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Dancing in the Dark
A searing new novel that reimagines the remarkable, tragic, little-known life of Bert Williams (1874—1922), the first black entertainer in the United States to reach the highest levels of fame and fortune.
Even as an eleven-year-old child living in Southern California in the late 1800s–his family had recently emigrated from the Bahamas–Bert Williams understood that he had to “learn the role that America had set aside for him.” At the age of twenty-two, after years of struggling for success on the stage, he made the radical decision to do his own “impersonation of a negro”: he donned blackface makeup and played the “coon” as a character. Behind this mask, he became a Broadway headliner, starring in the Ziegfeld Follies for eight years and leading his own musical theater company–as influential a comedian as Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and W. C. Fields.
Williams was a man of great intelligence, elegance, and dignity, but the barriers he broke down onstage continued to bear heavily on his personal life, and the contradictions between the man he was and the character he played were increasingly irreconcilable for him. W. C. Fields called him “the funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew,” and it is this dichotomy at Williams’s core that Caryl Phillips illuminates in a richly nuanced, brilliantly written narrative.
The story of a single life, Dancing in the Dark is also a novel about the tragedies of race and identity, and the perils of self-invention, that have long plagued American culture. Powerfully emotional and moving, it is Caryl Phillips’s most accomplished novel yet.
Even as an eleven-year-old child living in Southern California in the late 1800s–his family had recently emigrated from the Bahamas–Bert Williams understood that he had to “learn the role that America had set aside for him.” At the age of twenty-two, after years of struggling for success on the stage, he made the radical decision to do his own “impersonation of a negro”: he donned blackface makeup and played the “coon” as a character. Behind this mask, he became a Broadway headliner, starring in the Ziegfeld Follies for eight years and leading his own musical theater company–as influential a comedian as Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and W. C. Fields.
Williams was a man of great intelligence, elegance, and dignity, but the barriers he broke down onstage continued to bear heavily on his personal life, and the contradictions between the man he was and the character he played were increasingly irreconcilable for him. W. C. Fields called him “the funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew,” and it is this dichotomy at Williams’s core that Caryl Phillips illuminates in a richly nuanced, brilliantly written narrative.
The story of a single life, Dancing in the Dark is also a novel about the tragedies of race and identity, and the perils of self-invention, that have long plagued American culture. Powerfully emotional and moving, it is Caryl Phillips’s most accomplished novel yet.
209 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 2005
About the author
Caryl Phillips
55 books218 followers Caryl Phillips was born in St.Kitts and came to Britain at the age of four months. He grew up in Leeds, and studied English Literature at Oxford University.
He began writing for the theatre and his plays include Strange Fruit (1980), Where There is Darkness (1982) and The Shelter (1983). He won the BBC Giles Cooper Award for Best Radio Play of the year with The Wasted Years (1984). He has written many dramas and documentaries for radio and television, including, in 1996, the three-hour film of his own novel The Final Passage. He wrote the screenplay for the film Playing Away (1986) and his screenplay for the Merchant Ivory adaptation of V.S.Naipaul's The Mystic Masseur (2001) won the Silver Ombu for best screenplay at the Mar Del Plata film festival in Argentina.
His novels are: The Final Passage (1985), A State of Independence (1986), Higher Ground (1989), Cambridge (1991), Crossing the River (1993), The Nature of Blood (1997), A Distant Shore (2003), Dancing in the Dark (2005), In the Falling Snow (2009), The Lost Child (2015), A View of the Empire at Sunset (2018) and Another Man in the Street (2025). His non-fiction: The European Tribe (1987), The Atlantic Sound (2000), A New World Order (2001), Foreigners (2007), and Colour Me English (2011). He is the editor of two anthologies: Extravagant Strangers: A Literature of Belonging (1997) and The Right Set: An Anthology of Writing on Tennis (1999). His work has been translated into over a dozen languages.
He was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1992 and was on the 1993 Granta list of Best of Young British Writers. His literary awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a British Council Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and Britain's oldest literary award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, for Crossing the River which was also shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize. A Distant Shore was longlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize, and won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize; Dancing in the Dark won the 2006 PEN/Beyond the Margins Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of the Arts, and recipient of the 2013 Anthony N. Sabga Caribbean Award for Excellence.
He has taught at universities in Ghana, Sweden, Singapore, Barbados, India, and the United States, and in 1999 was the University of the West Indies Humanities Scholar of the Year. In 2002-3 he was a Fellow at the Centre for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Formerly Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order at Columbia University, he is presently Professor of English at Yale University. He is an Honorary Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford University.
A regular contributor to The Guardian and The New Republic, his most recent book is, Another Man in the Street.
