Abstract
This article situates the French dancer and choreographer of color Nyota Inyoka’s Egyptian-inspired work within the context of modern Orientalist Egyptomania and relates her to the avant-garde. Drawing out Inyoka’s ambiguous positionality the article not only demonstrates how Inyoka’s work disrupted the phenomenon of Egyptomania, most notably in her performance Prière aux dieux solaires (Prayer to the Sun Gods) (1921), but also unearths the ways in which her work, as it performed ‘ancient Egypt,’ deserves to be held alongside related and more canonized avant-garde practices.
Nyota Inyoka (1896–1971), whose choreographic oeuvre was created primarily between the early 1920s and 1950s, was born in Paris as an illegitimate child to a French mother and an unknown father of color who presumably descended from the French historical colonial context. Following her 1917 debut at the Folies Bergère in Paris, Nyota Inyoka, as a performer of color and of a poor economic background, gradually gained a reputation as an ‘Egyptian’ dancer from the 1920/21 season onward, with a stage adaptation of Pierre Benoit’s novel L’Atlantide (Atlantida), to which we will return.1 While her later oeuvre indeed presented mainly Indian- and Egyptian-inspired works, her early dance creations, however, also showcased Cambodian-, Persian-, and Bedouin-inspired performances, among others. Her early career, therefore, seems to have fit squarely into the craze for the exotic prevalent during the early twentieth century, and within this broader craze, also into mainstream ‘Egyptomaniac’ cultural and artistic productions. As we intend to demonstrate in this article, however, much more was going on in the creative practice of this fascinating dancer-choreographer than at first meets the eye. In fact, on closer inspection, Nyota Inyoka’s counter- or anti-colonial work deserves to be located firmly in a widened canon of avant-garde performance arts. To illustrate why this should be so, we first need to take a closer look at the particularities of French Egyptomania and the context in which Nyota Inyoka operated.
1 French Egyptomania and Orientalism
The knowledge produced about Egypt in the development of modern Egyptology, and the concurrent Egyptomania set forth, among others, by writers such as François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) and Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), played a key role in postcolonial thinker Edward Said’s articulation of his seminal theory on Orientalism and its colonizing implications. In his essay “Egyptian Rites,” Said succinctly described the political as well as imaginative importance of Egypt as a geographical place, but also the conflict over the right to depict Egypt:
Egypt’s astonishing historical continuity of thousands of years of recorded existence has regularly attracted European travelers, visionaries, artists, and conquerors, from Herodotus, Caesar, and Alexander to Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Flaubert. Then came the Americans—Cecil B. De Mille, David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger. Its strategic closeness to Europe and the East has made Egypt a highly prized and much sought after imperial possession: the roll call of civilizations that constructed foreign policies around Egypt is virtually unparalleled in world history, although the Atlantic West and the Arab world together have played the dominant part in this continuing drama.
As a result, then, we can speak intelligibly and correctly of a battle not only for Egypt, but also for the right to depict Egypt. On the one hand, there is the Egypt whose symbolic, cultural, and political identity, while African, is nevertheless essentially Western, in which the country’s ancient grandeur and modern significance come together in ways that are British, French, German, Italian, or American. On the other, there is the Egypt whose Islamic and Arab roles are in frequent conflict with its Western representations, which have often stressed the country’s remote (therefore more attractive) past at the expense of its actual present.2
Further distinguishing French and British Orientalisms in the context of British colonial dominance and French loss, Said noted that to the French, the Orient, and Egypt in particular, was an area
of memories, suggestive ruins, forgotten secrets, hidden correspondences, and an almost virtuosic style of being, an Orient whose highest literary forms would be found in Nerval and Flaubert, both of whose work was solidly fixed in an imaginative, unrealizable (except aesthetically) dimension.3
To capture this imaginative space of memory and loss, Said thus observed, the French in particular deployed their artistic arsenal to develop a predominantly iconically determined Egyptomania following the Napoleonic era and the (failed) Egyptian campaign. Indeed, in addition to writing, Said noted, museum architecture, the visual arts, and numerous stage productions (of musical theatre, ballet, in the Ballets Russes and in French modern dance more generally) brought the general public into regular contact with an iconography of ancient Egypt. As much inspired by ‘ancient’ Egyptian artifacts as by modern artistic exploits, this iconography in due course gave rise to an ever broadening, insinuating fascination with overwhelming pyramids and rock tombs that soon also spilled over into the modern cityscape. The Obelisk of Luxor, for example, erected in Paris in 1836 at the Place de la Concorde,4 contributed to the ‘Egyptification’ of the French metropolis. At the same time, colorfully illustrated books, such as the monumental Description de l’Égypte (Description of Egypt, 1809–1829), were published by scientists and artists accompanying the military campaign of General Bonaparte.5 The mentioned book was used as early as 1812 by Jean-Baptiste Isabey (1767–1855), director of stage decorations of the Opéra de Paris, for L’Enfant prodigue (The Prodigal Son), a pantomime ballet by Pierre Gardel (1758–1840).6 Numerous other stage productions subsequently came to ‘stage’ ancient Egypt in the ‘long’ nineteenth century, most productions being determined by an almost exclusively visual authenticity effect based on the latest archeological discoveries. The guiding principle here being a historicist ‘pastiche’ mise-en-scène, intended on evoking a phantasmatic image of ancient Egypt and Pharaonic culture, world fairs thereafter similarly intensified the public taste for spectacular and grand Egyptian scenery. In 1867, for example, an Egyptian temple was reconstructed by the Egyptologist Auguste Mariette at the Exposition Universelle or World Exhibition in Paris, and a great variety of sphinxes came to decorate entrances of buildings, gardens, and public squares in the French metropolis.7
As Said poignantly reminds us, such phantasmatic visual and performative presentations of ancient Egypt, were simultaneously used, especially by writers, to culturally devalue modern Egypt.8 This imperialist gesture is particularly obvious in the work of writers, where Muslim Egypt was as a rule denigrated, and colonial domination thereby justified:
