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The Chorus Girl in Black and White: Performing Race, Gender, and Beauty

Oehlers, Adrienne Gibbons
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7096-7757
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1682634278745119

Abstract Details

2023, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Theatre.
In the 2019 documentary on The Apollo, Ralph Cooper, founder and original master of ceremonies for the Amateur Night at Harlem’s acclaimed theater, declared that “There was always two kinds of show business. There was a white show business. And there was a black show business.” This dissertation considers these disparate worlds alongside each other to foreground the less documented and studied (and therefore deemed less prestigious) Black showgirl traditions in musical theatre and dance ensembles. The chorus girl has been the subject of scholarly consideration from American studies and Feminist studies to Theatre and Media studies, the entirety of which was almost exclusively focused on the historical and cultural implications of the white chorus girl. This project is centered around how the Black chorus girl was performing at the same time, despite having been relegated to history’s sidelines, and how her presence on the public stage shaped identity formation and perceptions of Black femininity. Considering the dual phenomenon of race on the revue stage in New York reveals how these segregated performances intersected and how they contributed to the development of the other. This research adds to the narrative of the chorus girl by rendering stories of Black female ensemble performers and identifying the ways in which their lives as dancers and models coincided and diverged with those of their white counterparts. This dissertation examines three distinct Black dance ensembles that performed in shows in New York City from 1910 to 1945, segregated from their other more famous, better compensated, and more stable white counterparts. These companies were chosen because they were conceived and performed with Black audiences in mind. The long-running but rarely remembered touring revue Brownskin Models (1924-1954) established a location for an ongoing presentation of Black beauty. Darktown Follies (1913) was a musical that developed in Black theatres in Harlem and across the country and utilized dance as a method of reclaiming and proclaiming Black cultural identity. The famous Apollo Theater had a chorus line as part of its daily shows from 1934 to 1942, and its dancers in the Apollo #1 Chorus Line worked an intense schedule with structural similarities to the all-white Radio City Rockettes but without many of their benefits. The Black dancers in these three ensembles had to maneuver in the slim space between casting preferences that were embedded in systemic whiteness, as seen in the Ziegfeld Girls and the Radio City Rockettes, and performances that could expand constructions of Black femininity. This project exposes the discrepancies between the lived realities of Black and white chorus girls, how they were viewed by racially different audiences, and how their performances influenced American opinions on race and gender.
Beth Kattelman (Advisor)
Linda Mizejewski (Committee Member)
Hannah Kosstrin (Committee Member)
E.J. Westlake (Committee Member)
214 p.
African American Studies; American Studies; Black History; Dance; Performing Arts; Theater History; Theater Studies; Womens Studies
Chorus Girl; Musical Theatre; Ensembles; Black performance; Community; Darktown Follies; Radio City Rockettes; Apollo Chorus Line; Brownskin Models: Ziegfeld Girl; Harlem theatre; Chorus lines; Unison dancing.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Oehlers, A. G. (2023). The Chorus Girl in Black and White: Performing Race, Gender, and Beauty [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1682634278745119

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Oehlers, Adrienne. The Chorus Girl in Black and White: Performing Race, Gender, and Beauty. 2023. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1682634278745119.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Oehlers, Adrienne. "The Chorus Girl in Black and White: Performing Race, Gender, and Beauty." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2023. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1682634278745119

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1682634278745119
248
© 2023, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.