(taken from carylphillips.com official web site)
He began writing for the theatre and his plays include Strange Fruit (1980), Where There is Darkness (1982) and The Shelter (1983). He won the BBC Giles Cooper Award for Best Radio Play of the year with The Wasted Years (1984). He has written many dramas and documentaries for radio and television, including, in 1996, the three-hour film of his own novel The Final Passage. He wrote the screenplay for the film Playing Away (1986) and his screenplay for the Merchant Ivory adaptation of V.S.Naipaul's The Mystic Masseur (2001) won the Silver Ombu for best screenplay at the Mar Del Plata film festival in Argentina.
His novels are: The Final Passage (1985), A State of Independence (1986), Higher Ground (1989), Cambridge (1991), Crossing the River (1993), The Nature of Blood (1997), A Distant Shore (2003), Dancing in the Dark (2005), In the Falling Snow (2009), The Lost Child (2015), A View of the Empire at Sunset (2018) and Another Man in the Street (2025). His non-fiction: The European Tribe (1987), The Atlantic Sound (2000), A New World Order (2001), Foreigners (2007), and Colour Me English (2011). He is the editor of two anthologies: Extravagant Strangers: A Literature of Belonging (1997) and The Right Set: An Anthology of Writing on Tennis (1999). His work has been translated into over a dozen languages.
He was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1992 and was on the 1993 Granta list of Best of Young British Writers. His literary awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a British Council Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and Britain's oldest literary award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, for Crossing the River which was also shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize. A Distant Shore was longlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize, and won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize; Dancing in the Dark won the 2006 PEN/Beyond the Margins Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of the Arts, and recipient of the 2013 Anthony N. Sabga Caribbean Award for Excellence.
He has taught at universities in Ghana, Sweden, Singapore, Barbados, India, and the United States, and in 1999 was the University of the West Indies Humanities Scholar of the Year. In 2002-3 he was a Fellow at the Centre for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Formerly Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order at Columbia University, he is presently Professor of English at Yale University. He is an Honorary Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford University.
A regular contributor to The Guardian and The New Republic, his most recent book is, Another Man in the Street.
(taken from carylphillips.com official web site)
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 44 reviews
August 17, 2020
Caryl Phillips is the perfect writer for Black Lives Matter-era America. A good many of his works address the African diaspora—and he is brilliant.
This is the fictionalization story of a black man who worked in vaudeville (minstrelsy) at the turn of the twentieth century. Bert Williams is in this mostly present-tense story an elegant man whose own blackness is not enough for the stereotypical “coons” he portrays. So he must further blacken his face with burnt cork and enlarge his lips with lipstick. Impeccably dressed in real life, on the Broadway stage he wears a clownish getup that shames him deeply. He and others feel he’s denigrating the race. There are periodic rationalizations in which he tries to convince himself that he’s simply an actor playing a role, but on the whole he’s deeply ashamed of what he does. It, and his closeted homosexuality, are like a one-two punch sundering him.
The story is rich with a full cast. It’s also about Bert Williams’s stage partner, George Walker, and those in their circle: wives, lovers, colleagues, and New York City. The author reanimates this long gone metropolis of coal powered elevated trains, race riots, and Harlem during its renaissance “...under a sky that is choked with stars” (p. 131), “...the rivers alive with their multitude of craft.” (p. 203)
Fortunately minstrelsy is long gone. Thinking Americans today do not see black people as “chicken-stealing, crap-shooting, razor-toting, gin-guzzling, no good nigger[s].” (p. 100) But 120 years ago this was a prevailing stereotype. So while Bert is living well—he’s 30 and has a lead role on Broadway—he’s daily perpetuating these pernicious stereotypes and that causes him great pain because that’s how he earns a living. Even his stage partner, George Walker, who plays opposite Bert, has begun to think less of his friend for playing the black buffoon. George thinks Bert is becoming more timid by the day, as if he’s internalized Shylock Homestead, his character in their hit In Dahomey.
The characters are full of secrets and not very good at leveling with one another. For instance, Bert has abandoned wife Lotte to their once-shared bed, while he reads throughout the night in the library. George is a first class rake, but his wife, Ada, won’t tell him what she needs and suffers in silence. The women are fully realized characters, but sadly turn of the century New York was a man’s world. Bert may be the most repressed of all. He’s completely closeted, with no lover on the side. His suffering seems hideous. Yet the man we see is controlled, professional, even if he has to drink to excess to achieve that outcome. He is one of the walking wounded.
The author seems to possess an extreme dislike of straightforward chronology, or sticking with a single point of view. This is the fourth or fifth Phillips’s book I’ve read, and as I continue to read the oeuvre it will be interesting to see if they all employ a fragmented timeline and different voices. Is this his signature device? A question for future readings. . . .