[I]n Egypt, Chateaubriand believes he can equate the absence of France with the absence of a free government ruling a happy people […]: how can this degenerate stupid mob of “Musulmans” have come to inhabit the same land whose vastly different owners so impressed Herodotus and Diodorus?9
Another important dimension of such Orientalist Egyptomania, equally crucial to grasp the avant-garde endeavor of Nyota Inyoka, we will see, was its sexualized dimension. Said explicitly highlights the important role of female figures and sexuality, from those of Cleopatra and Salome,10 to the Egyptian dancer and courtesan Kuchuk Hanem so central in Flaubert: “The Oriental woman is an occasion and an opportunity for Flaubert’s musings […] Less a woman than a display of impressive but verbally inexpressive femininity.”11 As Said pointedly concluded, “In time ‘Oriental sex’ was as standard a commodity as any other available in the mass culture, with the result that readers and writers could have it if they wished without necessarily going to the Orient.”12
Nyota Inyoka too appears to have been subjected to this Orientalizing, exoticizing, and sexualizing operation in the aforementioned stage adaptation of the popular novel L’Atlantide. In Henri Clerc’s (1881–1967) stage adaptation, which premiered in December 1920 at the Théâtre Marigny, Nyota Inyoka performed as a dancer at the court of Antinéa. Press articles announced her as “célèbre danseuse égyptienne” (“celebrated Egyptian dancer”), and remarked that she added a “note pittoresque de son charme exotique” (“picturesque note with her exotic charm”).13 Although not directly situated in an Egyptian setting, L’Atlantide was Egyptian-inspired in many ways: The queen of Atlantis, Antinéa, was said to have descended from Neptune and Cleopatra, and the aesthetic choices of the staging presented both ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ Egyptianizing motifs. A small drawing of “la danseuse Nyota-Nioka” (sic) in a press clipping related to L’Atlantide, for example, shows Nyota’s face in close-up with a turban-like headdress and very clearly features her as a woman of color—or, better, an Orientalized woman: An embodied, iconic referent to the ‘Orient’ available in the here and now. When we attend to the particularities of her performances and movements, however, a rather different, and far more critical, image of Nyota Inyoka’s oeuvre arises.
2 Nyota Inyoka and Egyptomania: Facing Ancestors
Figure 1 shows a photomontage of two faces: On the left, a photo of the head of an ancient Egyptian Pharaonic sculpture intricately carved out of stone and preserved in the Louvre.14 It presents the head in profile, serenely facing to the right—an almond-shaped eye, a beautifully swung eyebrow, an elaborate headdress in the characteristically square shape covering the ear and reaching the shoulder. Juxtaposed to this reproduced sculpture, a photo of Nyota Inyoka in profile, facing left (toward the sculpture), wearing a seemingly self-designed costume (used in her piece Nephtys of 1933)15 in a similarly Pharaonic style. Her costume is constructed from materials that must have been readily available to her in early twentieth-century France: Golden-colored strips of cloth braided and sewn together as a headdress recreate the texture of the ancient hairdo worn by the Pharaonic statue, her neck and shoulders being covered by a collar or gorgerin created from fabric strips connected to each other by a golden net-type texture. The collar is meticulously embroidered with pearls and sequins. An extraordinarily detailed piece, it resembles an early twentieth-century Parisian ‘do-it-yourself’ approximation of the texture and style of Pharaonic statues.
Figure 1
Collage by Nyota Inyoka
Citation: Journal of Avant-Garde Studies 4, 1 (2024) ; 10.1163/25896377-00401002
Program, Gala de la Libération de l’Egypte, Palais de la Porte Dorée, Paris, 1952–1953, BnF, F° Col. 119, box 3.The photomontage with the two faces—the Egyptian statue and Nyota Inyoka in the Egyptian-inspired costume intently facing each other—form part of Nyota Inyoka’s preserved press materials and printed evening programs. It not only exemplifies a partial, avant-garde blurring of the boundaries between life and art, as we will demonstrate later in this article. It also hints at Inyoka’s complicated and ambiguous relationship to Egyptomania in several ways. For on the one hand, as an image visually reenacting the Pharaonic statue, this montage fits squarely into the iconically determined Egyptomania discussed earlier. Indeed, by establishing and visually performing a direct connection to ancient Egyptian iconography it erases all traces of then current Egyptian cultural, social, and political conditions. Yet, on the other hand, this photomontage was also used in the printed evening program of her performance at the 1952 Gala de la Libération,16 commemorating the political transition of Egypt away from a pseudo-independent kingdom still under de facto British (colonial) control. This fact removes her from the abstract, aesthetic realm of Egyptomania and places her performance in the anti-colonial Egyptian present, thereby also situating her directly in the colonial political context of the French and British imperial competition dating back to the Napoleonic Egyptian campaign. Moreover, in some of her press materials using the same image, she also added a caption under the same photomontage: “I am facing my ancestors in my dance.”17
As a choreographer of color of, to this day, unknown origins in Paris, struggling for economic survival, Nyota Inyoka herself thus also clearly established a relationship of identification with ‘Egyptianness.’ Indeed, she felt a deep inner connection to Egypt from the early 1920s onward, perhaps motivated by her attempts to define or manifest her own identity. She repeatedly mentioned this felt connection in the press, and several of her (dream) journal entries also attest to it:
and I was thinking of my father and then someone says to me: So you are from this country. Why haven’t you said so. But I answered vividly and with an increasingly sincere conviction, but I am Egyptian, I assure you that I am Egyptian. I am sure that I am Egyptian I was thinking to myself.18
A comment below this entry reads: “I think I have seen the school where my father was with this word play Morfray which means that he died recently … perhaps … (but I am Egyptian!).”19 This inner sense of identification clearly distanced her from the superficial and outward-oriented Orientalist Egyptomania. Indeed, what we begin to see happening here is how Nyota Inyoka’s own fantasies as a Parisian woman of color from a poor economic background—a person, in other words, who was not acting, speaking, or performing from a stable, rooted positionality assured of its origins—came to be mixed up with the exoticizing fantasies of white French writers and artists, and also of many in the contemporary avant-garde, as we demonstrate later in this article, who acted from relatively ‘stable’ social and racial positions.
