“The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya

Introduction ^[1]

A curious performance occurred at The Stadium, Manila’s premier bodabil stage, on 4 January 1927. According to the Manila Times, in this jazz and kundiman Championship Contest, the leaders of two chorus groups, the “lady kundimans” and the “jazz girls,” were Filipina starlet Honorata Atang da la Rama and multiracial Afro-Filipina American jazz singer and dancer Maggie Calloway.^[2] A staged conflict between the two cultural forms arose: kundiman, the Filipino national genre of love songs, which allegorized Filipino resistance against Spanish colonization—and African American jazz songs and dance styles, including the Charleston and Black Bottom. Indeed, this contest between the jazz and kundiman dance styles parodied an imperial drama of political tensions between the colonized (Philippines) and the colonizer (United States) to potential theatregoers through a performance: the preservation of the Philippines’ national culture (kundiman) versus the pressing influence of American culture (jazz).

The chorus girl played a role in staging these political conflicts in front of popular audiences. These scenarios were common in Philippine bodabil theatre productions at the turn of the twentieth century where chorus girls helped to popularize bodabil—the Philippine adaptation of vaudeville—which encompassed multi-genre live performances that adapted American and European vaudeville variety acts, ranging from comedy sketches, poetry, songs, and dances to boxing competitions and acrobats. According to journalist Luningning B. Ira, “Vodavil was a gaiety. It was jazz-snappy, bawdy, alive-sounding after generations of the languid kundiman, balitaw, and slow waltzes of a moribund Spanish era. Vodabil was feminine pulchritude and, most of all, female legs exhibited for the first time on the Philippine theatrical stage.”^[3] While many chorus girls danced in ensembles onstage, others danced one-on-one with paying patrons. Their live and intimate acts, performed in front of large audiences of various classes and ages at venues located in the center of Manila’s commercial districts, entertained audiences in between silent film showings at theatres like The Stadium or Rivoli Theatre, or at cabarets and dance halls at the Savoy Hotel.

This article analyzes the performing routes and moves of Maggie Calloway, who participated in creating the “first Philippine blues style” in colonial Manila and British Malaya’s (Singapore and Malaysia) theatres and cabarets in the 1920s to 1940s during U.S. occupation of the Philippines (1898-1946). Analyzing her transcultural dance styles, vocal experiments, and fashion choices, I argue that Calloway and her chorus girls reinvented modern ideas of Filipina and Black femininities when religious and Philippine independence movements nationalized the “Filipina” figure as pious, asexual, and devoted to man, church, and the nation. Rather, Calloway’s performances focused on pleasure and shifting racial and gendered formations as she popularized various racialized dances like the Black Bottom, Charleston, and Hawaiian Hula during the interwar period as part of burgeoning transpacific performance circuits from Manila to Singapore, China, and California.

In both the Philippines and the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, the Filipina and Black American chorus girl was a controversial figure. On one hand, she was praised for her beauty, exuberance, and mastery of different dance forms onstage. On the other, she was often seen as unruly, aberrant, and immoral, particularly within conservative and religious Philippine movements for independence from American colonial rule. Domingo N. Casiño, a leader of the Filipino Christian youth, wrote of vaudeville, “This modern show is immoral; it is a menace to society for various forms of Satan’s act are shown which in turn is greatly appreciated by the youth. Vaudeville turns our youth into irreligious men… [and] our youth become Godless; for a man without religion is no better than an animal.”^[4] The chorus girl often reflected the nation’s desire to allegorize docile and pious Filipina femininity as the symbol of Philippine independence and religious devotion. Similarly, on the East Coast in the United States, African American chorus girls were seen as what Jayna Brown terms “Babylon girls,” and as “embody[ing] the modern condition as an illness of spirit and a cultural death” and as hedonistic excess.^[5] For example, in his poem “Cabaret,” African American writer Sterling Brown “pathologizes the young [chorus girls], directly situating them as willful and uncaring urban courtiers against their poor rural brethren” after the Stock Market crash in the late 1920s.^[6]

Multiracial Filipina and African American chorus girl, Magdalena “Maggie” Calloway, gained stardom and acclaim for her mastery of varying performance styles in bodabil. In the first half of the twentieth century, Calloway was one of the only celebrated African American women performers and socialites in Manila. As a child of Mamerta de la Rosa, a Filipina woman from a family of rice farmers in Central Luzon, and Sergeant John W. Calloway, an African American Buffalo soldier who served in the Philippine-American War, her itinerant career led her to study dance in the United States and Manila and to help train and choreograph many different styles of dance, from jazz dances like the Charleston and Black Bottom to the Spanish Revue, Scottish Dance, and Hula. Her performances drew on and assembled various cultural traditions across overlapping empires in the Pacific, from Manila and Shanghai to Singapore and San Francisco, where she permanently settled after World War II.

