Take the Zoom tour about Baker's life Saturday, December 19, 2020 at 2 PM - 3:15 PM
Tickets are only $12 www.eventbrite...
Josephine Baker was the ultimate it girl of the Jazz age-but also many other things: she was (briefly) and opera singer, she was a spy for the French Resistance, and she was a major leader in the US civil rights movement. In short, she was an astonishing person, a great star but also far more than a star.
Baker was born poor in St Louis in 1906, where she got her start dancing on the streets for spare change. Not many street performers (think Edith Piaf, Justin Bieber) are so talented that they get spotted, but Baker was one of those: she was picked up by a traveling dance troupe and made it to Broadway at the age of 15.
It was in Paris, though, that she really made it big: in 1927 she danced across the stage of the Folies Bergères in her famous Danse Sauvage, nude but for a string of beads, and a skirt of artificial bananas. It was the peak of the Jazz age, while Americans like Hemingway were living it up on cheap post-WWI French Francs. African art was in fashion with artists like Picasso. And Baker was the toast of the town-adored by Hemingway, sketched by Picasso.
She was also one of the first American black artists to flee to Paris from the US, to escape from the segregation of the Jim Crow era. Paris loved her, and she returned the love. Her greatest hit, in 1931, started with the line “j’ai deux amours, mon pays et Paris” (I have 2 loves, my country and Paris).
Baker became a French citizen in 1937, and she showed her love of France during WWII, when she served as a spy for the Resistance, collecting information at parties with Japanese and Italian diplomats, and writing it on notes that she stored in her underwear-counting, correctly on it turned out, on her star status to protect her against strip searches.
Baker returned to the US after the war, where she showed her courage again by refusing to play for segregated audiences and forcing many theaters to desegregate.
After the war, she also began a project that consumed much of her remaining life: Baker adopted children-13 by the end-of different races and religions, forming a family she called the “rainbow tribe,” to demonstrate that people of different races and religions could live in peace if they weren’t raised to hate each other. She also kept performing, on great stages like the Olympia in Paris and Carnegie Hall in New York. In fact, she died at 68 just after a performance put on to celebrate her 50+ years of performing, surrounded by glowing reviews.
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5 окт 2024