We have no evidence that Nyota Inyoka ever visited Egypt. Nonetheless, the stakes of her engagement were existential rather than phantasmic and her connection to Egypt, we argue, was not fully self-imposed but in part fueled by the void left in the absence of her unknown father of color. The following entry from the already cited journal, for example, attests to how she tried to situate herself as a woman of color within this matrix of Egyptomania: “I wanted to get a hairdo by black women. I met the girls of ‘Runnin[g] Wild.’ One had already her hair done, she was already wearing the fashion of ancient Egypt.”20 She also dreams of a door, which she sees as the entrance to ancient Egypt: “I clearly saw a door of red bricks and blue faience, which was the door leading to the entrance to ancient Egypt. An Egypt which I did not expect before the [???] of Mr. Met.’s lady friend and I reassured myself in the hope to get to know what was most interesting to me: what was behind the door.”21
As a racialized woman in early twentieth-century France, then, Nyota Inyoka’s dream connection to Egypt and her actual encounters with artifacts of ancient Egypt collected under the aegis of colonialism, resonate with similar encounters, albeit in relation to a different historical, geographic, and sociopolitical context, between people of color and ancient Egyptian art and artifacts. Scott Trafton, in his seminal study of nineteenth-century North American Egyptomania, for example, cites the reflections of a “free African American man living somewhere in the northeast” after a visit to the Museum of Charles Willson Peale in Philadelphia in the mid-1920s, where he saw
one of the first dynastic Egyptian mummies ever to be imported across [sic] American border: During a recent visit to the Egyptian Mummy, my thoughts were insensibly carried back to former times, when Egypt was in her splendor, and the only seat of chivalry, science, arts, and civilization. As a descendant of Cush, I could not but mourn over her present degradation, while reflecting upon the mutability of human affairs, and upon the present condition of a people who, for more than one thousand years, were the most civilized and enlightened.22
Trafton points out that this description “succinctly […] presents the central tension in nineteenth-century American Egyptomania”: Ancient Egypt, the land of “ ‘splendor and civilization,’ is placed face to face with a signifier of race. The Egypt of ‘enlightenment’ is considered next to the Egypt of ‘degradation.’ ”23 This articulation of an image resonant with ancient Egyptian civilization ‘face to face’ with a racialized image from the present indeed takes us back to Nyota Inyoka’s photomontage: A twentieth-century woman of color in an Egyptian-inspired costume facing a Pharaonic statue in a colonial museum, which she frames as metonymic of her ancestry—a ‘face-to-face’ association that has the potential to disrupt conventional Orientalism. And, sure enough, in her embodied performances, Nyota Inyoka can also be shown to have seen this potential through. For against the iconically determined Egyptomania we have laid out so far, she pitted the reenactment or restaging of the performative knowledge culture of ancient Egypt.
3 Performing Ancient Egypt: Reading Inyoka’s Notation of Prière aux dieux solaires
As the Egyptologist Jan Assmann has argued convincingly, a specific knowledge culture was developed in ancient Egypt.24 In part through Greek antiquity, this knowledge culture remained decisively present in the cultural memory of Europe as well. Be that as it may, in today’s research context and at the disciplinary interface of Egyptology and dance studies, there are surprisingly few studies on the particularities of the dance culture of ancient Egypt,25 and even less on its reception or Nachleben in modernity.26 This lack of scholarly research makes the exploits of Nyota Inyoka all the more interesting, for, incited by her desire to identify with (ancient) Egypt, she clearly can be shown to have engaged in such a form of research. In the case of Nyota Inyoka, indeed, moments of (personal) identification and the construction of a mysterious persona with ambiguous origins, coincided with extensive (artistic) research of ancient Egyptian (and also Indian) knowledge cultures, spiritualities, cosmologies and dance reenactment/restagings of ritual and performative gestures. Nowhere does this become clearer than in her piece Prière aux dieux solaires (Prayer to the Sun Gods, 1921).
Nyota Inyoka’s Prière aux dieux solaires is accessible to us today only by way of the notation of the work (see Figure 2). No filmed documentation of the dance has been found. The preserved notation shows a series of 33 line-drawn poses of a figure wearing an Egyptian-inspired gorgerin and headdress and includes written annotations. While visibly drawing on the two-dimensional, frozen poses from Egyptian reliefs,27 it goes beyond the Egyptian pictorial conventions and prototypical religious poses and gestures: The notation is in fact a series of poses and gestures that allow a restaging of Prière aux dieux solaires. Within the notation we can read stances and poses that appear measured and solemn, with variations of angular shapes, particularly in the arms and hands, which suggest strides and lateral changes of direction, gestures of reaching downward and upward (toward the sun), ending with a series of lunges, kneeling, and bowing.