With her working connection to John C. Cowper, a prominent American director of Philippine variety shows in Manila, Calloway was contracted to work in a transpacific performance circuit in Southeast Asia that connected Manila to British Malaya and cities across China.^[7] After World War I, many performers from Asia and across the diaspora took part in shaping Western and indigenous performance styles, displaying racial and gendered stylized acts across international arenas. In one of her first performances in Singapore in 1928 at the City Opera, the press wrote, “Miss Maggie Calloway, ‘star of the aggregation,’ was as usual the life of the performance.”^[8] I draw on the reviewer’s use of aggregation as a useful analytic to situate her importance as a multiracial performer who syncretized both Filipino and Black performers and performance styles. Aggregation refers to a “formation of a number of things into a cluster.”^[9] In concert with Saidiya Hartman’s theorization of the “chorus,” aggregation attends to the “radical hope of living otherwise” and collective possibility for Filipina and African American performers in the Philippines during the interwar period.^[10] Calloway contributed to the makings of an interracial Afro-Filipina chorus through what I call performances of aggregation, which she created as a soloist, and as an ensemble member and choreographer. As a multiracial soloist, she aggregated various racial identifications and performance genres throughout her career. For instance, Calloway embodied multiple racial identifications, including Black, Filipina, and Hawaiian both in the Philippines and Singapore. As a chorus girl and choreographer, she also aggregated interracial performances in ensemble formations. Singing and dancing live in the bodabil cabarets became sites of spectatorship and enjoyment, and people from all racial, gendered, and classed backgrounds socialized in these spaces. In all these roles, she spectacularized feminine pleasure and sexuality, troubling the national symbol of the modern Filipina woman.

Scholarship on the Black Pacific and relationships between Filipinos and African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century has tended to focus on African American and Filipino male soldiers and musicians who played in constabulary bands.^[11] Expanding upon this work, I examine Calloway’s ephemeral traces—poetry, photoplay films, photographs, and newspaper reviews—in archives across the Philippines, Singapore, and Malaysia during the interwar period to elucidate her role in forging these Philippine and African American performance genealogies. Assembling this performance archive demonstrates the significance Calloway had as a multiracial performer in embodying these aggregated performance styles during the interwar period. This article also reads against the grain of accounts that argue that these cabarets were segregated and that women lacked creative choice in performance, as Isidora Miranda, Dough Ancheta, and Vernadette Gonzalez have argued.^[12] Indeed, Calloway’s presence in these cabarets and dance halls contests W.E.B. Du Bois’s notion of the segregated “global color line” in the midst of American occupation in Manila and the burgeoning political struggles for African American racial progress in the United States.

This Afro-Filipina aggregation performed new versions of femininity and the modern Filipina woman by appearing in and adapting various media and popular technologies available to them, like the bodabil theatre space, silent photoplay films, and broadcast radio. As Denise Cruz writes on “transpacific femininities,” at the first half of the twentieth century, defining the Filipina woman became a “cultural obsession” and debates about Filipina femininity over time and space was shaped by multiple and overlapping Spanish, American, and Japanese imperial presences.^[13] In the first part of this article, I historicize Calloway’s life and her family history. I also trace the forces that compelled both interracial Filipino and African American disaggregation and aggregation with the presence of African American soldiers and performers during American occupation (1898-1946) in the Philippines. While African American soldiers and performers formed affinities with Filipinos, there were also intensified divisions across race, gender, and class. In the second part of the article, I focus on Calloway’s performances of aggregation as sites of interracial collectivity and pleasure-making in bodabil across colonial Manila and Singapore.

Maggie Calloway and Interracial Anxieties and Affinities in Colonial Manila

Maggie Calloway was born in 1910 in Manila and had a prolific performance career in Asia. Her family lived in the Quiapo neighborhood in Manila, in a center of vibrant social and cultural change during the American colonial period. In addition to his military service, Sergeant Calloway was an ardent fan of the arts and wrote to Black intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois about the importance of African American racial progress through music, theatre, and dance.^[14] Maggie Calloway similarly followed her father’s affinities for the arts; however, rather than perform opera and other European “high art” forms that her father and African American bourgeois intellectuals argued would “uplift the race,” Calloway often choreographed popular African American jazz songs and dances, like the Black Bottom and Charleston in her repertoires.^[15]