Toward the end, as the bodies pile up, I thought I detected an ever so subtle shift to—what’s the word?—a kind of rounded sonorousness only latent in the text until then. I’m not saying this correctly. But it’s a beautiful effect. This is a beautiful book that deserves to be widely read. This is a book to treasure.
This is the fictionalization story of a black man who worked in vaudeville (minstrelsy) at the turn of the twentieth century. Bert Williams is in this mostly present-tense story an elegant man whose own blackness is not enough for the stereotypical “coons” he portrays. So he must further blacken his face with burnt cork and enlarge his lips with lipstick. Impeccably dressed in real life, on the Broadway stage he wears a clownish getup that shames him deeply. He and others feel he’s denigrating the race. There are periodic rationalizations in which he tries to convince himself that he’s simply an actor playing a role, but on the whole he’s deeply ashamed of what he does. It, and his closeted homosexuality, are like a one-two punch sundering him.
The story is rich with a full cast. It’s also about Bert Williams’s stage partner, George Walker, and those in their circle: wives, lovers, colleagues, and New York City. The author reanimates this long gone metropolis of coal powered elevated trains, race riots, and Harlem during its renaissance “...under a sky that is choked with stars” (p. 131), “...the rivers alive with their multitude of craft.” (p. 203)
Fortunately minstrelsy is long gone. Thinking Americans today do not see black people as “chicken-stealing, crap-shooting, razor-toting, gin-guzzling, no good nigger[s].” (p. 100) But 120 years ago this was a prevailing stereotype. So while Bert is living well—he’s 30 and has a lead role on Broadway—he’s daily perpetuating these pernicious stereotypes and that causes him great pain because that’s how he earns a living. Even his stage partner, George Walker, who plays opposite Bert, has begun to think less of his friend for playing the black buffoon. George thinks Bert is becoming more timid by the day, as if he’s internalized Shylock Homestead, his character in their hit In Dahomey.
The characters are full of secrets and not very good at leveling with one another. For instance, Bert has abandoned wife Lotte to their once-shared bed, while he reads throughout the night in the library. George is a first class rake, but his wife, Ada, won’t tell him what she needs and suffers in silence. The women are fully realized characters, but sadly turn of the century New York was a man’s world. Bert may be the most repressed of all. He’s completely closeted, with no lover on the side. His suffering seems hideous. Yet the man we see is controlled, professional, even if he has to drink to excess to achieve that outcome. He is one of the walking wounded.
The author seems to possess an extreme dislike of straightforward chronology, or sticking with a single point of view. This is the fourth or fifth Phillips’s book I’ve read, and as I continue to read the oeuvre it will be interesting to see if they all employ a fragmented timeline and different voices. Is this his signature device? A question for future readings. . . .
Toward the end, as the bodies pile up, I thought I detected an ever so subtle shift to—what’s the word?—a kind of rounded sonorousness only latent in the text until then. I’m not saying this correctly. But it’s a beautiful effect. This is a beautiful book that deserves to be widely read. This is a book to treasure.
April 21, 2022
Dancing in the Dark is a fictionalization of the life of Bert Williams. Though it isn’t as well read as it could be, and the description makes it seem quaint, Philips uses the life of Bert Williams and his hardships to paint what it means to be black in the public eyes. Very few novels capture black anger and frustration in front of the white gaze as well as this one does. The descriptions are quite to the point and the language is tense. I think if it were published during the Black Lives Movement it would have been a very commercial successful book. But sadly there is always a price to being ahead of one’s time.
Nonetheless Dancing in the Dark shows a lot of brilliance. Phillips is narrating a universal struggle but in a very particular context. His success in doing so is what makes this novel a great one, and I hope more people discover so, over the passage of the years.
Nonetheless Dancing in the Dark shows a lot of brilliance. Phillips is narrating a universal struggle but in a very particular context. His success in doing so is what makes this novel a great one, and I hope more people discover so, over the passage of the years.
December 26, 2020
Writing in 1940, whilst reflecting back on the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes noted a black irony: it was a time when the most popular novels about black identity were written by white authors and black authors, in vogue, wrote for a white audience. A perverse crossing of the tracks! Dancing in the Dark is fully aware of this irony and dramatises it in the novel’s central character, Bert Williams. The novel is not simply a reflection on a light-skinned black man from the Bahamas who assumed the image of a dark-skinned African by adopting black-face and “playing the coon”, whose theatrical works tried to draw closer to Africa but ended in parody and distanced from Africa. (How can you seek a fixed identity through something without identity?) It is a novel about the connection between outside and inside, the tones of blackness, and what it is like to feel that you do not belong…and how, as a displaced author, you still seek placement with a dual audience.