Figure 2
Photograph of the original notation, Prière aux dieux solaires (Prayer to the Sun Gods) (1921)
Citation: Journal of Avant-Garde Studies 4, 1 (2024) ; 10.1163/25896377-00401002
BnF, 4° Col. 119, box 3.Inyoka did not merely (mono- or interculturally) juxtapose elements from Egyptian iconography and the stock of ‘Western’ motifs here. For while the poses used suggest a recognizable reference to the dance or corporeal iconography of ancient Egypt, they do so by interweaving movement motifs and phrases from modernity. This becomes evident through suggested movement qualities reminiscent of (European and US-American) modern dance such as momentum (poses 16–17), expressivity (poses 3, 18), and the accentuation of hip movement (poses 5, 6) as well as the arc de cercle (pose 22) in order to convey a spiritually loaded but modern interpretation. Above all, Inyoka’s interpretation of the prayer is less form-orientated than it is energy-regulated.28 Nyota Inyoka’s performative restaging of an Egyptian prayer in Prière aux dieux solaires is indeed the result of a process of de- and recontextualization of an ‘imagined’ past performance, which is accompanied by parameters such as selection, focusing, implementation, fading, montage, and hybridization or negation. Her practice, as a mode of remembrance, creates “a performance [or transmedial artwork] that restages choreography by relying on imaginative memories rather than reconstitution of the work step by step”:29 Its potential literally lies in an “unorthodox fidelity.”30
The notation shows a linear progression, suggesting a ritual unfolding. Although we do not know exactly which source Nyota used her re-creation—as we will see later, she claimed to have been inspired by a certain papyrus—we can conclude that she sought to embody the Pharaonic ritual act for the sun god Amun-Ra as a prayer for the rebirth of the sun on the morning after its nocturnal death. The practice of keeping the world in motion, a matter of the highest and cosmologically locatable knowledge, was primarily the responsibility of the kings, scribes, and priests in ancient Egypt. In Egyptian knowledge culture, the cosmos was indeed not primarily understood as a spatial coordinating system, but as a temporal entity that is not simply there but must be constantly brought forth through ritual action, day after day, year after year. When the king invokes the sun god in the morning, this is a decisive act, because it is the only way to ensure the continuity of the world. This knowledge, subject to a precise narrative and choreographic structure of worship, is performed by him and his entourage until he finally takes it to the grave.31 The oldest and most canonical of ‘underworld books’ thus taken to the grave is the Amduat, also known as the Book of the Hidden Chamber. This is a funerary text describing the journey of regeneration of Ra, the Egyptian sun god, through the 12 hours of the night from sunset (symbolizing death) to sunrise (symbolizing rebirth).32 The Amduat was a codified source of hermetic secret knowledge, which, in its function as cosmography, was interred with deceased kings. By burying the Amduat with the kings, ancient Egyptians hoped to ensure a continuation of the ritual gestures in the afterlife in which “the cosmos is not explained but interpreted […]. By revering the ordering forces that govern the cosmos, man also mobilizes the cosmos within himself. He interprets the world by placing himself within it.”33
In her book Nyota Inyoka. Des Danseurs qui sortent du cadre (Nyota Inyoka: Dancers Who Step Out of the Frame, 1947), Loulou Roudanez included the quoted subtitle of Prière aux Dieux Solaires, which confirms our thesis of her familiarity with Egyptian sources and, albeit implicitly, the Amduat: “According to the hieroglyphic papyri. Drive out the shadows, welcome the light of Amon, according to the consecrated expression, ‘do things,’ ‘be the Truth.’ ”34 If then Prière is a reenactment of ritual and performative gestures, Nyota Inyoka transferred this ritual of the World-In-Motion, the rebirth of the sun after it dies at night, into a modern context, situated in proximity to avant-garde artistic practices, as we will see shortly. In her own translated way, informed by her research on Egyptian iconography and knowledge culture as well as by her personal sense of identification with Egyptianness, she enacted the Pharaoh and his cosmotheistic rites for upholding the world—her performance thus also not restricting itself to an exclusively female perspective. Whereas the ancient Egyptian prayer was not intended for an audience, Nyota Inyoka performed it on stage, thus casting the ritual outward rather than inward, and making it as intersubjective as it was subjective and cosmic.35
Just how deeply steeped Nyota Inyoka was in research on Egyptian iconographies, aesthetics, and philosophies becomes evident when we turn to the observations of her contemporary, the writer, actor, and theatre director Aurélien Lugné-Poe. He described Nyota Inyoka’s way of researching and creating like this:
Highbrow culture is often boring, whereas science in Art is less so. One can transpose in the sense of archaeological reconstitutions sufficient grace and beauty in order to permit fantasy to find its place. This is the theory of this Egyptian dancer. She is a museum or library rat, as the English term it, and this sort of rat is more alive than the Opera [ballet] rats … With a pencil, she is facing Vishnu at the Musée Guimet, an Ammon Râ in the Bibliothèque Doucet. She catches the frozen poses of forty centuries for our stirring and troubled humanity. Then she dreams. And she fills with fantasy, so to say, the interval that exists between two drawings of the same god, which she contemplates. […] [S]he is learned and discovers the exact lines and curves which must have once charmed the prosternated Hindus or the subjects of Sésostris.36
Lugné-Poe’s description of Nyota Inyoka’s way of working further resonates with choreographic and research notes found in her archive at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, suggesting that this was indeed her choreographic methodology, as also in the case of Prière aux dieux solaires.
Nyota Inyoka thus transposed a quotidian sacred act of ancient Egypt into a modern-day stage context. The music to which she performed Prière aux dieux solaires, again found in the form of the musical notation (in a print dated 1925) by M. Naggiar and titled Dieux Solaires. Prière et Danse Majestueuse Egyptienne Antique (Solar Gods: Ancient Egyptian Majestic Prayer and Dance),37 contributed to this transfer into a modern (European) context and, to listeners familiar with European chamber or small orchestra music, must have suggested a solemn, stately pacing of the ritual.38 The presumably self-designed costume for the performance, meticulously embroidered with solid square sequins, is in turn striking and surprising in its colorful immediacy: Turquoise, with a little red and white on gold, and a centerpiece that bears a similarity to the designs of the centerpieces of twentieth-century Indian classical dance costumes—and all this embroidered with square pearls reminiscent of Egyptian iconographic patterns. Prière aux dieux solaires was thus structured by an intuitive interweaving of movements—visual and melodic motifs drawn from different cultural contexts and times—that in turn connected her life, research, and spiritual goal of opening the door to a past knowledge culture. As such, the piece also can be seen as being based more on iconographic parameters and a kind of embodied spiritual connection to the ancient world of Egypt than on dance technique.
This transfer relies on a strongly assimilative gesture, that is, while it takes up certain aspects of the reference culture (such as the formal manifestation of the prayer bowl or a spiritually charged reenactment of the poses), it decisively omits, reinterprets, and ignores others (such as the context of the ritual, which presupposes intimate seclusion and exclusion of the public, as well as a daily routine), and this despite plausible knowledge of them.39 Indeed, the archival material attesting to her research and working process suggests that she dealt intensively with the dance cultures of the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms in her early work—even if we can only speculate about which iconographies, artifacts, and writings she studied and researched. The echoes of performative ancient Egyptian knowledge culture in Nyota’s early work, however, are clearly not limited to the fashionable à l’égyptienne of her time. What is certain is that she identified with Egypt to a great extent, as she writes in her diary: “I am Egyptian.”40
4 Nyota Inyoka and Avant-Gardism
To say that Nyota Inyoka’s work was purely autobiographical would obviously be erroneous. While her process of engaging with Egypt can be argued to mirror a personal search for her, in part, unknown ancestry, the resulting dance works appear at once abstract and thematic. Looking at the positionality of Nyota Inyoka and her oeuvre in relation to Valentine de Saint-Point (1875–1953)—one of the most interesting female artists of the avant-garde who has, we hasten to add, only recently been rediscovered in artistic and academic circles41—several (in part unexpected) similarities can be observed. De Saint-Point is best known for her Futurist performances before and during the First World War (such as Métachorie [Metachory], 1913) and for manifestos like the “Manifeste de la Femme Futuriste” (“Manifesto of the Futurist Woman,” 1912). She was increasingly forgotten after her decision, in the mid-1920s, to leave France and to go into exile in Cairo/Egypt, where she subsequently converted to Islam.42
Of course, differences abound between these two women. Unlike Nyota Inyoka, for example, de Saint-Point grew up in the French aristocratic milieu,43 her living and working conditions differing greatly from those of Inyoka, not in the least given what Franz Fanon called the “epidermal racial scheme.”44 Valentine de Saint-Point further remained committed to an artistic and politically motivated actionism throughout her life, whereas Nyota Inyoka hardly ever expressed herself directly politically; traces of the political can only be found in the structure and aesthetics of her productions. Even so, it is the similarities between these two women that stand out—similarities which, we will suggest, perhaps ultimately also allow us to see their differences in a clearer light: Both marry young and their husbands die early, both remain alone and childless afterwards, for both unconventional love and life designs can be traced, both work tirelessly until the end of their lives on their multifaceted oeuvres, both draw and write poetry, but above all, perhaps, both women chose dance as their way of world-making—literally (using the wording of the time), dance is the “cosmic”45 means by which they opt to dissolve the boundaries between their art and their lives.