While the origins of the Black Bottom and Charleston have been contested, scholars conclude that African Americans in the South first performed both dances and these styles migrated to theatres and popular music recording circuits in the North during the Jazz Age. Tim Ryan writes that the lively and syncopated Black Bottom dance style may have first premiered in the 1924 staging of Dinah in Harlem.^[16] However, white Broadway performers, like Ann Pennington in George White’s Scandals, and Tin Pan Alley songwriters appropriated and recorded the “Black Bottom” in 1926.^[17] Similarly, African American workers in Charleston, South Carolina created the notable Charleston dance style, including the “feet twisting and rapid forward and backward kicking steps,” that African American stars Josephine Baker and Ada “Bricktop” Smith garnered praise for.^[18] As Matthew McMahan asserts, “the language surrounding the Charleston consistently depicted it as a liberating force in contrast to the stolid quality of European dances.”^[19] The novel and rebellious appeal of both dance styles attracted international performers and audiences. Calloway, who learned these performance styles in the United States, gained her start as a chorus girl in Manila with the Savoy Nifties and Varieties Company that were managed by theatre manager J.C. Cowper. Named the “Tala ng Bodabil” (star of bodabil), Calloway was praised in the press for her dancing and singing of both Filipino and American popular songs.

During the Philippine-American War, government officials, journalists, and people in the sound recording industries often justified the occupation of the Philippines through the racial co-affiliations of Filipinos with African Americans and Native Americans. In many political cartoons in satirical magazines like Puck and Judge, Filipinos were depicted as Black minstrel characters. In addition, the music industry intensified these racial anxieties, especially of Filipino and African American romantic and sexual unions. For instance, in the Tin Pan Alley recording industries in the early 1900s, songwriters like Charles K. Harris wrote the song “Ma Filipino Babe,” which illustrated a Filipina woman as racially Black in the songbook’s images. The lyrics also racialized the Filipina woman as Black and detailed her romance with an African American soldier.

African American intellectuals, writers, and musical composers in the United States responded to these interracial Black and Filipino dynamics in the Pacific. African American intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells outwardly spoke out against U.S. intervention in the Philippines. Writers and performers also used comedy and “brown face” to introduce complex portrayals of Filipino and African American relations to popular audiences. For instance, in 1902, the Black Patti Troubadours staged a parody and musical comedy The Filipino Misfit: A Farcical Skit in One Act that cast Black actors and actresses as Filipino/as. According to Marta Effinger-Crichlow, the actors were “lumped into a generic Asian or foreign body, with no regard for the cultural, language, and historical differences.”^[20] Similarly, African American playwrights Bob Cole, Rosamond Johnson, and James Weldon Johnson’s 1907 play Shoo-Fly Regiment featured African Americans performing in “brown face” of Filipino characters, highlighting the contradictions of African American participation of empire, as well as their critique of global anti-Black racism through such productions.^[21]

During the war, African American military men like Sergeant Calloway forged relationships with Filipinos in the Philippines. During his ten years of service in the Army, Sergeant John W. Calloway wrote numerous letters about his stay in the Philippines and the reception of African Americans by way of Filipino perspectives. He informally interviewed Filipinos about their perspectives on the war, including a physician named Señor Todorica Santos who stated,

These accounts demonstrate the Filipinos’ affinities towards African Americans in the Philippines despite the racial segregations that African American soldiers experienced. Indeed, during his service, Sergeant Calloway befriended Filipino families, like the Consunji family of San Fernando, Pampanga. While forming relations with the Consunji family, Calloway was dishonorably discharged from the U.S. Army over suspicions that he was a “well known sympathizer with the insurrectos” during his service.^[23] In Sergeant Calloway’s case, these interracial affinities created racial anxieties that were deemed dangerous and risky. These fears of racial intermixing and proximity often punished African Americans, creating distance and disaggregation during the Philippine-American War. 

These perspectives illuminate the complex tensions of U.S. imperialisms and U.S.-Philippine relations. In his study of the Black Pacific, Vince Schleitwiler theorizes the “Black transpacific culture” as the mode by which “African Americans would imaginatively and materially access new degrees of imperial privilege by crossing the Pacific as ambivalent participants in U.S. imperialism, while simultaneously contemplating the emergence of a militant Asian champion of the darker races against white world supremacy.”^[24] On one hand, soldiers like Sergeant Calloway and David Fagen—another celebrated African American Buffalo soldier during the Philippine-American war who defected from the U.S. causes—participated in military operations in the Philippines. On the other hand, they also critiqued anti-Black and anti-Filipino sentiments enforced by white American colonial officials.

