines until he was spotted at a local tavern by the accomplished circus clown Tony Grice. Offering to train Chocolat in exchange for his services as a domestic, Grice taught Chocolat the craft and brought him along as he toured Europe. At first, Chocolat looked to be a mere addendum to Grice. On October...