Bert Williams and George Walker formed one of the most successful performance partnerships ever. On stage, they were a unity, but off stage they were opposites. In Phillips’s novel, Williams knows his place. Artistry depends on the black man knowing how far he can go within the white spot-light. He is the introspective intellect, living outside sexuality, troubled by never being sufficiently black, whereas Walker is the extrovert. Handsome and confident, he is drawn by sexuality and emotion to cross the colour line…Garvey and Du Bois are the backdrop to his attitude. The real triumph of Dancing in the Dark is that is demonstrates what Wright wrote about the new black novel: it should have a “complex simplicity”. Within a simple life—and the events are mundane—a dazzling complexity should be created, for the “negro” was not simple and did not require a reading “primer”.
Short it might be, but Dancing in the Dark is no “primer”. Phillips takes one theme: the relationship between blackness and melancholia/depression. Then working with the theme of skin, light, and how black skin reflects light—dazzle—he uses the physical to become a metaphor for the psychological. Through the depression that Williams’ experiences, Phillips charts the depression that exists, not in the “heart of darkness” and the racist imagination of Conrad’s turn of the century society, but in the heart of the black identity when it is exiled from life.
Dancing in the Dark is a novel that resonates today. Set between 1873 and 1922, before the negro and negritude were supposedly liberated, it looks to be a novel about what might have been. In fact, it is a novel about what has come to pass. Black, skin, sex, race, the gulf between the ivory-tower Williams and the boy-on-the-street Walker; artistic life and monetary success becoming a withdrawal from reality, a sensitivity to life turning into depression and a terminal sensing of death. A blackness at the heart of things spreading through a despair concerned with what cannot be healed? “Performative bondage”—says Phillips, in the Prologue to his novel…that is the source of melancholy, and in the end: “I wander in this darkness that makes human beings of us all…Here in the darkness….I shall perform no more.”
Bert Williams and George Walker formed one of the most successful performance partnerships ever. On stage, they were a unity, but off stage they were opposites. In Phillips’s novel, Williams knows his place. Artistry depends on the black man knowing how far he can go within the white spot-light. He is the introspective intellect, living outside sexuality, troubled by never being sufficiently black, whereas Walker is the extrovert. Handsome and confident, he is drawn by sexuality and emotion to cross the colour line…Garvey and Du Bois are the backdrop to his attitude. The real triumph of Dancing in the Dark is that is demonstrates what Wright wrote about the new black novel: it should have a “complex simplicity”. Within a simple life—and the events are mundane—a dazzling complexity should be created, for the “negro” was not simple and did not require a reading “primer”.
Short it might be, but Dancing in the Dark is no “primer”. Phillips takes one theme: the relationship between blackness and melancholia/depression. Then working with the theme of skin, light, and how black skin reflects light—dazzle—he uses the physical to become a metaphor for the psychological. Through the depression that Williams’ experiences, Phillips charts the depression that exists, not in the “heart of darkness” and the racist imagination of Conrad’s turn of the century society, but in the heart of the black identity when it is exiled from life.
Dancing in the Dark is a novel that resonates today. Set between 1873 and 1922, before the negro and negritude were supposedly liberated, it looks to be a novel about what might have been. In fact, it is a novel about what has come to pass. Black, skin, sex, race, the gulf between the ivory-tower Williams and the boy-on-the-street Walker; artistic life and monetary success becoming a withdrawal from reality, a sensitivity to life turning into depression and a terminal sensing of death. A blackness at the heart of things spreading through a despair concerned with what cannot be healed? “Performative bondage”—says Phillips, in the Prologue to his novel…that is the source of melancholy, and in the end: “I wander in this darkness that makes human beings of us all…Here in the darkness….I shall perform no more.”
October 8, 2022
Very good 📖. The duality black people live is and has been a difficult road for generations. We were brought here against our will. We saw what the so called 'American Dream' was, so we wanted it for ourselves also. But when non blacks see us with the trappings of it, they're 😠 😡 and do their best to rip all vestiges of it away from us, no matter how hard and long we worked for it.
It seems like the only way non blacks really feel comfortable seeing 👀 us is in poor. Non- threatening circumstances like the knee slapping minstrel, in black face or 'know'in our place.' Which always seems 2 b waaay back dar
It seems like the only way non blacks really feel comfortable seeing 👀 us is in poor. Non- threatening circumstances like the knee slapping minstrel, in black face or 'know'in our place.' Which always seems 2 b waaay back dar
February 26, 2022
this is gonna sound crazy but i loved the writing style so much... i would not want to read many books written like this because it's not easy to follow but like... as a probably once in a lifetime experience i honestly enjoyed it... i don't even rate books that i read for uni classes but this one deserves it
September 15, 2017
Struggled with the writing style so much..with all the chopping and changing of perspectives, I loss sight of much of the plot, which is a shame as the language used was really captivating and one of the main reasons I continued till the end..