In performance cultures in the Philippines during U.S. occupation, blatant forms of anti-Black sentiments also existed, particularly from the upper-class Spanish Tagalog elites. In colonial Asia, jazz singing and dance styles like the Charleston and Black Bottom were racialized and acquainted with African American popular dance forms. Peter Keppy writes about Filipina jazzista performers who performed jazz dances like the Black Bottom and the Charleston: “From an elitist perspective these dances were particularly suspicious, if not dangerous to society as they originated from the ranks of the lower classes, and even worse, from the descendants of slaves.”^[25] Keppy argues that elite Hispanicized Filipinos harbored racial antagonism toward Black slaves and sought to ensure that the emerging Philippine nation was not associated or identified with Blackness. These dances often were classed and critiqued as “low art” in comparison to “more respectable and refined” Euro-American dance and singing styles like waltzes and operas.

However, performers like Calloway performed the Charleston and Black Bottom dances, altering normative notions of race, gender, and sexuality in the cabaret spaces. Through her performances of aggregation, Calloway took on the persona of popular Black women performers like Josephine Baker, whose rendition of the Charleston exhibited a multiplicity of racialized surfaces, or what Anne Cheng calls as “second skins.”^[26] These alternative and aggregated performance styles also flourished in these interracial cabaret spaces that challenged the Jim Crow logics of racial segregation and interracial intimacies, even as these repertoires became increasingly commodified and staged for white audiences. As Shane Vogel argues, performers in cabarets in Harlem demonstrated how the “interplay of close and distance, acceptance and refusal, connection and disconnection, concentration and distraction” coincided.^[27]

As a result of these racial affinities, anxieties, and antagonisms in the early 1900s, multiracial Filipino and Black Amerasian identities and anti-Blackness were and, today, are fraught in the Philippines. Anti-Blackness in Filipino communities both in the Philippines and in the diaspora perpetrate white supremacist structures and “colonial mentalities,” especially against indigenous groups like the Aeta peoples. Despite these contradictory interracial socialities and relations, after World War II and onwards, Manila would see more performances by other famous Black cultural performers like Marian Anderson, Muhammad Ali, Nat King Cole, Eartha Kitt, and Donna Summer, all of whom all made appearances at the famous Araneta Coliseum. Moreover, today in the Philippines, hip hop and other major African American cultural figures are celebrated in the archipelago.

“I Want”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure

Calloway’s career in entertainment started in an era of rapidly growing commodity cultures, trade, and industrialization in the United States, the Philippines, Shanghai, and British Malaya during the interwar period. Henry Jenkins theorizes this interwar technological period as “pop cosmopolitanism” and “the ways that the transcultural flows of popular culture inspire new forms of global consciousness and cultural competency.”^[28] As the phonograph, 78 RPM vinyl records, radio, and silent films gained popularity as commodities, so too did bodabil performances.^[29] With electrical recording booming in Manila and Singapore, global protests and musical movements by subaltern subjects in the colonies also responded to Euro-American colonial presence. Michael Denning calls these responses as global “noise uprisings” after World War I where musicians in entrepôt cities, like Manila, Jakarta, Honolulu, Goa, Shanghai, Havana, and Rio De Janeiro, formed a “world musical revolution.” Performers adapted vernacular musical forms that became “fundamental to the extraordinary social, political, and cultural revolution that was decolonization.”^[30] For instance, transcultural music practices, like the kundiman encountered jazz and blues styles and crossed over and circulated.

The novelty and global appeal of Filipino bodabil led to the creation of transpacific tours and circuits where these Afro-Filipina aggregations took shape. In addition to Calloway’s background in jazz singing and dancing, she also performed traditional Philippine dances like the sword dance, Moro Moro, and Cariñosa. As she traveled within these circuits, she was exposed to different transcultural music and dance styles like jazz, the rhumba, kundiman, Hawaiian hula, the Scottish dance, the New York flapper, and the Spanish revue, which she also learned and choreographed in their own shows. Spectacularizing her body through the aggregation was part of her transcultural dance styles. Calloway’s performances of aggregation brought together kundiman and jazz-blues forms that became their own cultural phenomena. This demonstrates how Filipina and Black women transformed these practices into hybridized dance and singing styles, while also establishing relations with one another through the ephemeral socialities that emerged in the cabarets.

