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It did not take long for the Dixie Steppers, a traveling vaudeville troupe, to encounter young Josephine’ s charismatic onstage presence and knack for being both humorous and seductive. The ever-resourceful girl jumped up on stage while the group was performing in St. Louis for an on-the-spot audition. The audience cheered on Josephine’ s comical dance, and she secured a spot in the troupe the very next day. While touring in Philadelphia, Josephine( a mere 15 years old at the time) met and married railroad worker William Baker. Her second marriage was short-lived, like her first, but she kept the last name Baker for the rest of her professional career.
MEMOIRS, COLLECTED BY MAR- CEL SAUVAGE, 1949
Flashmag! Issue 172 May 2026
Why did I become a dancer? Because I was born in a cold city, because I was always cold as a child, because I’ ve always wanted to dance on stage.
Dance is her escape, her first language. At thirteen, she performed in street clubs and small traveling shows, making crowds laugh with her funny faces and comical dance moves. At seventeen, she managed to join the chorus line of the Broadway show“ Shuffle Along,” where she dazzled even before the spotlights were turned on her. She was then just a silhouette at the back of the stage— but that silhouette, even then, radiated. In 1925, an incredible opportunity arose: a vaudeville troupe was recruiting for Paris. Josephine had never left America. She was only nineteen. She boarded the ship with the absolute— and irrational— certainty that something else awaited her. Something grand. Something human.
Josephine Baker, Aout 1933.
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« To live is to dance. I would like to die breathless, exhausted, at the end of a dance or a chorus. »
On October 2, 1925, at the Théâtre des Champs- Élysées, the Revue Nègre exploded like a bomb in the bourgeois and frivolous Paris of the interwar period. Josephine Baker took the stage in a pink feathered costume, carried aloft by her partner Joe Alex, and the audience went wild. Within minutes, Paris had a new queen. What struck Parisians was not just her body, her dance, or her extraordinary charisma— it was the complete freedom she exuded.