... Said he'd show me all the latest dances to date Promised me he wouldn't keep me out very late, So we lost no time at all but we taxied to the hall. First we did a "Tango," then did a "Trot," No "Hesitation" at all. Then he said, "Now Lilian, Let's do the Brazilian And I will show you something new." La-la la (etc.) Oh! what that man did do! His arm went round my waist But it wouldn't stay in place. And every time we bent our knees 'Twas then I felt a run in my silk stocking, how shocking! While dancing Brazilian Max-cheese. (Nazareth and Window 1914)

Sung to music by the Brazilian composer Ernesto Nazareth, this amusing piece fed and reflected the appeal of the Afro-Brazilian set dance maxixe.

For a brief moment concentrated around this single year, maxixe was an inescapable part of the dance craze sweeping the United States.

In the United States today, of course, maxixe is notable primarily for its absence. Why did maxixe disappear? Like many a fad, this dance vanished from U.S. popular culture and memory when the culture industry turned its attention elsewhere. Later, critics and historians layered their neglect over that of their sources. In maxixe's case, however, the here-today-gone-tomorrow quality of popular fashions is more complex. Maxixe's star rose for some of the same reasons that it fell, all involving a pair of conjoined phenomena key to the structuring of U.S. social relations. The two defining backdrops of both the emergence and erasure of this popular form are U.S. imperialism, at its height in this period, and domestic racial conditions, particularly the ongoing fortification of Jim Crow violence against African Americans, which gained momentum from the end of Reconstruction and into the 1920s. Maxixe's fate in the United States involved both of these factors, as well as the links and tensions between them. I offer here a brief history of maxixe's travels, hoping this disappearing dance can focus those connections and contradictions, revealing facets of the project of musical classification relevant to students of popular music in all disciplines.

Maxixe, Tango, Jazz

Maxixe's moment in the United States was another chapter in the long life of a peripatetic set dance form. Its origins lie clouded in the meetings of polka, lundu, tango, habanera, and more in urban, nineteenth-century Brazil (Duran 1942, 21; Almeida 1948; Efege 1974; Alvarenga 1982; Chasteen 1996; Moore 1997; Behague 1999; Fryer 2000, 154). At the intersection of these various traditions, people dancing and playing maxixe incorporated, through their bodily movements, a series of encounters, especially Afro-diasporic encounters, in the Americas. Maxixe was not only a palimpsest of earlier crossings but an arena of cultural mixture and an opportunity for ongoing innovation. It was one of many set dance forms, as dance historian Curt Sachs (1937, 33) noted, that "crossed the Atlantic"--and, we should add, the equator--"back and forth, not one but many times, invariably altered upon their return and often carrying a new name." Created by bodies in all sorts of motion, maxixe would never come to rest.

Maxixe as such began its travels outside of Brazil in the late nineteenth century, according to Jota Efege, maxixe's most enthusiastic and thorough historian. Efege (1974, 141) reports that Brazilian dancers in Paris, along with French and other non-Brazilian dancers who traveled to Brazil, brought maxixe repeatedly to the French capital, beginning at least as early as 1889. Sachs (1937, 444-445) confirms this timing, placing maxixe at an important, catalytic position in the round of exchange initiated at the turn of the twentieth century:

Since the Brazilian maxixe of 1890 and the cakewalk of 1903 broke up the pattern of turns and glides that dominated the European round dances, our generation has adopted with disquieting rapidity a succession of Central American [sic] dances.... We have shortly after 1900 the one-step or turkey-trot; in 1910, inspired by the Cuban habanera, the so-called 'Argentine' tango ...; and in 1912 the fox trot with its wealth of figures. After the war we take over its offspring, the shimmy,... the grotesquely distorted Charleston,... the black bottom,... the rocking rumba--all compressed into even movement, all emphasizing strongly the erotic element, and all in that glittering rhythm of syncopated four-four measures classified as ragtime.

Maxixe was a part of the great fad for Afro-diasporic set dance forms that made Paris, London, and other cities of the European metropole the sites of intense Afro-American cultural exchange, innovation, and transformation (Dewitte 1985, 1989; Lotz 1986, 1983; Riis 1986; Rye 1986; Fabre 1991; Stovall 1996; Blake 1999, 27, 62; Edwards 2000, 2003). (1)

In the United States, maxixe's vogue was vigorous but brief. By 1916, maxixes had begun to disappear from sheet-music advertisements and, presumably, the public venues they index. (2) Certainly, its suggestions about rhythm, harmony, bodily movement, and so on survived as part of the palette of possibilities for composers and performers who had lived through the fad--cultural residues can be disclaimed or ignored, but the contact is, on some level, ineradicable. Popular culture in the United States would sound Brazilian notes from time to time to haunt maxixe's fair-weather friends. In the 1920s, for example, maxixe echoed faintly through a spate of sappy songs that referred vaguely and dreamily to Brazil. (3) In the big-band scene, Sammy Gallop and Bob Crosby (Bing's kid brother) scored big with the rollicking "Boogie-Woogie Maxixe," a bestselling hit through the 1950s, which was recorded numerous times.