Women performers on stage explored the contradictory and shifting gender dynamics in the Philippines during the U.S. period. Women challenged monolithic ideals of feminine respectability and stars like Atang de la Rama and Katy de la Cruz’s performers and songs focused on women’s pleasures and commented on conservative gender norms. For instance, Atang de la Rama performed in the silent film Dalagang Bukid (Country Maiden) and her song “Nabasag ang Banga” (The Clay Pot Broke) commented on the preservation of women’s virginity through the metaphor of a broken jar. Katy de la Cruz, who was named the “Queen of Jazz,” used humor throughout her jazz and blues performances to comment on women’s pleasures. Her song “Balut” (Fertilized Duck’s Egg) from the 1930s allegorizes women’s sexual desires. The popular plays on the notion that the balut delicacy is said to “not only allude to strength and general good health but refers to sexual robustness and stamina.”^[31] In addition, her song “Ang Manok” (The Chicken) references cock fighting and alludes to ideas about men’s infidelity. These outwardly sexual themes in her songs contended with the conversative ideas of women as the virginal, pious, meek, and devoted Filipina figure. These mythologized women, like the Maria Clara figure who was popularized in Filipino writer Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tángere, became pious symbols of the Catholic church, family, and education systems that espoused these moral and nationalist politics.^[32] 

Indeed, women in bodabil challenged representations of modern femininity in the Philippines. Filipina women during the Spanish colonial period commonly worked as cigarette rollers, seamstresses, domestic workers, teachers, nurses, performers, and as prostitutes.^[33] With the emergence of Filipino bodabil in Manila in the early twentieth century, young, independent, and working-class chorus girls sought out employment in the cabarets and dance halls. Women in bodabil and their reception were met with contradictions: on one hand, they were celebrated for their displays of modernity and adaptations of American cultural forms. On the other hand, chorus girls were castigated in society, especially by religious and conservative politicians, and were often associated with prostitution. For instance, Manila’s City Mayor, Justo Lukban, who was elected in 1917, disbanded the Gardenia District, Sampaloc’s former red-light district in Old Manila. Filipino cultural critic Nick Joaquin writes “when [Lukban] tried to abolish the cabarets too, the bailarinas, a more spirited tribe, rose in revolt and marched on City Hall. The mayor backed down and the cabarets remained to color the lives of all the wild bucks of the era.”^[34] Cabarets in Manila continued to flourish until talking pictures emerged in cines and nightclubs were introduced in the 1930s.

Nick Joaquin was one rare writer who documented the pleasures of bodabil and of Calloway’s authorial voice within the interracial and multi-expressive aggregation. In his long poem “Bye-Bye Jazz Bird,” Joaquin captures the spirit of bodabil in the height of its appeal in the 1920s. In contrast to Sterling Brown’s vilification of the “Babylon girls,” which is also apparent in Filipino writer Jose Garcia Villa’s 1927 short story “The Bailarina,” Joaquin centers the erotics of the cabaret, and especially women’s pleasure. Published in 1979, “Bye-Bye Jazz Bird” is a poem written in a documentary style that offers images from the bodabil scenes through Joaquin’s perspective as a journalist and cultural critic. As Joaquin did not grow up in the 1920s and 30s when Calloway performed, his poetic work contends with the limits of the performance archive as he dramatizes the events at the cabarets.

The poem draws us in into the sensual atmosphere of the vaudeville scene with “King of Jazz Piano,” Porfirio “Ping” Borromeo, and his contemporaries. Borromeo served as the piano player and bandleader for the Savoy Theater vaudeville company. He performed his signature “stride bass” ragtime jazz style alongside the popular Filipina starlets of the time, including Nena Warsaw, Grace Darling, Katy de la Cruz, and Isabel Rosario Cooper, who experimented with “modern” jazz dances like the “Charleston” and “Black Bottom.” They performed in front of diverse audiences and, at times, segregated white-only spaces like the Army and Navy Club, the Manila Polo Club, and the Tiro Al Blanco. At places like the Rivoli Theater, audiences racially intermixed. Joaquin writes,

Joaquin’s poem captures his impressions of the cabarets as he homes in on the pleasure-filled atmosphere that the cabaret girls elicit, particularly for their “sailor” audiences who “howl.” American military men and Filipinos of various social classes frequented the cabarets and dance halls. Fritz Schenker writes about the “imperial whiteness,” where white men patrons asserted their racial dominance in juxtaposition to the Filipina jazz dancers.^[36] While conservative writers, political officials, and religious figures disparaged the morality of dance halls, as venues subject to adultery, prostitution, and disease, Joaquin invites readers into the glamour, the wild aesthetic gestures, the novel techniques of these women performers, and sexuality in the cabarets. Borromeo leads the jazz band as he “stabs the keys” and “his piano groans.” Nena Warsaw “knocks her knees against her torso” while “hot has Maggie Calloway got ‘em / while she shimmies her Black Bottom.” Joaquin’s attention to these erotic gestures energizes the performing bodies that are too extra, intense, and incontrollable.

