On a steamy summer evening in 1933, a group of young black dancers readied themselves into position behind the plush curtains of Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre. They were the last act on a program of music and dance, a lineup that had been full of Chopin and orchestral favorites. Theirs was a new ballet, La Guiablesse, the story of a “she-devil” from the island of Martinique who lures a young lover away from his beloved, pushes him over a cliff, and disappears in a puff of smoke. Beyond the curtains sat an audience, including many elite Chicagoans, who would have been familiar with the venerable theater but hardly with what they were about to see.
It was also her black period. Page’s attraction to the forms and styles of African and African-American dance might have been influenced by what she knew about her city. During the 1930s and 1940s, the most avant-garde art—the aesthetic experiments better known as modernism—did not come from Page’s north-side neighborhood. Rather, the creative ferment of the city could be found in Bronzeville, that thin corridor seven miles long and one and a half miles wide, where the city’s black population crammed into kitchenettes under the force of the city’s racist, restrictive housing covenants. Despite entrenched lines of segregation, inhabitants of Bronzeville were emboldened by their community’s quest for economic and cultural self-determination, expressed in exciting ways across the arts, from jazz and blues to film and dance.
On an overhanging ledge of the hill, La Guiablesse (Page) watches in a white robe with sleeves like “veils” or “wings.” She winds her way down the hill, swinging her veils as she runs across the stage, casts off her robe, and kisses the young lover on the forehead. They move together in a “jazz dance,” a seduction of stamps and lunges. He shakes loose from the villagers to follow her into the mountains, losing his way. At the moment when La Guiablesse reveals her true, horrid self—an ugly hag, wrapping the lover in the veils of her strangling embrace—a haunting offstage voice merges with the music’s wordless melody.
La Guiablesse may have inverted racial fear by embodying the sexual power of the shape-shifter in Page herself. It is unclear whether Page imagined that she was an exotic figure of the Caribbean, or if the production played upon her whiteness to stage her as an interloper to the Caribbean scene. It may have been a little bit of both. William Grant Still neatly typed the ballet’s scene above the musical score, including a note describing La Guiablesse casting off her robe to reveal a “bronzed body.” And yet the program note to the ballet, written by the Chicago dancer, poet, and painter Mark Turbyfill, describes how La Guiablesse “with her white deceit, comes to separate and destroy dark-skinned lovers.” Was she black or was she white? Color difference was central to this performance, if also ambiguous. Here was a world of magic, it seems, a stage that gave imaginative license to express possibility beyond the strict categories of racial segregation everywhere else in the city of Chicago.
Herein lies the complicated transmission of La Guiablesse as an aesthetic form: a folktale written down by a traveling writer (Hearn), which inspired a Russian immigrant dancer (Bolm), who shared it with a white midwestern choreographer (Page), who then gifted her ballet to a black dancer (Dunham), who would become intimately connected to the culture of the Caribbean that originally inspired the story and ballet.
It may be tempting to see Dunham as the rightful heir to the ballet, as she certainly understood the culture from which it was derived. But must artists have an embodied connection to their practice? Today, the ethics of artistic appropriation have become more complicated than ever, as we negotiate how and when it is “OK” to imagine stories, languages, and movements that are not our own.
