ABSTRACT
We learned in the previous chapter that the white artists who were first to dance the Cake-Walk were among the biggest stars of the music-hall; it was they who transformed the dance, outdoing their black rivals in hyperbolic gesture, and making it into a phénomène de société. It is highly pertinent to note that two of these women were considered not quite white by French spectators: Polaire came from Algeria, and la Belle Otero (Caroline Otero) from Spain. This was also the case for Eugénie Fougère, a Spanish Jew. Remember, too, that another of these stars, Louise Balthy, was known for her ugliness. As was stated in the previous chapter, the French reworking of the Cake-Walk made it a perfect fusion of hystero-epilepsy and of Darwinian regression; as such, it seemed only natural that the epileptic singers should be its best interpreters. Popular spectacle played a powerful role in creating, reinforcing, or changing racial stereotypes. Yet, even before the Cake-Walk phenomenon in France, some of the most popular Epileptic Singers were, like Polaire, already associated with the Dark Continent. Marguerite Duclerc for example – the “Joy of Paris” who sang “Turn me on! Turn me on!” – was called a Sarrazin beauty. Perhaps that was because she did the belly dance in her 1889 debut before adopting the persona of a Spanish dancer and then of an epileptic singer. She was comical as well as sexy, and “her tumultuous shaking and trembling, her audacious gestures amused audiences for five or six years … Then fashion left these fantasies behind.”1 She died in 1902 at the age of 35. Note the confirmation of our observation that the epileptic performance style was becoming outmoded before the Cake-Walk allowed the singers to re-vivify their movements and image. Another comical singer, Mlle Walsy, was a hit singing and
dancing in “The Clown of the Molier Circus”; the Courrier Français journalist felt it important to inform readers that “she had traveled a lot especially in Algeria, among the bandits of North Africa [Barbaresques].”2 After their popularity had faded, former epileptic singers could still draw applause by imitating the NorthAfrican style of dancing. “They amuse the spectator by the gestures of a mouquette or by the contortions of a moukère.”3 The caf’conc’ was already a key site where images of class, sexuality, and pathology, were molded into pop icons; now it became a site where race was an overt component in the portrayal of the dislocated, pathologized, hyper-sexual body.