Moreover, Calloway’s performances of aggregation and the Black Bottom demonstrate how performers and audiences coming together in the cabaret was a site of pleasure. The Black Bottom was a radical act that presented African American popular culture in front of audiences despite the Spanish and Tagalog elite’s racial prejudices against such dances. In addition, the Black Bottom, as popularized by African American blues songstresses like Ma Rainey, depicted Black women’s pleasures publicly. Towards the end of the poem, Joaquin ends with Calloway again,

While this final stanza honors Borromeo indelible “first Philippine blues style,” Joaquin also ends the poem with Calloway declaring a desire: “I want.” Presumably, Joaquin here is listening to a recorded performance of Calloway’s singing, one that is no longer accessible in present archives. And yet, he highlights Calloway’s pleasures which repeat, “I want, I want, I want,” a simplicity that stands as its own complete thought: “I want.” Whereas the opposite, the refusal of “I don’t want,” establishes a boundary and enclosure, the lack of specificity in Calloway’s “I want” is an opening, an improvisational jazz break, and open-ended refrain as the long poem ends. Fred Moten has theorized the possibility of the break as a place of improvisation for African American performers.^[38] As the audience members rile with passion in the poem, Calloway declares this refrain significantly as a testament to her wants within the cabaret and dance hall scenes that were often organized and socialized for Filipino and foreign men’s desires, wishes, and wants. Moreover, Calloway’s repetition of “I want” reflects her subjectivity as a soloist within the male-dominated space. “I” re-asserts the cabaret space as a place solely for men’s pleasures and complicates the hierarchies of “imperial whiteness” and social dynamics between men and the chorus girls.

This moment in the poem is significant and demonstrates not only as an important interracial and transcultural moment of the Philippine blues style, but also a significant moment of Afro-Filipina women’s pleasure in creating and fashioning this cross-genre aesthetic. As Maureen Mahon writes, African American women in rock, blues, and jazz have long participated in experimenting with musical categories and genres across the twentieth century, often exposing how these imposed categories have been racialized and gendered.^[39] Indeed, Joaquin notes that this moment “hasn’t lost its novelty,” as indeed, these two singing and performing together at the Rivoli was novel for audiences. Furthermore, Calloway’s expression of “I want” attends to how pleasure and desire were important in her popularity and career and—with Joaquin’s ending of this poem with her—she featured significantly in Filipino bodabil cultures.

“Mood of Ecstasy”: The Filipina Josephine Baker in Colonial Singapore

Calloway’s first appearance in Singapore on September 27, 1928 featured her dancing the Charleston and Black Bottom, which received positive reception from audiences. In an interview with the Malaya Tribune, Calloway characterizes her impressions of her performance, 

Calloway’s first-hand account gives an intimate insight into the audiences she performed in front of and her own authorial vocal and choreographic experiments. Audiences were attracted to Calloway’s unique singing and dancing and often gave her encores. Calloway details how she captivated audiences through her “playful moods,” “smile of pleasure,” and “mood of ecstasy.” Through these hyperbolic descriptions, Calloway’s performance also overcame the “studied reserve” of both British and Malayan audiences. She notes that she “increased their interest” by responding through tempo, facial gestures like smiling, and competing with the big band. This was met through their applause. Similar to Joaquin’s “Bye Bye Jazzbird” poem, Calloway delivered an authorial voice and risqué gestures that were not common at the time, nor looked fondly upon. In this way, Calloway developed a pleasure politics on stage that negotiated with the desires of the audiences and her own.

In this performance, Calloway also compares herself to Josephine Baker who was performing dances like the Charleston and Black Bottom in Paris. Baker was a prominent African American dancer and singer born in Saint Louis, Missouri. She immigrated to Paris during the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, contributed to the makings of a global Black feminist performance style. While stars like Atang da la Rama were named the “Queen of Kundiman” and Katy de la Cruz was heralded as the “Queen of Jazz” and was compared to Mae West and Sophie Tucker, Calloway likened herself as the Josephine Baker of the Philippines. African American women performers were seldom written about in the Philippine and British Malayan presses. Thus, Calloway’s claiming of herself as Baker, a Black woman dancer who popularized the Charleston and Black Bottom, forged an affinity between her. Rather than continue to promote the elite Spanish Tagalog racial and classed hierarchies, Calloway chose to perform popular dances like the Black Bottom and Charleston as an act of proximity and affiliation. Indeed, Calloway becomes part of this Black women’s performance genealogy and instrumentalized this Afro-Filipina chorus. In the austere British Malaya venues City Opera and Victoria Hall, like Baker, Calloway demonstrated creative risk in front of British and Malayan audiences. In her performance of the Charleston, Calloway delivered an exuberance that countered typical comportments of Filipina femininity and shifting racializations.

