I've been going through a mini-obsession with Josephine Baker lately, so what better way to start the new year than this magnificent dance sequence? I love how everyone in the audience is sitting around totally nonchalant and disinterested while she's dancing her little heart out, but she doesn't even give a damn. She just keeps dancing.
So I was reading this examination of Josephine's life here, and I really liked this description:
Baker’s improvisations transgressed the conventions of choreographed dance; she strung together steps with every appearance of spontaneity. Where European dancers showed the front, presenting the body as a unified line, Baker contrived to move different parts of her body to different rhythms. Most shocking to dance purists, she used her backside, shaking it, as one of her biographers says, as though it were an instrument.
What I'm saying is, I hope you're out there today, shaking your ass like it's an instrument! Happy New Year!
Fantastic.. My new dance justification: it's not that I don't have rythym, it's that I'm moving to several different rythyms at the *same* time!!
Posted by: panloaf at January 2, 2009 06:44 PM
What I also find surprising about this video is the different angles and distances used in recording and the editing. Both seem quite more sophisticated than I would have expected for those times. What fun to watch!
Fantastic.. My new dance justification: it's not that I don't have rythym, it's that I'm moving to several different rythyms at the *same* time!!