While Shake Queens mainly focuses on femme shakers, there was a straight cis male shaker named "Snakehips" Tucker that revolutionized shake dancing and continues to inspire performers to this day. He was known as an "eccentric" dancer, which is the same category all shake dancers were placed in back in the day. I wrote a longer article on his life for my Patreon, but I wanted to share a very interesting quote I came across during my research on him.
"To appeal to white audiences, black men and women portrayed themselves as primitive dancing fools, a white fantasy. Duke Ellington’s band, for instance, played “Jungle Music.” Earl “Snakehips” Tucker (who became famous among other dancers) and the tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson performed in a happy, sensual way, playing powerless fools. Also, there was a widespread assumption that blacks were natural dancers rather than performers who had learned their art and craft as any other artists do: through observation, coaching, and practice."
This quote is from the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, an excellent reference book I use often in my shake dancing research.
Reading this quote made me feel a lot of complex emotions. I think many people consider Black folks to be "natural dancers" who don't have to work very hard at choreographing acts with precise musicality and excellent rhythm -- we often even pride ourselves on this stereotype, even though it's not 100% true. Most of the Black burlesque artists I know work very hard to come up with unique movements, including spending money on classes and hours spent rehearsing. But there is this belief that we just pop out the womb dancing and shooting hoops, I guess.
Within the burlesque industry, I've seen a lot of pushback against the notion that Black burlesquers have to nonstop-dance their ass off and do tons of acrobatics to feed into the "white fantasy" of the "dancing fool" onstage. Many Black performers advocate for stillness in movement -- a skill that seems natural, but is very difficult to achieve onstage.
As a Black shake dancer, I find stillness onstage, while difficult, to be innately rebellious and freeing. Some audiences only want to see Black bodies move in certain ways -- when we are twerking or gyrating or contorting our bodies. Nothing wrong with moving like this at all! But I've noticed that some people's societally-influenced gaze will "allow" White-presenting femmes the luxury of moving slowly about the stage (or not even much at all). When this same stillness is presented in a Black femme form, I've heard others describe it as "boring", inauthentic, or they question the performer's worth as a dancer. In my experience, Black femmes have been more likely to be subject to this kind of judgment when they practice stillness onstage. My first time practicing stillness onstage, one white person told me I should try to twerk more, and another white person told me I should "try to be myself when I'm up there" -- which I assume meant she wanted to see me twerk too? In that moment of stillness onstage, feeling myself breathe and standing in my own power, I felt more "like myself" than I ever had onstage before. So who know wtf she was talking about?
This quote made me realize that some people will use the perceived naturalness of Black movement to downplay the hard work that goes into creating unique and individualized burlesque art. And then, therefore, Black burlesque artists are suddenly held to different standards than our White co-workers; we are expected to move in certain monolithic ways instead of celebrated for our uniqueness and individuality.
And when we do move in ways that are expected of us -- because, honestly, this type of Black art is uniquely beautiful as well -- it is belittled and marked as "primitive" and "powerless". For instance, when Black femmes teach or practice twerking onstage, it's considered ghetto and classless by many! But when White-presenting performers teach these very same classes or do these moves onstage, they literally sometimes go viral and the performers are heralded as damn near geniuses for shaking their ass in the same exact way BlPOC do. It's honestly a tale as old as time.
I don't have any insightful advice on how to handle this type of microaggression -- it's so subtle as to be insidious and it's hard to guess what's behind a person's gaze, but I think in my own art I will continue to be aggressively, unapologetically ME, even if that doesn't vibe with what someone is expecting of me. I will dance like a maniac and shake and shiver and vibrate whenever I damn well please, and I'll stop and stand still as a statue onstage when I want to as well! That's the beauty of burlesque <3. I'm really really happy shake dancers hardly perform in black-and-tan nightclubs anymore, centering a white gaze that demands we perform not like ourselves, but as "powerless fools". We perform as the most beautiful versions of ourselves, and just like my last post stated --- I contain multitudes! Not just one style.
With love and until next time,
Bebe xoxo
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