March 13, 2011
I feel bad giving this book such a low rating when it appears so many others enjoyed it. It was the writing style that brought it down for me. The sudden changes in perspective, third person omnipresent, first person, third person limited, and then 'newspaper' articles, and wow, it just ended up doing my head in.
I can't help but wonder how much was real, and how much is Phillips' imagination coming into play. I think if this book was written in a much more linear form, and the perspective wasn't continuously changing, then it would be easier to pick it apart and decide where fiction started and non-fiction ended. Ultimately, I just found this book hard to enjoy when the writing seemed to be all over the place. Instead of appearing artistic, it just seemed messy.
I can't help but wonder how much was real, and how much is Phillips' imagination coming into play. I think if this book was written in a much more linear form, and the perspective wasn't continuously changing, then it would be easier to pick it apart and decide where fiction started and non-fiction ended. Ultimately, I just found this book hard to enjoy when the writing seemed to be all over the place. Instead of appearing artistic, it just seemed messy.
July 29, 2011
I'm really behind in reading the novels of this wonderful, prolific writer! What an amazing, bitter and sadly shifting novel of voices, thoughts and alienation about a world where entertaining becomes a means of degrading oneselves to insanity.
March 17, 2023
I heard of Bert Williams from the “Music From 100 Years Ago” podcast. He was funny and emotional. “I’m Neutral.” Who was this guy? I’m not sure I got that answer here. I feel this was more George Walker’s story than Bert’s. I felt for Ada and her trying stand out. Lottie went through a lot in her life.
This Bert is moody, conflicted, possibly homosexual or has VD. It’s not clear if that is the truth. Therein lies the issue. What Bert is the truth? Is he ever telling the truth? Is the author covering up because he doesn’t know.
I also felt the author was outside the story instead of taking me into the middle of it. It felt distant.
Glad I learned about George and Ada Walker. Sad I didn’t learn about Bert which was the reason for the book.
This Bert is moody, conflicted, possibly homosexual or has VD. It’s not clear if that is the truth. Therein lies the issue. What Bert is the truth? Is he ever telling the truth? Is the author covering up because he doesn’t know.
I also felt the author was outside the story instead of taking me into the middle of it. It felt distant.
Glad I learned about George and Ada Walker. Sad I didn’t learn about Bert which was the reason for the book.
December 10, 2017
actually started enjoy the reading from the second part on. Not a bad book, though... But definitely not the kind of book I would read to relax and have a good time. Too difficult to change so many points of view and understand each time who's talking and about what. 2 out of 5 is fair for me, but I think the writer would be able to do so much better... and besides, issues confronted in the book are totally valid, but a preparation reading or collecting information about the age and place where the novel is set is necessary.
May 5, 2018
I'm fascinated by Bert Williams and I find his one man poker game in the film Natural Born Gambler to be a brilliant piece of mime and character study. I found this fictionalized version of his life to be confusing (multiple points of view that switch without warning). And having finished, I'm genuinely unsure of what the effect or theme that the author intended. The historic Williams was known as a deeply sad man but the story that Phillips weaves around that sadness is sometimes ambiguous and other times clear but inconsistent.
January 9, 2020
It's a shame. I like historical fiction, and I like the idea of looking back at early stage entertainment and the conflicts of black entertainment, particular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but I had a hard time getting into this book. The writer shifts viewpoints between four characters, who are depicted very similarly. I found myself constantly going back because I was confused who was doing what. Also, there was something about the language that seemed distancing. I never felt close OR intimately involved in any of the characters. I don't know. This book just wasn't for me.
February 3, 2022
i read this book for class and that is pretty much the only reason i finished it. i think the complexities of minstrelsy are interesting to learn about and i understand this as something of a companion to that. but honestly i felt like it strayed from that idea so much. it ended up being just a supposed narrative of the lives of these two performers. so not only was most of this reading irrelevant to the class, it was also just not interesting. the writing wasn’t annoyingly sub-par, but it was nothing to get excited about.
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December 10, 2017"She knows a colored woman cannot expect too much out of this life" p.53
This quote captures society's view of women. Being a woman and colored was enough for society to require Ada to expect little out of life. Women of all races are put down and demeaned because of factors they cannot control like their race and gender. When they dare to expect more like Ada does, they are policed by religion, the government and social forums.
Thelma Amoah
This quote captures society's view of women. Being a woman and colored was enough for society to require Ada to expect little out of life. Women of all races are put down and demeaned because of factors they cannot control like their race and gender. When they dare to expect more like Ada does, they are policed by religion, the government and social forums.