Neither of the women, moreover, appeared under their birth names. Instead, they chose pseudonyms, each of which brought into being a (self-determined and self-determining) artistic existence: “[t]he invention of a pseudonym is a commitment to what does not yet exist, a contract which stipulates, once the one listed by the Civil Registry has been deleted, that the work will come to give content to the new name.”46 Valentine de Saint-Point, born Anna Jeanne Valentine Marianne Deglans de Cessiat-Vercell, changed her name twice. First in 1904 at the beginning of her artistic career, her choice of de Saint-Point referenced the Chateau de Saint-Point, an estate in Bourgogne owned by her great-uncle, the famous writer and politically significant Alphonse de Lamartine. Her second name change took place in 1924 in Egypt as part of her conversion to Islam. This time she chose the name Rawiha Nour Eldine (Guardian of the Divine Light). During this time, she was in close contact with the Theosophical Society in Paris, as Nyota Inyoka was later.47 The Society at that time planned to expand its activities not only in India, but also in Egypt, and promoted spiritually motivated artistic expression.48 In turn, Nyota Inyoka exclusively and persistently performed and circulated a mystified and fictionalized artistic persona, thereby erasing the boundaries between her life and her art and taking her actual birth name with her to the grave.49 Indeed, her life, as she archived it, was that of her stage persona ‘Nyota Inyoka,’ which, drawing on the languages Swahili and Lingala from the African continent, means ‘Star’ (Nyota) and ‘Snake’ (Inyoka)—her actual birth name is entirely absent from her self-collected archive. Even her gravestone, along with the year of her birth and death, only has her artist’s name, bringing it in tension with her self-claimed title ‘Choregraphe Hindou.’
Furthermore, both artists share an interest in Egypt. While the “avant-gardisme saint-pointiste,” which was decisive for the early oeuvre of Valentine roughly until the end of the First World War, is not characterized by any explicit artistic engagement with Egypt, an implicit recurring motif can be uncovered that is also of crucial importance for Nyota Inyoka, namely the invocation of the sun, which goes hand in hand with a cosmic and mystical (in part theosophical) conception of the world as well as a cyclical model of time and history. In her Manifeste de la femme futuriste, Valentine de Saint-Point writes: “We are at the beginning of a spring. We miss a lot of sunshine.”50 Similarly, in June 1921 when Nyota Inyoka performed her creations Prière aux dieux solaires—the first of a series of dances with the theme “évocation de l’Égypte antique [evocation of ancient Egypt]”51—alongside her Indian-inspired dance Vishnu at Paul Poiret’s Théâtre de l’Oasis, the evocation of the sun would literally take center stage. While the well-known Parisian couturier Poiret (1879–1944) contributed to staging her as a Europeanized icon of Egyptian and Indianness with his spectacular costumes, Inyoka claimed that the dance was inspired by an ancient (still unidentified) source: A papyrus with hieroglyphs. She defined her choreography as a “reconstitution” of this papyrus.52
We have already established that it would be mistaken to plainly situate Nyota Inyoka within the mainstream, fashionable Egyptomania of her time; it would be equally wrong simply to equate her interest in the sun with that of de Saint-Point’s. For the latter’s positionality as an avant-gardist put her perhaps in a less tense relation vis-à-vis the Orientalizing Egyptomania evoked earlier in this article. Hence, while both Valentine de Saint-Point and Nyota Inyoka, as female artists, eventually fell into oblivion even during their lifetimes, and, perhaps most conspicuously in the context of this article, both were denied entrance into the canon of the avant-garde—de Saint-Point, as we noted earlier, only recently having been inserted into it—we could also ask in conclusion what is keeping us from now also allowing Nyota Inyoka access to that same canon?
The canon of historiography has not classified Nyota Inyoka as an ‘avant-gardist’; but as a dancer and choreographer of color and of mixed heritage the register of the ‘exotic’ was reserved for her throughout the twentieth century. Perhaps because her physical appearance suggested ‘authenticity,’ appreciation of her performance was often reduced to an enactment of Egyptomaniac fantasies, rendering invisible the depth of her research and the uniqueness of her choreography. The paradigm shift in current avant-garde discourse, however, is accompanied by a critical revision of both personal (‘white,’ ‘male,’ ‘European’) and aesthetic (modernist models of world renewal) principles of inclusion:
As a site of experimentation, contestation, and indeed as a mark of hybridity, the term avant-garde is less fixed than in flux, and its contested status invites a discussion about whether the avant-garde is fundamentally and ideologically tied to a Eurocentric cultural sensibility or whether the existing histories of the avant-garde have privileged a Eurocentric framing of practices that were always already present in a variety of unacknowledged forms across the spectrum of world cultures.53
In Nyota Inyoka’s performative articulations, facets of the avant-garde became identifiable in Sascha Bru’s sense: “[t]he new of the avant-gardes, in other words, was at heart a hybridisation or reorganisation of the old […] At a most basic level, the creative act thus starts off with selecting and bringing together familiar things in unexpected or unfamiliar relationships.”54
Prière aux dieux solaires by Nyota Inyoka, her danced evocation of the sun in modernity, interweaves cultural spatialities and temporalities situated between a notion of ancient Egypt and her French present. This puts her into proximity of the avant-gardism of her time, as our short comparative analysis of Valentine de Saint-Point illustrates, as much as it inserts her work in the long durée. These multiple spatialities and temporalities can actually be found within the element of her movements, we saw, even if ostensibly her performance conformed to mainstream, Orientalizing modes of European Egyptomania. Upon closer investigation of her movements, her research-oriented working processes, and her personal position vis-à-vis Egypt (all of which are marked and, as we have argued, possibly even driven, by a desire for identification), it is evident that we need to pay more attention to the fact that she interweaves apparently contradictory regimes of movement and gesture. In Prière aux dieux solaires Nyota Inyoka artfully combined modern European and avant-garde approaches to dance with variations of poses derived from old Egyptian iconographies, and in their juxtaposition, she performed a notion of ‘Ancient Egypt’ that resonated in her time and place and allowed her to perform possible facets of a partially unknown subjectivity (to come).
