In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

DANCING
As the only artist of the American dance and music show La Revue
negre, the nineteen-year-old Josephine Baker, who within a few weeks
has become the darling of the Parisian public, receives a contract to
appear at the Folies Bergeres. During the winter months, however, she
gives two daily performances (at 8:30 P.M. and 11:15 P.M.) at Berlin's
Nelson Theater. It is in Berlin that her dancing begins to fascinate the
intellectuals of the Old World. Max Reinhardt, who dominates the
German-speaking theater scene with his productions in Berlin, Vienna,
and Salzburg, tries to persuade Baker to make a "serious" career on the
stage: "The expressive control of the whole body, the spontaneity of
motion, the rhythm, the bright emotional color: these are your treasures-no,
not yours alone-these are American treasures. With such
control of the body, such pantomime, I believe I could portray emotion
as it has never before been portrayed" (Rose, 85).
There is a certain ambiguity in Reinhardt's reaction to Josephine
Baker's dancing. On the one hand, he is impressed with its sheer form
and its sensual presence ("the spontaneity of motion, the rhythm, the
bright emotional color"). But on the other hand, he wants to see it as an
"expression" or as a "portrait" -i.e., as a signifier for something" deep"
(Reinhardt speaks of "emotions") that comes to the surface. [see Authenticity
vs. Artificiality] Full of enthusiasm, Reinhardt phones his influential
friend Harry Graf Kessler late in the evening on Saturday, February
13, and invites him to meet Baker at the apartment of the playwright
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