Thelma Amoah
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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August 13, 2019I would call this a heavy duty novel. You know as you begin to read that nothing will turn out well and that heartache will never end. There are many gems of wisdom i felt i should record, like the one about not every journey leaves footprints. I keep that in mind now.
December 7, 2022
Questo devo dire, l'ho letto per l'Università, ho i miei dubbi che in altre circostanze sarebbe mai entrato nella mia libreria. Non conoscevo minimamente Bert Williams e non avevo mai sentito parlare di questo libro. Alla fine della lettura però posso dire di essere stata quanto meno arricchita da un pezzo di storia molto lontano da me e di cui probabilmente avrei saputo poco altrimenti. In questo libro si parla di razzismo, di black face e di cosa a volte si è costretti a fare per essere accettati o quanto meno tollerati. E' la storia di un uomo diviso tra la propria immagine di sé e l'immagine che invece presenta sul palcoscenico, diviso tra il pubblico bianco e il pubblico nero. E' una storia toccante, sebbene abbia trovato i continui cambi di prospettiva, di tempo e di spazio a tratti un po' psichedelici.
February 12, 2020
This is a interesting story which show us how things were in the entertainment industry.
July 3, 2020
Groaznica. Nu o recomand. Stilul de scriere este jalnic.
February 2, 2021
The fragmented writing style / many POVs got in the way for me. I enjoyed the ideas and themes more than the actual reading experience.
August 1, 2023
Unfortunately, the subject of this novel was not that interesting for me. And the writing was also not great, but I used this opportunity to learn a little bit about early Afro-American entertainers.
November 10, 2023
3.5 stars rounded up to 4.
September 17, 2025
Bert calling his wife “mother” is the 1900s equivalent of calling someone mommy
February 25, 2011
I heard Caryl Phillips, author of ‘Dancing in the Dark,’ at Toronto’s International Festival of Authors some years ago. I was impressed with Phillips, who was born in St. Kitts, West Indies and brought up in Britain. I was interested in what he had to say about his background and very much enjoyed his reading. Also, I’m writing a Caribbean black character as part of the new novel I’m working on — and it’s Black History Month at the moment — so the time was definitely ripe to read Phillips’s work.
In ‘Dancing in the Dark’ Phillips fictionalizes the life of Bert Williams (1874-1922), who was the first black entertainer to gain high levels of fame and fortune in the U.S.A. Bert Williams was born in the Bahamas and came to America with his parents when he was a boy. Bert fought his way to the top of the entertainment business to eventually appear on Broadway. He also performed and toured with the popular Ziegfeld Follies. His achievement was a remarkable feat for a black person who was born mere years after the last slave was freed in the U.S.A. and where, during his lifetime, segregation and prejudice were rife.
Not surprisingly his story — and more particularly the stories of the black entertainers who surrounded him but who were not as successful — are incredibly hard and sometimes immensely sad. Phillips does a great job of describing the punishing atmosphere in which black performers of the period worked and the crushing disappointments experienced by many of them. He also paints hyper-real pictures of Harlem and New York in general. As a reader we get to “see,” “smell” and “hear” these venues by virtue of Phillips’s vivid descriptions.
Despite the inequalities and unfairness of the time articulated by Phillips and strong preconceptions I had about discrimination's injustices, I wasn’t convinced by Phillips that Bert’s life and those of his peers could actually have been quite so relentlessly, unrelievedly depressing as he depicts. Phillips suggests strongly without spelling it out that Bert’s great burden was that he achieved his fame and fortune by donning burnt cork "black face" and becoming what was described as a “coon.” He exaggerated the mannerisms, movements, and speech of a “darkie” to entertain white audiences, which eventually brought scorn and anger from the black community, his own father included. All of which was doubtless true, but it’s hard to believe there weren’t one or two moments of joy, exuberance or triumph along the path of Bert’s rise to fame. Difficult to think there wasn’t any enjoyment at all of his fortune and the comfort it afforded him and his wife. But Phillips never shows us any.
When it comes to Bert’s wife (a performer he met on the stage), Phillips supplies no reason for Bert’s absolute and cruelly glacial attitude to her once they were married. It’s suggested that the marriage wasn’t even consummated, but no reason is even hinted at, apart from Bert’s depressed state, which really isn’t convincing enough. Added to all of the above, Phillips's style, although beautifully rendered and articulate to a point, has a consistently doleful tenor with no relief whatsoever.
I really wanted to like this book, and I didn’t not like it, but I found it relentlessly glum without being convinced by Phillips that it needed to be. In fact I wondered if the tragedies of the novel wouldn't have seemed more intense if there had been some joy as a contrast to the unceasing misery. I was left thinking that surely just occasionally even the most challenged dancer comes into the light, even for a brief moment.