Pierre Benoît, L’Atlantide (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 1919).
Edward Said, Reflections on exile and other essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 154.
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: First Vintage Books, 1979), 170.
The Louvre Pyramid is, of course, another, more recent, example.
Jean-Marcel Humbert, “Ancient Egypt on stage from Bonaparte’s military campaign up to the present time,” in Egyptomania and beyond, ed. Noreen Doyle, special issue of Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections 8 (March 2016), 26–48.
“Egyptomania: l’Egypte dans l’art occidental, 1730–1930,” exhibition catalogue (Paris: Musée du Louvre, 1994).
Humbert, “Ancient Egypt.”
Said, Orientalism, 172.
Said, Orientalism, 174–175.
Said, Orientalism, 180.
Said, Orientalism, 187.
Said, Orientalism, 190.
All preserved in the Scrapbook Nyota Inyoka 1921–1924, BnF, F° Col. 119, box 2. All translations by the authors, unless stated otherwise.
Franz Anton Cramer, “Border-dancing across time: the (forgotten) Parisian choreographer Nyota Inyoka, her œuvre, and questions of choreographing créolité,” ZOOM-Minisymposium “Forgotten Dancers/Forgotten Archives,” 9 May 2020:
BnF, 4° Col. 119, box 3, Folder “Égypte antique—De sortir le jour (déesse Nephtys)—1933.”
BnF, F° Col. 119, box 3.
Cf. Cramer, “Border-dancing across time.”
Journal 1923/24, BnF, F° Col. 119, box 4, fol. 15 recto, Samedi, 1 er Decembre. Our translation.
The original reads: “et je pensais à mon père et voila que quelqu’un me dit: Etes vous donc de ce pays. Pourquoi ne le disiez vous pas. Mais je repondis vivement et avec une conviction de plus en plus sincère mais je suis Egyptienne, je vous assure que je suis egyptienne. Je suis sûre que je suis egyptienne pensais-je en moi-même aussi.” Comment below: “Je pense que j’ai vu l’ecole d’enseignement ou se tenait mon père avec ce jeu de mot Morfray qui veut dire qu’il est mort dernierement … peut être … (mais je suis egyptienne!).” Journal 1923/24, BnF, F° Col. 119, box 4, fol. 15 recto, Samedi, 1 er Decembre.
“Je voulais me faire coiffer chez des femmes noires. Je rencontrai des petites de ‘Runnin[g] Wild.’ L’une d’elle était deja prete, était deja accomodée a la mode de l’Egypte antique.” Journal 1923/24, BnF, F° Col. 119, box 4, fol. 35 verso, Samedi, 5 Janvier 1924.
“je remarquai très clairement une porte faite de briques rouges et de faiences bleues qui était l’entrée conduisant à l’Egypte antique. Une Egypte insoupçonnée de moi avant le r[??]t de l’amie de Mr. Met. et je me rassurais dans l’espoir de connaître ce qui m’interessais le plus: ce qu’il y avait après la porte.” Journal 1923/24, BnF, F° Col. 119, box 4, fol. 11 verso, Mardi, 20 Novembre [1923].
Anonymous. “Mutability of human affairs.” Freedom’s Journal (6 April 1827). Quoted in Classical Black nationalism: from the American Revolution to Marcus Garvey, ed. Wilson Jeremiah Moses (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 53. Cited from Scott Trafton, “Egypt land: race and the cultural politics of American Egyptomania, 1800–1900” (Dissertation, Duke University, 1998), 308.
Trafton, “Egypt land,” 308.
Jan Assmann, “Ägypten in der Wissenskultur des Abendlandes,” in Revolutionen des Wissens: Von der Steinzeit bis zur Moderne, ed. Johannes Fried and Johannes Süßmann (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2001), 56–75.
An exception is Erika Meyer-Dietrich: “According to Ancient Egyptian sources, contexts in which dance occurs spontaneously, or is performed according to traditional ideas, include sunrise, banquets, funerals, the afterlife, joyousness, royal ceremonies, and religious festivals. The most common noun for dance is jb3w, which was continuously used from as early as the Old Kingdom, where it is found in the Pyramid Texts, through the Ptolemaic Period, where we find it featured in temple descriptions. The determinative of the verb, and of the corresponding noun (‘dancer’), is a man standing on one leg bent at the knee. Nevertheless, the iconographical sources show both female and male dancers, and in a variety of contexts. Without exception dancers who appear in pairs or in groups are of the same gender.” Erika Meyer-Dietrich, “Dance,” in UCLA encyclopedia of Egyptology, ed. Willeke Wendrich (Los Angeles: UCLA, 2009):
Exceptions are: Emma Brunner-Traut, Der Tanz im alten Ägypten. Nach bildlichen und inschriftlichen Zeugnissen (Glückstadt: Augustin, 1938); Valentine Gross, “Quelques mouvements de danse en Egypte,” Revue musicale Société Internationale de Musicologie 2:10 (1914), 17–24; and Irene Lexová, Ancient Egyptian dances (Praha: Oriental Institute, 1935).
