It is in a new Parisian theater, on the Passy side, some fragments of the life of Joséphine Baker, the American who became a French citizen who entered the Pantheon on Tuesday November 30, the first black woman, even if the one who was a great friend of Princess Grace will remain buried in Monaco…
We could dream of a three-hour show with multicolored paintings, a grandiose reconstruction, so much the life of Joséphine Baker has been multiple, rich in encounters and dramas, and much more shared than we might think, us French, between Europe and the United States. The ambition of Xavier Durringer, the author of the play, is much more modest: some emblematic fragments of the singer’s existence, to make her voice heard, and not only in her repertoire. A heckled and fighter, a little girl born in terrible poverty and who will become this flamboyant icon, the first independent black woman. She earned her living, she lived it as she saw fit, lovers and lovers (these, among which Colette, not at all mentioned: strange modesty!). She was also a fighter in the true sense of freedom, and a woman of the world, in both senses too: socialite and of this whole world where she will adopt, not being able to have any herself, so many children from one continent to another. the other: the risk, she was so generous, was to lose all of her fortune.
The voice of Josephine therefore embodied by an astonishing young unknown actress, Clarisse Caplan, who bares herself (really) with a deep correctness, dignity and bitterness, a life force that could have turned into absolute misfortune. A little girl rabbit tooth born in Saint Louis, Missouri, in the blackest misery of the blacks (pun easy but so sad and so just that here, it moves). Father left immediately, alcoholic mother and new alcoholic companion, tin roof on a sordid hovel where rats and cockroaches swarm to the point that with brothers and sisters we have competitions like others make roosters fight. And Joséphine beaten by the two drunks, dancing when she escapes, the happiness of dancing, the joy, finally, of dancing, of getting drunk on steps and jumps, the few cents that we will end up bringing back for the family and, when they are not brought back, more blows, redoubled.
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It’s a melodrama. A terrible melodrama but truer than those that we invent and that we would say: “There is too much”. And here, no, it is not enough. Durringer plays formulas that hit the mark: The goose game (of life), universal laws … but so little shared, says Josephine, these laws of equality between human beings, in a South America whose racism is still so monstrous from which the Northerners, 50 years after the Civil War, look away. Because, says Josephine, in the American conscience, the white angel is kind, the black angel is a demon. White is immaculate, black is soot, it’s dirty.
And she attends, on July 2, 1917 (she is 11 years old) one of the worst riots of segregation, one of the worst massacres, pregnant black women trampled in front of her by whites, white police, 8 white dead, more than 100 officially at home. the blacks, undoubtedly much more. And we hear Strange Fruits. Billie Holliday. These strange fruits which hang from the branches of trees, poplars and redwoods, these strange fruits, the bodies of lynched blacks which wither in the humid South. Joséphine is then in the service of a White. Who teaches him good manners. With scathing contempt.
The rest is a little below. Joséphine confides in her lover-impresario, Pepito, who, despite this Spanish nickname, was Italian. She tells us about the failure of an American tour, again because of this damn racism, but also of a European tour where she caused a scandal in Nazi Germany, in Catholic Austria (we therefore suppose to be in the 1930s but you have to really know your life to get your bearings). And then parade the resistant Joséphine who, to fool the occupants, hid tickets in her bra or codes in her scores for the use of the Allied secret services. Then the human rights activist, alongside Martin Luther King during the famous Washington speech (the I have a dream of this one concealed that Baker also spoke on this occasion).
We will meet Rosa Parks, the one who refused to give way to a white man on the bus, we will hear the shots from Memphis: Baker was not there, it becomes a story of the black cause, bordering on outside subject, with one side we were afraid of forgetting something … Other paintings. We will not have the Milandes, we will not have Joséphine, mother of the children of the world. We will finally have the beginnings of French glory. In the background, black and white photos of a poor house in the South, of an ocean liner leaving New York with a 19-year-old girl who, on a whim, accepts the proposal of a rich socialite, Caroline Reagan . She wants to put on a show on her name, paid 250 dollars a week, a golden bridge for the poor girl.
It will become the Negro review. On October 2, 1925 at the Champs-Elysées theater, popularized by the poster by Paul Colin, Joséphine B., almost naked, boyish hairstyle in this Paris, the world symbol of freedom, caused a scandal with her Wild dance, cowrie bracelets on her bare ankles, a banana belt that is still controversial today.
Durringer is right to deliver it to us without comment (Clarisse Caplan is still remarkable there), also leaving us in the perplexity that Joséphine Baker has always wanted to maintain: the image of Epinal extended to whites who only saw in the Dark “” a good savage “at the risk of shocking the Black community nowadays by the power of this cliché. Because although France was far ahead in this area compared to the USA, we were nevertheless coming out of the scandal caused by the first Goncourt prize given to a black man (Martinique), René Maran, in 1921: interpellation at the Chamber of Deputies for the have him withdraw, Maran having recognized himself in the emerging movement of the Negritude (Senghor, Aimé Césaire).
Alongside Camille Caplan Thomas Armand plays all the other roles, sometimes overplaying them: he is never as good as when he is in the simplicity. But it is he who sings very nicely the famous I have two loves, transformism way, Caplan contenting himself with It’s him (For me there is only one man in Paris and it’s him) Not enough music someone near us was saying. Is it a question of rights?
In any case the duo, which it seems did not know how to dance “before”, treats us, charleston, cake-walk, moments à la Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, giving these choreographic breaths the dimension ofwings of the dream which transforms Josephine B. into a musical comedy that takes off. A 19-year-old becomes a star. Two young actors hardly older dream of being one, and take their first steps.
Josephine B. by Xavier Durringer, directed by the author,
With Clarisse Caplan and Thomas Armand.
Passy Theater
Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 7 p.m., Sunday at 4 p.m.
Until January 2, 2022.
It is possible that the play will be extended until the end of March, with the possible addition of another day (Wednesday).