Master Juba - European Tour

European Tour

In 1848, a dancer billed as "Boz's Juba" performed in London, England. He was a member of the Ethiopian Serenaders, a blackface minstrel troupe under the leadership of Gilbert W. Pell (or Pelham). The company had performed in England two years prior, when they had made minstrelsy palatable to middle-class British audiences by adopting refinements such as formal wear. With Boz's Juba as its newest member, the company toured middle-class theaters and lecture halls in the British Isles for the next 18 months.

The identity of Boz's Juba is open to doubt. "Boz" was a pen name used by Dickens. The Ethiopian Serenaders quoted from Dickens's American Notes in their press releases, and The Illustrated London News considered the black dancer to be the same person Dickens had seen in New York in 1842. Dickens never refuted the claims. Nevertheless, the Serenaders' assertions were promotional, and Dickens may not have remembered the exact look or characteristics of the dancer he had seen in the Five Points. Writers from the period and later have generally identified Boz's Juba as the same person Dickens had seen during his visit to New York and who had danced against Diamond.

Boz's Juba seems to have been a full member of Pell's troupe. He wore blackface makeup and played the endman, Mr. Tambo (a tambourine player) opposite Pell's Mr. Bones (on the bone castanets). He sang standard minstrel songs, such as "Juliana Johnson]" and "Come Back, Steben", and he performed in sketches and "conundrum" contests. Despite this apparent level of integration into the act, advertisements for the troupe set Juba's name apart from the other members. The Serenaders continued through Britain and played establishments such as the Vauxhall Gardens. The tour ended in 1850. Its run of 18 months was the longest uninterrupted minstrel tour in Britain at that time. Juba and Pell then joined the troupe headed by Pell's brother, Richard Pelham. The company was renamed G. W. Pell's Serenaders.

Juba was the most written about performer in London for the summer 1848 season, no easy feat considering the large number of competitors. He proved a critical favorite, with commentators doting on him praise normally accorded to popular ballet dancers. That August, the Theatrical Times wrote, "The performances of this young man are far above the common performances of the mountebanks who give imitations of American and Negro character; there is an ideality in what he does that makes his efforts at once grotesque and poetical, without losing sight of the reality of representation." An anonymous clipping from the 1848 season says,

he dancing of Juba exceeded anything ever witnessed in Europe ... The American Juba has for some years drawn immense audiences whenever he has appeared. He is quite young, being only in his seventeenth year. Mr. Dickens, in his 'American Notes,' gives a graphic description of this extraordinary youth, who, we doubt not, before many weeks have elapsed, will have the honor of displaying his dancing attainments in Buckingham Palace.

One reviewer wrote, "Juba is a musician, as well as a dancer. To him, the intricate management of the nigger tambourine is confined, and from it he produces marvelous harmonies . We almost question whether, upon a great emergency, he could not play a fugue upon it". His only known negative review during his British tour came from The Puppet-Show on August 12, 1848:

The principal feature in entertainments at Vauxhall is Juba: as such at least he is put forth—or rather put first—by the proprietors. Out of compliment to Dickens, this extraordinary nigger is called 'Boz's Juba,' in consequence, we believe, of the popular writer having said a good word for him in his American Notes: on this principle we could not mention the Industrious Fleas as being clever without having those talented little animals puffed all over London as being under the overwhelming patronage of the Showman. Juba's talent consists in walking round the stage with an air of satisfaction and with his toes turned in; in jumping backwards in a less graceful manner than we should have conceived possible; and in shaking his thighs like a man afflicted with palsy. He makes a terrible clatter with his feet, not owing so much to activity on his part as to stupidity on the part of his boot-maker, who has furnished him with a pair of clumsy Wellingtons sufficiently large for the feet and legs of all the Ethiopians in London: besides this, he sometimes moves about the stage on his knees, as if he was praying to be endowed with intelligence, and had unlimited credit with his tailor. As a last resource, he falls back on the floor ...

The piece goes on to describe a drunken man the critic met after Juba's performance:

When again we saw him he was labouring (like a horse—or, rather, an ass) under the influence of champagne. We understood that he was imitating Juba, and he behaved so ridiculously that he may actually be said to have surpassed him.

Master Juba's stint with Pell makes him the earliest known black performer to tour with a white minstrel troupe. Scholars disagree over why he was allowed to do so. Dance historian Marian Hannah Winter argues that Juba was simply too talented to be held back. Dance historian Stephen Johnson sees Juba's talent as less central to the matter, and emphasizes the element of exoticism and exhibition in the tour. During the same period, exhibits of Arab families, Bushmen, Kaffir Zulus, and Ojibway warriors appeared in London. A reviewer for the Manchester Guardian gave an almost anthropological description of Juba, unheard of for other performers:

But the great feature of the entertainment, and that which we imagine attracted the large and respectable audience present, was undoubtedly "Master Juba," the immortalized of Boz. This "phenomenon" (as the bills describe him) is a copper-coloured votary of Terpsichore,—the Monsieur Perrot of Negro life in the southern states; and possesses the additional attraction of being a "real nigger," and not a "sham," like his vocal associates. He is apparently about eighteen years of age; about 5 feet 3 inches in height; of slender make, yet possessing great muscular activity. His head is very small, and his countenance, when at rest, has a rather mild, sedate, and far from unpleasing expression.

Pell's advertising repeatedly alleged that Juba's dance was authentic, and the reviewers seem to have believed him. The same Manchester critic remarked that Juba's dances "illustrated the dances of his own simple people on festive occasions". The few reviews of Juba as a solo performer after his tour with Pell (and thus out of the exhibitionist mode) are more negative. Dance scholar Thomas DeFrantz has said that Master Juba's stage persona "buffered associations between the potent black body onstage and the preferred impotent everyday, male slave body". Scholar of African American studies Maurice O. Wallace adds that Juba was an example of how "those strategies of black cultural performance ... have historically coalesced to shape black masculine subjecthood in Eurocentric contexts". However, Wallace cautions that by the time Juba had reached London, he had " the racial gaze" and was seen as a dancer first and black man second.