Currently, there is a consensus among researchers that the frozen poses and gestures of the dance scenes, which are lined up serially on reliefs and are almost exclusively two-dimensional, do not allow for a reconstruction of the choreography, movements, or tempo. Nonetheless, some scholars have tried to deduce dance movements from gestures and body postures seen in Egyptian representations of dance. Postures have been interpreted as the dancers’ successive steps in a dance sequence (see sources mentioned in note 26).
This observation corresponds with Roudanez’s description: “The Dancer with severe discipline passed from one attitude to another, slowly developing the submission and reverence contained in her prayer.” Original: “La Danseuse avec une discipline sévère passait d’une attitude à une autre, développait lentement la soumission et la vénération contenues dans sa prière.” Loulou Roudanez, Nyota Inyoka (Paris: Susse, 1947), 105.
Timmy De Laet, “Giving sense to the past: historical d(ist)ance and the chiasmatic interlacing of affect and knowledge,” in The Oxford handbook of dance and reenactment, ed. Mark Franko (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 33–56 (43).
De Laet, “Giving sense,” 47.
As Assmann points out, the Egyptian royal tombs of the New Kingdom are decorated with images and descriptions of the world beyond: “Most of these image-text compositions are itineraries of the sun’s nocturnal journey, embedding the sun’s path in a map of the underworld.” Assmann, “Ägypten in der Wissenskultur des Abendlandes,” 58.
Assmann, “Ägypten in der Wissenskultur des Abendlandes,” 60.
“D’après les papyrus hiéroglyphiques. Chasser les ombres, accueillir la lumière d’Amon, selon l’expression consacrée, ‘faire les choses,’ être Vérité.” Roudanez, Nyota Inyoka, 105.
Patricia Spencer, “Dance in ancient Egypt,” Near Eastern Archaeology 66:3 (2003), 111–121 (113).
Aurélien Lugné-Poe, “La danseuse évocatrice Nyota-Nyoka [sic] de l’orient,” La Danse (November 1921), n.p. “L’Art savant est souvent ennuyeux, La science dans l’art l’est moins. On peut transposer dans le sens des reconstitutions archéologiques suffisamment de grâce et de beauté pour permettre à la fantaisie d’y trouver sa place. Telle est la théorie de cette danseuse égyptienne. C’est un rat de musée ou de bibliothèque, comme disent les Anglais, et cette sorte est plus vivante que les rats … de l’Opéra. Munie d’un crayon la voici devant Vishnu du musée Guimet, un Ammon Râ de la bibliothèque Doucet. Elle en surprend les poses figées depuis quarante siècles pour notre humanité remuante et troublée. Puis elle rêve. Elle remplit de fantaisie l’intervalle, si on veut, qui existe entre les deux dessins du même Dieu qu’elle contemple. Et parce qu’en outre elle est savante et découvre les lignes et les courbes exactes qui devaient charmer jadis les hindous prosternés et les sujets de Sésostris. […].” Translation: Gerrit Berenike Heiter.
When she premiered the piece in May/June 1921 at the Théâtre de l’Oasis she used Claude Débussy’s Danseuses de Delphes (Dancers of Delphi). See Program of the Théâtre de l’Oasis in Nyota Inyoka’s Scrapbook, BnF, F° Col. 119, box 2. Starting with the performance of the piece at the Salon d’Automne on 10 November 1921, Prière aux dieux solaires was accompanied by music composed by Maurice Naggiar, announced as “Compositeur Égyptien” (“Egyptian composer”) at her behest.
The music is not named on the notation, but the music notation by Maurice Naggiar can be found at BnF 4-VM15–11851.
Jan Assmann, “Das ägyptische Prozessionsfest,” in Das Fest und das Heilige. Religiöse Kontrapunkte zur Alltagswelt, Studien zum Verstehen fremder Religionen 1, ed. Jan Assmann and Theo Sundermeier (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verl.-Haus Mohn, 1991), 105–122 (106).
Assmann, “Das ägyptische Prozessionsfest”: “Je suis égyptienne.” Even her actual first birth name, which she concealed all her life, points, extremely enigmatically, to an—either factual-biographical or constructive-imagined—Egyptian connection, be it that her father came from the North African region, or that her mother, influenced by French Egyptomania in the long nineteenth century, had a particular fascination for Egyptianized figures in the performing arts.
Among others, see Giovanni Dotoli, RoseLee Goldberg, and Adrien Sina, eds., Feminine futures: Valentine de Saint-Point: performance, danse, guerre, politique et érotisme: performance, dance, war, politics and eroticism (Dijon: Les Presses Du Réel, 2011); Carole Maccota, “Futurisme féminin, luxure, littérature et danse chez Valentine de Saint-Point,” The French Review 90:2 (2016), 36–46; David Martens and Andrea Oberhuber, “L’avant-gardisme aristocratique de Valentine de Saint-Point,” L’Esprit créateur 53:3 (2013), 50–63; Elisa Borghino, “Des voix en voie: les femmes, c(h)oeur et marges des avant-gardes” (Dissertation, Université de Grenoble/Università di Torino, 2012); and Günter Berghaus, “Dance and the futurist woman: the work of Valentine de Saint-Point (1875–1953),” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 11:2 (1993), 27–42.
Berghaus, “Dance and the futurist woman.”
For an in-depth biography and chronology of her oeuvre, see, for example Dotoli, Goldberg, and Sina, eds., Feminine futures, 12.
Frantz Fanon, Black skin, white masks (London: Pluto, 1986), 84.
Roudanez, Nyota Inyoka; Nancy G., “Le danseur de corde: the metaphysiscs of métachorie,” in Dotoli, Goldberg, and Sina, eds., Feminine futures, 43.
“[L]’invention du pseudonyme est un engagement vers ce qui n’existe pas encore, un contrat qui stipule, une fois rayé celui que l’État civil a recensé, que l’oeuvre à venir donnera un contenu au nom nouveau.” Michèle Touret, “Remaniements contractuels (à propos de Blaise Cendrars),” in Littératures sous contrat, ed. Emmanuel Bouju (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2002), 31–46 (33).
Inyoka premiered Shiva at the Société théosophique in 1926. See “Danses de Nyota Inyoka” (program leaflet), 4 April 1926, Salle Adyar, BnF, Ro-12344 (1); Dotoli, Goldberg, and Sina, eds., Feminine futures, 79–81.