P.S. After the kerfuffle over “nigger” being removed from an updated 'Huckleberry Finn' edition, it’s interesting that Phillips uses the “n” word quite liberally in this book, as it would have been used during the period in which the book is set.
In ‘Dancing in the Dark’ Phillips fictionalizes the life of Bert Williams (1874-1922), who was the first black entertainer to gain high levels of fame and fortune in the U.S.A. Bert Williams was born in the Bahamas and came to America with his parents when he was a boy. Bert fought his way to the top of the entertainment business to eventually appear on Broadway. He also performed and toured with the popular Ziegfeld Follies. His achievement was a remarkable feat for a black person who was born mere years after the last slave was freed in the U.S.A. and where, during his lifetime, segregation and prejudice were rife.
Not surprisingly his story — and more particularly the stories of the black entertainers who surrounded him but who were not as successful — are incredibly hard and sometimes immensely sad. Phillips does a great job of describing the punishing atmosphere in which black performers of the period worked and the crushing disappointments experienced by many of them. He also paints hyper-real pictures of Harlem and New York in general. As a reader we get to “see,” “smell” and “hear” these venues by virtue of Phillips’s vivid descriptions.
Despite the inequalities and unfairness of the time articulated by Phillips and strong preconceptions I had about discrimination's injustices, I wasn’t convinced by Phillips that Bert’s life and those of his peers could actually have been quite so relentlessly, unrelievedly depressing as he depicts. Phillips suggests strongly without spelling it out that Bert’s great burden was that he achieved his fame and fortune by donning burnt cork "black face" and becoming what was described as a “coon.” He exaggerated the mannerisms, movements, and speech of a “darkie” to entertain white audiences, which eventually brought scorn and anger from the black community, his own father included. All of which was doubtless true, but it’s hard to believe there weren’t one or two moments of joy, exuberance or triumph along the path of Bert’s rise to fame. Difficult to think there wasn’t any enjoyment at all of his fortune and the comfort it afforded him and his wife. But Phillips never shows us any.
When it comes to Bert’s wife (a performer he met on the stage), Phillips supplies no reason for Bert’s absolute and cruelly glacial attitude to her once they were married. It’s suggested that the marriage wasn’t even consummated, but no reason is even hinted at, apart from Bert’s depressed state, which really isn’t convincing enough. Added to all of the above, Phillips's style, although beautifully rendered and articulate to a point, has a consistently doleful tenor with no relief whatsoever.
I really wanted to like this book, and I didn’t not like it, but I found it relentlessly glum without being convinced by Phillips that it needed to be. In fact I wondered if the tragedies of the novel wouldn't have seemed more intense if there had been some joy as a contrast to the unceasing misery. I was left thinking that surely just occasionally even the most challenged dancer comes into the light, even for a brief moment.
P.S. After the kerfuffle over “nigger” being removed from an updated 'Huckleberry Finn' edition, it’s interesting that Phillips uses the “n” word quite liberally in this book, as it would have been used during the period in which the book is set.
September 4, 2017
Saint Kitts and Nevis
"The balance has gone."
"He once more closes his eyes and urges his mind to hurry back in the direction of the Caribbean."
"In this new place they are now encouraged to see themselves as inferior."
"It is true, journeys don't always leave footprints."
"I truly lost sight of myself many years ago."
"Do you really understand what they want from us in this American world? We are being held hostage as performers, and those who imagine that they are engaged in something other than entertainment should ask my wife to pass them the handheld mirror.
"Others will come after me to entertain you, and they will happily change their name and put on whatever clownish costume you wish them to wear, and dance, and sing, and preform in a manner that will amuse you, and you will mimic them, and you will make your money, but know that at the darkest point of the night, when no eyes are upon them, these people's souls will be heavy, and eventually some among them will say no, and you will see their sadness, and then you will turn from them and choose somebody else to place in the empty room, or nudge onto your empty stage, but it will not be me for I am tired, so please excuse me and let me wander here in the darkness and search for my father, who is also lost."
"The balance has gone."
"He once more closes his eyes and urges his mind to hurry back in the direction of the Caribbean."
"In this new place they are now encouraged to see themselves as inferior."
"It is true, journeys don't always leave footprints."
"I truly lost sight of myself many years ago."
"Do you really understand what they want from us in this American world? We are being held hostage as performers, and those who imagine that they are engaged in something other than entertainment should ask my wife to pass them the handheld mirror.
"Others will come after me to entertain you, and they will happily change their name and put on whatever clownish costume you wish them to wear, and dance, and sing, and preform in a manner that will amuse you, and you will mimic them, and you will make your money, but know that at the darkest point of the night, when no eyes are upon them, these people's souls will be heavy, and eventually some among them will say no, and you will see their sadness, and then you will turn from them and choose somebody else to place in the empty room, or nudge onto your empty stage, but it will not be me for I am tired, so please excuse me and let me wander here in the darkness and search for my father, who is also lost."
