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chapter four Vaudeville { 1 } The use of the term “vaudeville” as a metaphor for the modernist project is one that goes back to the beginnings of modernism itself. Music hall performers and dancers inspired the English Decadent and Symbolist poets, and Arthur Symons, in his collection London Nights (1895), is considered to have created a classic expression of the connection the precursors of modernism (who thought of themselves as modernist) made between their art and the emergent variety, or vaudeville, theater, as he demonstrates here, in the “Prologue” to the collection: My life is like a music-hall, Where, in the impotence of rage, Chained by enchantment to my stall, I see myself upon the stage Dance to amuse a music-hall. (Selected Writings 38) As Linda Dowling remarks, Symons treated the music hall “in the spirit of art” (233).1 The word vaudeville, which in the late nineteenth century began to be used to refer to a particular genre of theater performance, came to be identified as well with a style of making art, characterized by the mixing of genres with the aim of emphasizing their varietal character. One particular feature of this genre was the assembling of various parts of the performance in what appeared to be random order. James Weldon Johnson described one early vaudeville performance, The Octoroons (1895) this way: “It was billed, ‘A Musical Farce,’ but it was made up of a first part, a middle part, and a finale, neither one having any sequential connexion with the others” (Black Manhattan 96; original spelling). Robert W. Snyder has described the structure of these performances. “To an outsider, the sequence of acts looked as random as the scenes glimpsed from a trolley car on a busy city street,” he writes; however, the selections “were actually based on established principles of vaudeville” (66). Those principles, as described by George Gottlieb, a booker for the Palace Theater, and as summarized by Snyder, divided the vaudeville performance into nine parts: first, a “dumb act” involving dancers 110 vaudeville . 111 or trick animals, followed by “anything more interesting than the first act,” such as a singer; third, a comic; fourth, another two singers, one lesser known than the other. Then there is an intermission, followed by the last four acts, which consist, again, of miscellaneous performers, including mimes; comics presenting skits; and, of course, the big star, who is followed by “the closing act, preferably a visual number—trick animals or trapeze artists—that sent the audience home pleased” (Snyder 66–67). The lack of developmental or sequential connection between the various parts of the show is crucial to understanding what differentiated vaudeville from other forms of comedic stage performance. The lack of an overarching , determinative narrative was a modernizing characteristic of the form. It prefigured the disruption of narrative and sequential architecture that became a hallmark of modernist art. Among those who understood this were the original publicists of the book Cane by Jean Toomer. The description they wrote on the dust jacket of the first edition called it “a vaudeville out of the South.” Presumably, the authors of this description had some confidence that their audience would understand the term as it applied to the book. Here is the dust jacket copy, as quoted by Michael Soto: This book is a vaudeville out of the South. Its acts are sketches, short stories, one long drama and a few poems. The curtain rises (Part One) upon the folk life of Southern Negroes, their simple tragedies, their wistfulness, their waywardness , their superstitions, and their crude joy in life. Part Two is the more complex and modern brown life of Washington. Jazz rhythms all but supplant the folk tunes—one simple narrative weaves its plaintive way, and is almost lost amid the complications of the city. Part three (a single drama) Georgia again. But this is not a brief tale of peasant sorrow. It is a moving and sustained tragedy of spiritual suffering. There can be no cumulative and consistent movement and, of course, no central plot to such a book. But if it be accepted as a unit of spiritual experience , then one can find in Cane a beginning, a progression, a complication, and an end. It is too complex a volume to find its parallel in the Negro musical comedies so popular on Broadway. Cane is black vaudeville. It is black supervaudeville out of the South. (Qtd. in Soto 169–70) The linkage established here between jazz, vaudeville, and...

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