Her life sounds like a cross between ‘Moulin Rouge’ and a Robert Ludlum novel.Born poor in St. Louis, she joins a touring Broadway company in her teens, becomes a superstar in 1920s Paris and is depicted in art by Picasso and Alexander Calder.
Later she smuggles documents – written in invisible ink – for the French Resistance, adopts 12 orphans and returns to America to join Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1963 March on Washington.
But Josephine Baker was a real woman, and this year the world marks the birth centenary of the celebrated African-American singer, dancer and actress.
Americans might still be reluctant to accept someone who danced virtually nude onstage as a major historical figure, but there is little doubt that the Missouri native was one of the toughest, most extraordinary women America has produced.
The bittersweet part of the story is that, as a black woman born into pre-civil rights America, she had to live in Europe to achieve her goals.
To celebrate the talents of this sensual beauty and heroic civil rights leader, the American Jazz Museum and the Kansas City Friends of Alvin Ailey will present ‘Jammin’ at the Gem: A Josephine Baker Tribute,’ at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Gem Theater in the 18th and Vine District.
‘There’s a lot she stands for to African-Americans that goes beyond the banana dance,’ said Friends executive director Tyrone Aiken, referring to a famous Baker number in which she wore little but a string of 16 bananas stitched together to form a skirt.
Jazz singer Nnenna Freelon will ‘channel’ Baker in a set of songs, and six dancers from Ailey II, the apprentice company of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, will perform a new work choreographed for the occasion by Ailey II assistant artistic director Troy Powell.
Ailey II artistic director Sylvia Waters will host the event. Powell’s choreography is set to music of Nina Simone (‘Ol’ Jim Crow’), Miles Davis (‘So What’) and Baker herself (‘I Love Dancing’).
On Sunday the Kansas City Friends of Alvin Ailey repeats Powell’s choreography in a different program honoring Baker. The events are a tribute not just to Baker’s artistry but also to her efforts in ‘pushing envelopes and breaking down barriers,’ said Jazz Museum music coordinator Gerald Dunn. ‘Even today she’s not given credit for speaking out against racism or sexism or not being able to express yourself through your craft.’
Baker’s strength as an artist was that she continually reinvented herself, he added. ‘She just happened to be black. The way she conducted her life, she would have been great no matter what.’
Powell, a former Ailey dancer, said: ‘She was way ahead of her time. Josephine Baker was one of those flashy, carefree black women who did what she wanted to do. She went to Paris to work because they accepted her there. It’s so funny that it’s still the same today, we still have that wall up against nudity and other things.’
Baker was part of a flood of African-Americans who found artistic fulfillment in Paris, from the 1920s to at least the 1960s, when authors like James Baldwin made their home in the city on the Seine.
‘One day I realized I was living in a country where I was afraid to be black,’ Baker said of her early life, as cited on the well-researched official Web site at cmgww.com/stars/baker.
‘It was only a country for white people. Not black. So I left. I had been suffocating in the United States. A lot of us left, not because we wanted to leave, but because we couldn’t stand it anymore. I felt liberated in Paris.’
By PAUL HORSLEY. Read more at The Kansas City Star
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