Louis Lumière | Le Cake-Walk au Nouveau Cirque / 1903

parisian cakewalks

by Douglas Messerli

 

Louis Lumière (director) Le Cake-Walk au Nouveau Cirque / 1903

 

The dance called “the cakewalk” began as a parody among black slaves concerning the pretensions of their white masters, but soon developed into its own dance form, sweeping the US from 1890 to 1910. Huge contests were held among black couples who attempted to outdo one another in their high-step maneuvers, the prize generally being an elaborately decorated cake. White couples soon followed, in particular the “cakewalk champions” Mr. and Mrs. Elks, who performed their dance at Paris’ Nouveau Cirque in a review titled “Les Joyeux Nègres."

     Alongside their performance danced the famed child couple, the brother and sister team of Rudy and Fredy Walker, among other couples, including the famous Jack Brown and Charles Gregory.

     Throughout 1902 and 1903, Paris was overwhelmed by the cakewalk craze, with another performance of the “Florida Creole Girls,” seven African-American women dancing at the Casino de Paris. By 1908 the popular dance form had made its way into the higher echelons of culture with Debussy’s Golliwogg’s Cake-walk as part of his Children’s Corner.

     In 1903 a 5-minute film was made of the cakewalk dancers. The biographer of the Walkers, Lotz long argued the film was made by the French Pathé company, leading commentators such as popegrutch on Century Film Project to argue that the director was Alice Guy. But Jim Radcliff in his The American Songbook convincingly demonstrates that the film was actually the work of Louis Lumière, and that the film did not depict a single shoot, but was an amalgamation of five different short films from Lumière of the period, corresponding to the catalog numbers 1350-1354:

 

1350……Nègres, [I]

1351……Négrillons

1352……Nègres, [II]

1353……Les Elkes, champions du cake-walk

1354……Final [“Les Soeurs Pérès” and the other previous performers] (brackets represent my addition)

 

     Seeing the final film today it is hard to imagine as a collage of five separate films, particularly since we see each of the former dancers lined up against the wall while others perform in the foreground, and the last “Final” scene consists of all the previous dancers joining in one long final promenade and curtain call. Radcliff bases his evidence also on the postcards that accompany the films, so I shall bow to his wisdom.

     For the purposes of this publication, it is the first dance, attributed to Brown and Gregory, the latter dancing, as usual, in drag, that most matters. Their number, in fact, introduces the dance itself before the other duos provide variations of the work.

 

   Radcliff questions even if it’s Gregory in performance, suggesting that it doesn’t look like Gregory given his representation elsewhere on the postcards. The Lumière description itself certainly does not resolve the matter:  “n°1350……. ‘Les Nègres,’ a team which consists of two men, the taller one in drag.” But most commentators are convinced that the men in the film are Brown and Gregory, and to it appears to me that their postcard costuming and posing (show above) is highly similar to the dance performed in the short film.

     Also of great interest is the final scene which includes to Spanish sisters, Jeanne and Nina Pérès, one of them costumed in a modified version of male attire.

     And finally, one has to acknowledge that if mockery is at the heart of this dance form, performing the dance as a same-sex couple throws the Southern Gentleman and his Belle into a new perspective.

     All of these dances are joyfully raucous and another piece of evidence of how audiences of the day loved drag performances. The film, as a whole, was remarkably popular.

      I might add that in presenting dance, theater, and other arts as did Lumière and Pathé, cinema provided their audiences a role similar to what Instagram, Facebook, and other such services do today.

 

Los Angeles, March 24, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).