ABSTRACT
In her 1942 autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (pub. 1996), Zora Neale Hurston takes stock of her presentation of black diasporic folk songs and dances a decade earlier. She notes both the impact of her concert and the public’s failure to remember her association with it. In a departure from what Hurston chalks up to the ways of ‘theater people’, this essay seeks to restore credit to Hurston for her staging of black folk dance by adding ‘choreographer’ to the list of accomplishments – novelist, folklorist, anthropologist and playwright – that more frequently accompany her name. At the same time, I explore some of the implications of employing naming as a strategy of remembrance. While use of the term ‘choreographer’ helps remedy the longstanding neglect of Hurston’s dance contributions, this retroactive designation also poses certain dilemmas. Consequently, I hope to show that the act of remembering Hurston’s performances is one that requires a careful rethinking of our disciplinary definitions of artists and artistry. The concert to which Hurston refers in her autobiography premiered on
10 January 1932, at the John Golden Theatre in New York. Titled The Great Day and billed as ‘A Program of Original Negro Folklore’, Hurston’s revue was based on the anthropological research she conducted in the southern United States and the Bahamas during the late 1920s. The narrative of the concert traced a single day in the life of a railroad work camp in Florida, from the waking of the camp at dawn to a rousing Bahamian Fire Dance at midnight (Programme 1932). Over the next few years, Hurston produced her folk concert in slightly different versions and under various titles – From
Sun to Sun, All De Live Long Day, Singing Steel – in cities and towns across the country. Although she continually reworked the revue, the enactment of the Caribbean dance finale remained a fixture that was by all accounts the high point of the production. In addition to these full-length concerts, Hurston presented portions of her revue at several venues around New York, twice at the National Folk Festival (in St Louis in 1934 and in Washington DC in 1938), and under the auspices of the Florida Federal Writers’ Project in Orlando. Along the way, her Bahamian dance material captured the interest of choral director Hall Johnson, Russian-born jazz dance promoter Mura Dehn, theatre director Irene Lewisohn, modern dance artists Ruth St. Denis, Doris Humphrey and Helen Tamiris, and ballroom dance icon Irene Castle. Despite this attention, Hurston’s contributions to the field of dance remain all but forgotten. The project of recovering the history of Hurston’s stagings of black
diasporic dance is therefore one of ‘revisibilization’: unearthing what Brenda Dixon Gottschild (1996) has described as the ‘invisibilized’ black influences on American culture. Certainly Hurston is no stranger to the revisibilization process. From the 1970s to the 1990s, this African American artist – and her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God in particular – catapulted from near-complete obscurity to canonization within the academy. While Hurston’s current renown makes the neglect of her dance practice all the more striking, the rise of her literary star also proves instructive as we set out to recuperate her dance productions. As a number of black feminist critics have pointed out, the reclaiming of Hurston as foremother to a black woman’s literary tradition has elevated her to the position of pure origin, a move that not only naturalizes and decontextualizes Hurston’s own artistic production but also privileges her representation of a reputedly ‘authentic’ black folk heritage over and above other African American experiences and histories.1
