From the Black Death to Black Dance: Choreomania as Cultural Symptom

Paris in the interwar years was abuzz with Black dance and dancers. The stage was set since the First World War, when expatriate African Americans first began creating here, through their performance and patronage of jazz, “a new sense of black community, one based on positive affects and experience.”1 This community was a permeable one, where men and women of different races came together on the dance floor. As the novelist Michel Leiris recalls in his autobiographical work, L’Age d’homme, “During the years immediately following November 11th, 1918, nationalities were sufficiently confused and class barriers sufficiently lowered... for most parties given by young people to be strange mixtures where scions of the best families mixed with the dregs of the dance halls ... In the period of great licence following the hostilities, jazz was a sign of allegiance, an orgiastic tribute to the colours of the moment. It functioned magically, and its means of influence can be compared to a kind of possession. It was the element that gave these celebrations their truemeaning: a religiousmeaning, with communion by dance ... [S]wept along by violent bursts of topical energy, jazz still had enough of a dying civilisation about it, humanity submitting blindly to the machine.”2 Into this already fervid scene burst Josephine Baker with her Charleston and her charisma, and it seemed for awhile that all of Paris had abandoned the kinesis of the everyday for this new form of exhilaration. The French dance critic André Levinson described Baker’s performance in LaRevue Negre as marked with “a wild splendour andmagnificent animality... the plastic sense of a race of sculptors came to life and the frenzy of theAfrican Eros swept over the audience. It was no longer a grotesque dancing girl that stood before them, but the blackVenus that