In Cairo, Valentine de Saint-Point founded and edited a magazine called Phoenix from 1925–1927, with the telling subtitle Revue de la Renaissance Orientale (Oriental Renaissance Review).
For a theoretical reflection on pseudonymity see David Martens, L’invention de Blaise Cendrars: une poétique de la pseudonymie (Paris: Champion, 2010), 23–50. Also Martens and Oberhuber, “L’Avant-gardisme aristocratique,” 57. In the course of our research we found her real name, but decided not to ‘deadname’ her and instead refer to her by her chosen name of Nyota Inyoka. Unfortunately, after we discovered her actual name it was publicly posted online by a person outside our research team. However, we still follow our principle of using only her chosen name Nyota Inyoka.
“Nous sommes au début d’un printemps. Il nous manque une profusion de soleil.” Dotoli, Goldberg, and Sina, eds., Feminine futures, 8.
Program for the performances Théâtre de l’Oasis, Scrapbook Nyota Inyoka 1921–1924, BnF, F° Col. 119, box 2.
Program for the performances Théâtre de l’Oasis, Scrapbook Nyota Inyoka 1921–1924, BnF, F° Col. 119, box 2.
James M. Harding and John Rouse, eds., Not the other avant-garde: the transnational foundations of avant-garde performance (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 3.
Sascha Bru, The European avant-gardes, 1905–1935 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 174.
References
Assmann, Jan. “Das ägyptische Prozessionsfest.” In Das Fest und das Heilige. Religiöse Kontrapunkte zur Alltagswelt, Studien zum Verstehen fremder Religionen 1, ed. Jan Assmann and Theo Sundermeier (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verl.-Haus Mohn, 1991), 105–122.
Assmann, Jan. “Ägypten in der Wissenskultur des Abendlandes.” In Revolutionen des Wissens: Von der Steinzeit bis zur Moderne, ed. Johannes Fried and Johannes Süßmann (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2001), 56–75.
Benoît, Pierre. L’Atlantide (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 1919).
Berghaus, Günter. “Dance and the futurist woman: the work of Valentine de Saint-Point (1875–1953).” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 11:2 (1993), 27–42.
Borghino, Elisa. “Des voix en voie: les femmes, c(h)oeur et marges des avant-gardes” (Dissertation, Université de Grenoble/Università di Torino, 2012).
Bru, Sascha. The European avant-gardes, 1905–1935 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018).
Brunner-Traut, Emma. Der Tanz im alten Ägypten. Nach bildlichen und inschriftlichen Zeugnissen (Glückstadt: Augustin, 1938).
Cramer, Franz Anton. “Border-dancing across time: the (forgotten) Parisian choreographer Nyota Inyoka, her œuvre, and questions of choreographing créolité.” ZOOM-Minisymposium Forgotten Dancers/Forgotten Archives, 9 May 2020: https://vimeo.com/421652940?embedded=false&source=vimeo_logo&owner=115403649.
De Laet, Timmy. “Giving sense to the past: historical d(ist)ance and the chiasmatic interlacing of affect and knowledge.” In The Oxford handbook of dance and reenactment, ed. Mark Franko (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 33–56.
Dotoli, Giovanni, RoseLee Goldberg, and Adrien Sina, eds. Feminine Futures: Valentine de Saint-Point: performance, danse, guerre, politique et érotisme: performance, dance, war, politics and eroticism (Dijon: Les Presses Du Réel, 2011).
“Egyptomania: l’Egypte dans l’art occidental, 1730–1930.” Exhibition catalogue (Paris: Musée du Louvre, 1994).
Fanon, Frantz. Black skin, white masks (London: Pluto, 1986).
Moore, Nancy G. “Le danseur de corde: the metaphysiscs of métachorie.” In Feminine futures: Valentine de Saint-Point: performance, danse, guerre, politique et érotisme: performance, dance, war, politics and eroticism, ed. Giovanni Dotoli, RoseLee Goldberg, and Adrien Sina (Dijon: Les Presses Du Réel, 2011), 43.
Gross, Valentine. “Quelques mouvements de danse en Egypte.” Revue musicale Société Internationale de Musicologie 2:10 (1914), 17–24.
Harding, James M., and John Rouse, eds. Not the other avant-garde: the transnational foundations of avant-garde performance (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2009).
Humbert, Jean-Marcel. “Ancient Egypt on stage from Bonaparte’s military campaign up to the present time.” Egyptomania and Beyond, ed. Noreen Doyle. Special issue of Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections 8 (March 2016), 26–48. Lexová, Irene. Ancient Egyptian dances (Praha: Oriental Institute, 1935).
Lugné-Poe, Aurélien. “La danseuse évocatrice Nyota-Nyoka [sic] de l’orient.” La Danse (November 1921). In Scrapbook 1921–1925, Nyota Inyoka, Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, F° Col. 119, box 2.
Maccota, Carole. “Futurisme féminin, luxure, littérature et danse chez Valentine de Saint-Point.” The French Review 90 (2016): 2, 36–46.
Martens, David. L’invention de Blaise Cendrars: une poétique de la pseudonymie (Paris: Champion, 2010).
Martens, David, and Andrea Oberhuber. “L’avant-gardisme aristocratique de Valentine de Saint-Point.” L’Esprit créateur 53:3 (2013), 50–63.
Meyer-Dietrich, Erika. “Dance.” In UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, ed. Willeke Wendrich (Los Angeles: UCLA, 2009): http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark=21198/zz001ndh48.
Roudanez, Louou. Nyota Inyoka (Paris: Susse, 1947).
Said, Edward. Orientalism (New York: First Vintage Books, 1979).
Said, Edward. Reflections on exile and other essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
Spencer, Patricia. “Dance in ancient Egypt.” Near Eastern Archaeology 66:3 (2003), 111–121.
Touret, Michèle. “Remaniements contractuels (à propos de Blaise Cendrars).” In Littératures
sous contrat, ed. Emmanuel Bouju (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2002), 31–46.
Trafton, Scott. “Egypt land: race and the cultural politics of American Egyptomania, 1800–1900” (Dissertation, Duke University, NC, 1998).