Like Baker, Calloway’s performances of the Black Bottom, Charleston, and other racial types interacted with and challenged the colonial primitivist views of African Americans on these international stages and asserted a Black Amerasian feminine pleasure and politics on the stage. As Anne Cheng argues, Baker was the definition of modernity in the 1920s and 1930s. Through her performance of “second skins,” which she displayed through different organic and inorganic materials (coal, bananas, glitter, and shimmering ensembles), she mastered the artifice of surfaces and masks through performance.^[41] Similarly, Calloway’s performances of aggregation across British occupied-Malaya embodied a multiplicity of Filipino and Black women racial presentations and masks through her dancing and singing of Black popular dances in Singapore.            

After her first performances of the Black Bottom and Charleston at the City Opera and Victoria Theatre, Calloway also performed the Charleston at the Moonlight Hall at the New World Shows. One reviewer wrote, “Maggie Calloway was in great demand. Indeed, the audiences were cruel in their calls for encores. Maggie pleased immensely in “The Roof Blues,” charleston-ing and singing on top of the piano with that ease and abandon only expected of an accomplished artist.”^[42] The New Orleans Rhythm Kings wrote the song “The Rooftop Blues,” or “Tin Roof Blues,” in 1923 and it is considered a jazz standard about New Orleans. Louis Armstrong sang a popular version in 1955. The reviewer notes Calloway’s exuberant and pleasurable performance as exhibiting “ease and abandon” and the moods and delights she displayed through her performances. I read the “ease” of her performances as pleasures that Calloway articulated on these stages. While many of these blues songs were commissioned and selected on behalf of Calloway by the company managers, she also had the authorial voice and choreographic capacities to express her mastery, skill, and pleasure through jazz and the blues.

These kinds of pleasures countered the invisible labor of Black women performers and singers, who were often exploited and vilified. For instance, the Black Bottom was popularized by “Mother of Blues Singer” Gertrude “Ma” Rainey’s “Black Bottom,” which she recorded in 1927 in Chicago, Illinois. According to Rainey’s accounts and theatre productions such as August Wilson’s 1984 Broadway play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Rainey performed under conditions of duress. She was not compensated for her labor as an in-demand African American women performer. The Black Bottom was a major hit in the United States and because of Calloway’s training in the US, she participated in popularizing and transferring this dance style to chorus girls and audiences in Manila and Singapore.            

Calloway returned to British Malaya during World War II in the 1940s where there was a pronounced shift in her image in advertisements in the press. Calloway’s comeback career in Singapore occurred in the 1940s, perhaps one of her last performances that she danced in and choreographed during World War II and before the declaration of Philippine independence in 1946. In the 1940s Singaporean press, there is a notable shift and attention to women’s bodies and sexual economies with the heightened presence of British and Japanese military in Singapore. Calloway’s image started to change, especially with the kinds of performances and visualizations she participated in. Rather than perform her regular jazz Charleston and Black Bottom numbers, she started to perform as racial types like the hula girl and harem girl. 

Cabarets featured the hula girl racial type across the world, not only in the Philippines and Singapore, but across cabaret venues in port cities across the Pacific. The hula girl fantasized “imagined intimacies,” what Adria Imada argues “brokered the process of incorporation and integration” of Hawai’i into the United States empire.^[43] Hula girls performers performed the fantasy of Hawai’i as a site of rest, relaxation, and hospitality for their audiences. In one advertisement of her performance of a Special Dinner-Dance and Cabaret at the Sea View Hotel, a popular resort outside Singapore’s urban city center, Calloway poses as a hula girl.^[44] She wears a tropical Hawaiian influenced look with a bikini top that bears her midriff and a sheer grass skirt. She has a hibiscus flower in her hair and a lei around her neck. These full-body images in The Straits Press and Malaya Tribune contrast her public appearances in the press in Manila, which were exclusively headshots. In Manila in the 1920s and 1930s, she typically adorns Philippine and American attire in the 1940s, and her body is not the focal part of the advertisement. In contrast to her prior visualizations in the press, these photographs are full-body and elicit racial, gendered, and sexual desires. Indeed, these changes of “moods of ecstasy” became more sexually explicit and geared towards military audiences during the 1940s when the British occupied Singapore and Penang. Indeed, Calloway’s adaptation of this solo performance of the hula at the Sea View Hotel performed a localized form of hospitality through the British colonial integration of Malaya. Through these subaltern’s performances, women’s bodies specifically became sites of hospitality that brokered these imperial intimacies.

