When You See Josephine, You See Her Mother

Pulitzer Arts Foundation

Screening, Performance & Talk

11/19/2022

This event is inspired by the exhibition Barbara Chase-Riboud Monumentale: The Bronzes, which features a sculpture dedicated to Josephine Baker.

1. Featuring short film When You See Josephine, You See Her Mother with commissioned original choreography, Charis Railey
2. Panel presentation and discussion with Associate Professor Joanna Dee Das and Professor Denise Ward-Brown
3. Live dance performance, Heather Beal accompanied by SamFox student, Jess Piard

When You See Josephine, You See Her Mother

SYNOPSIS

Carrie McDonald was Josephine Baker’s mother. 

Carrie McDonald was famous for her dancing abilities. The archive contains no details about how she danced other than one sentence from a Baker biography that states she could dance with a glass/bottle on her head. That sentence is our jumping-off point for creatively imagining this world of ragtime and the blues, of the dancing that Josephine Baker saw as a child and inherited from her mother.

Dance is a cultural marker in the African diaspora.  Dance is part of the ‘unwritten’ archive that we inherit generation after generation. 

We speculate that Josephine’s grand-mother gave the gift of dance to Carrie and Carrie’s sister.