Théâtre des Champs-Élysées to Spotlight Josephine Baker

She danced in banana rock, risked her life as a spy and fought tirelessly against racism: Who was Josephine Baker? 50 years after her death, she remains pioneering.

Théâtre des Champs-Élysées to Spotlight Josephine Baker

Théâtre des Champs-Élysées will stage a week of performances including a new work by the Senegalese choreographer Germaine Acogny.

Josephine Baker’s French exit

On 14 May 1961, two groups of Freedom Riders – interracial protesters campaigning against segregation on interstate bus travel – left Atlanta on Greyhound and Trailways buses headed for Alabama. Turning the South’s racial codes on their head, black activists sat at the front; white activists at the back. The first group stopped in Anniston, Alabama, where they were attacked by around 200 racists who slashed the vehicle’s tyres, chased it up the …

Le lycée Pré de Cordy de Sarlat was officially renamed Josephine Baker, by the name of the artist and resistant, this Friday, April 11 during a ceremony organized in the institution. The students formed a rainbow with t-shirts of all colors.

Just quote her and the "beautiful idol of brown steel, irony and gold", as the French poet Jean Cocteau called her, comes to life again in all its unbridledness. "I was born to dance, only to dance. To live is to dance," she declared at the age of twenty, and she certainly suspected it much earlier. From an early age, she provoked with her defiance: "I don't like being forced to do this or that. I have always preferred freedom." She took what sh…