As part of these shifting racial and gendered performances amongst women performers, Calloway’s performances of aggregation responded to the larger presence of military men who frequented the cabarets in the 1940s. Military men from the Royal Arm Forces (RAF) were stationed in Seletar in Singapore. Pre-World War II photographs depict the Royal Arms Forces (RAF) servicemen and Yacht clubs as well as the leisure places they frequented. Many of these military men were nostalgic for entertainments, so they joined sailing and yacht clubs and watched boxing and sporting events. Like the hula girl, Calloway’s performances of these racial types and transition to more explicit performances demonstrate how the cabaret catered more to men’s desires as women also negotiated their place and authority in the cabaret scenes during World War II. 

Conclusion

Mirroring the imperial drama that I opened this article with, I end with another encounter between choruses and popular dances fifteen years later at the Cabaret Tea Dance at Singapore’s Cathay Café in 1941. The press advertised for the “Philippine Islands Folk Dance for Singapore Cabaret Show” to take place at the Victoria Memorial Hall. Calloway served as the choreographer at this event and trained the cariñosa dancers, as well as those who danced the conga, “the newest American craze,” and the rhumba. The People and Places” advertisement reads “Preparing for Feb. 9 Floor Show: Miss Maggie Calloway, who is training the dancers who will take part in cabaret items at the Cabaret Tea Dance to be given by the Singapore Filipino Association at the Cathay Café.”^[45]Next to the advertisement is a portrait of Calloway. She wears a sheer lightweight dress in a modern Filipiniana style with terno sleeves that reflects the traditional attire that Atang de la Rama wore in her kundiman performances. In the portrait, Calloway poses by touching a vine of flowers. Her short hair is well-kept as she smiles towards the camera. In this portrayal, one of the last visual depictions of Calloway in Singapore’s archives, she does not masquerade as American, African American, Asian Hawaiian, Middle Eastern racial type. Rather, she is represented as a professional woman choreographer. I read this last visual representation as another performance of aggregation meant to situate Calloway’s professional credibility as a dancer amidst her varied representations.

While Calloway’s performances of aggregation participated in the cabaret’s masculinist and militaristic desires towards the end of her performance career in Asia, she also continued to demonstrate her creative authorship by choreographing choral arrangements with the cariñosa and rhumba dancers in Singapore. Calloway was a master of improvisation and like Josephine Baker, she continuously modulated her image. With her performances of aggregation, along with popularizing jazz and the blues in Manila and British Malaya, she also translated different choreographic dances and articulated varying racial and gendered performances across her repertoires. In addition, Calloway’s choreography and continuous training of Filipina chorus girls transferred cultural forms—from the Charleston and Black Bottom to the cariñosa and rhumba—through repetition and body-to-body knowledge across these various locales in the Pacific. These performances of aggregation became cultural and formalistic experimentations. They offered places of improvisational pleasure and bodily reinvention for Filipina and Black chorus girls.            

Ultimately, this article charts Calloway’s presence and formations of performances of aggregation in the emergence of Filipino bodabil in colonial Manila and Singapore. On one hand, the presence of Filipino and African American collaborative performances demonstrates how American modernity and jazz styles promoted a sajonista American modernity and capitalist profit in the entertainment industries in Manila. During this time, fear of intermixing and proximity between Filipinos and African Americans was also a concern and produced racial and classed antagonisms formed by white American colonial officials and Spanish Tagalog elites. On the other hand, Calloway’s appearances in bodabil also revised modes of respectable racial and gendered comportments with her jazz performances and choreographic arrangements of pleasure. Bailarinas and jazzistas in bodabil adapted jazz as modes to experiment, play, and comment on pleasure in their aesthetics, and Calloway’s performances added to the complexity of these pleasure politics within Colonial Manila and British Malaya’s performance cultures. Specifically, I contend that Calloway’s vocal and choreographic gestures asserted a pleasure politics that responded to the nationalist, racialized, and gendered ideations of Filipina women.

Centering her pleasure in her oeuvre, Calloway’s performing body and spectacularized gestures, even ephemerally, rearranged the contours of her itinerant life and imagined otherwise her confined conditions as a young actress. Calloway’s career and the aggregation tell a reverberating story and legacy of how subalterns interacted, contradicted, strategized, and negotiated with dominant cultures, as they emphasized the creation of vibrant transcultural music and musical practices that resulted from such encounters. After Calloway moved to the U.S. permanently in the 1940s during World War II, other multiracial Filipina and Black stars and comedians like Elizabeth Ramsay made their vibrant presence in Philippine performances in the 1950s and 60s. An intimate study of Calloway’s life gifts us with interracial and transnational lenses through which to study diasporic Philippine and Black American performance genealogies as not separate, but as intertwined and aggregated histories, of which more is yet to be made known.