Brazilian newspapers continued to celebrate maxixe's success in various European cities throughout the 1930s--claims that should be taken with some salt but that suggest that maxixe may still have been played and danced outside Brazil between the world wars (Efege 1974, 154-55).

That maxixe rhythms, steps, and melodies survived under other names is illustrated by the carioca performed by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in RKO's 1933 Flying Down to Rio. The carioca became quite a fad in the movie's wake. Efege (1974, 101) calls it "maxixe-based," a legacy jazz historians tend to neglect in their discussion of the film and its dance (e.g., Stearns and Stearns 1968, 114). Furthermore, the "Bahiana" played in Flying Down to Rio by African-American performer and radio host Etta Moten Barnett, with white starched skirts and a modest basket of fruit on her head, would soon enjoy a powerful echo; it was in this garb that Carmen Miranda would offer maxixe's legacies to U.S. audiences in the 1940s. As part of the traditions feeding samba, maxixe would echo in the United States during the Miranda-inspired samba vogue and a decade later in the bossa nova.

Still, today, especially if one reads the historical record formalistically or at face value, maxixe appears to have disappeared without a trace. In the turn-of-the-twenty-first-century historical-cultural lexicon of my North American peer group, to take a terribly subjective standard, 1910s and 1920s vogues such as the turkey trot or tango have a place, while maxixe does not. As a measure of maxixe's status in a broader collective memory, one swing-dance website credits Maurice Mouvet with "creating" Brazilian maxixe in 1913 and does not even mention the dance's far more famous Brazilian exponent, Duque (Watson 2003). Even a cultural historian of dance reform, discussing the sanitization of lascivious popular dances, claims that "professional dancers ... developed elegant versions, such as the 'Castle Walk,' 'Hesitation,' 'Maxixe,' and 'Pousse Cafe'" (Perry 1985, 729). The suggestion that maxixe was an elegant dance developed in the United States as a branch of moral reform would have surprised nineteenth-century Brazilian dance reformers, themselves convinced of maxixe's vulgar immorality. Maxixe has sunk so far below memory's horizon that even careful observers can miss it entirely.

Maxixe's star rose and fell against the complex background of domestic popular culture in the era of formal political imperialism, and so it is this background that we must examine to understand the dance. Exotic forms mesmerized audiences during this period, dominating popular fora. On the stages of popular theaters and pages of magazines, an endless succession of forms called Oriental, Spanish, Latin, and so on played and danced together, distinguished barely or not at all. As a scholar of vaudeville notes, audiences imbibed a steady diet of "Brazilian Maxixe, burlesques of The Merry Widow, Princess Rajah's snake dance, and, of course, Salome" (Daly 1995, 107). Sheet-music sales illustrate one slice of this phenomenon. When publishers stopped advertising maxixe scores about 1916, they did not simply substitute homegrown forms. Instead, they executed a head-spinning turn to songs invoking Hawaii. Suddenly, Tin Pan Alley was issuing countless Hawaiian waltzes, such as "Myona Waltz," "My Hawaiian Sunshine," "Mo-ana," and comic numbers such as "O'Brien Is Tryin' to Learn to Talk Hawaiian." (4) Just as the precise routes maxixe traveled to the United States are unclear, this dramatic turn to the Pacific is bewildering. Hawaii had become a U.S. territory in 1900, and even before the nation entered the World War I in April of 1917, it was often in the news as a point on the map of the theater of conflict. Did the war somehow shine a light on Hawaii and diminish the apparent relevance of Brazil?

Along the route of this transition, Brazilian and Hawaiian forms overlapped, foreshadowing another Brazil-Hawaii conflation, the 1930-1940s overlap of the hula and the Carmen Miranda phenomena (Imada 1999). Brazil and Hawaii share enough palm trees, it seems, to have merged in North Americans' conflationary imaginations at several moments in the twentieth century.

After Hawaii's moment in the sun, Egypt had a turn. In one popular music magazine in 1920, Metronome, Egyptian themes represented a plurality of place-oriented titles. Carl Fischer-Witmark took out a full-page ad for "Bo-la-bo, that favorite Egyptian Fox Trot" and another...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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