November 23, 2012
This book was so well-received, certainly among my fellow GoodReaders, that I feel somewhat out of step in my disappointment. I love Bert Williams, I love historical fiction, and I didn't care for this.
In this novelization of the life of Bert Williams, Phillips concentrates on guilt that Phillips places on Williams' shoulders for playing the "coon" for white audiences in the vaudeville era. If Williams felt guilt, he certainly wasn't alone because he caught heat from black contemporaries for demeaning himself, and caught heat from whites when he tried to perform dignified shows. This is part of the line that performers of colour had to walk in order to make a living; as Hattie McDaniel used to say "I'd rather play a maid for $200 a week than work as one for $2.00).
There's a lot here that doesn't jibe with the historical record, and that's a shame. Williams faced a great deal of racism, but he dealt with it better than you would think from reading Dancing in the Dark, and he opened doors for the next generation of performers in a way that can still be appreciated today.
And then there are the technical issues. Constantly shifting perspectives and timeline, one moment first person, next omniscent narrator, etc. It's a very disjointed, confusing (and confused) story, and unfortunately so, because Bert Williams was a fascinating man, and one well worth reading about. If you choose to do so, I recommend Eric Ledell Smith's biography, Bert Williams: Biography of a Pioneer Black Comedian.
In this novelization of the life of Bert Williams, Phillips concentrates on guilt that Phillips places on Williams' shoulders for playing the "coon" for white audiences in the vaudeville era. If Williams felt guilt, he certainly wasn't alone because he caught heat from black contemporaries for demeaning himself, and caught heat from whites when he tried to perform dignified shows. This is part of the line that performers of colour had to walk in order to make a living; as Hattie McDaniel used to say "I'd rather play a maid for $200 a week than work as one for $2.00).
There's a lot here that doesn't jibe with the historical record, and that's a shame. Williams faced a great deal of racism, but he dealt with it better than you would think from reading Dancing in the Dark, and he opened doors for the next generation of performers in a way that can still be appreciated today.
And then there are the technical issues. Constantly shifting perspectives and timeline, one moment first person, next omniscent narrator, etc. It's a very disjointed, confusing (and confused) story, and unfortunately so, because Bert Williams was a fascinating man, and one well worth reading about. If you choose to do so, I recommend Eric Ledell Smith's biography, Bert Williams: Biography of a Pioneer Black Comedian.
June 18, 2008
What a sad, sad book. Melancoly. OH MY! It was a fictionized (is there such a word?) story about one of the very first black performers in the early 1900's. It actually was a two team comedy, singing and dancing act one of which sported black face (if you remember Al Jolson - even tho he was white Bert, in the book, also sported that type of black face with the exaggerated lips). The author weaved a story of sadness that plagued the performers b/c although their life was in the performance, the sadness came from the fact that they were doing it in a form of entertainment that they did not embrace. The way that they had to play the "darkey" was an insult to themselves but the only way that the white population would accept them. The turmoil that permeated their lives was a sad way to live their lives and it bled into their family life, their marriages and their deaths. I also compared this to the way a lot of people must even live today whether they be white, black, straight, gay, persecuted for various reasons. I can see how this concept would lend itself to many venues of life today. I can see how people of everywhere might have to live a lie in their lives to make it through the day. I kept reading this book hoping beyond hope that there would be a happy ending. The way of the early 1900s and the way of life for these black men was what it was, unfortunately. A very sad, but thinking, book.
May 29, 2013
I feel like a bad person for not knowing who Bert Williams was before I started reading this book. I'm still not convinces I know him, because this book was fraught with Williams' confusion over his own identity as a Black performer at the turn of the 19th and into the 20th century. A (and it pains me to write this) "coon," mocking his own blackness (often in blackface, Williams elicited laughs from white audiences and often disgust or outright hatred from African American audiences.
He gave up a lot of his identity to become the first black performer in modern American society. Williams even preformed in the famous Ziegfield Follies. But, as Caryl Phillips deftly explores, at what cost?
Not an easy read.
He gave up a lot of his identity to become the first black performer in modern American society. Williams even preformed in the famous Ziegfield Follies. But, as Caryl Phillips deftly explores, at what cost?
Not an easy read.
December 27, 2013
It's strange to read the Wiki entry for Bert Williams after the book, since the Wiki entry employs a defensive, even celebratory tone to describe Williams's career, whereas Dancing in the Dark never loses sight of the pathos of blackface performance. Phillips does a great job of capturing Williams as a melancholic alcoholic who has internalized American culture's racism and criticisms of his work by black intellectuals--he's really getting it from both ends, so to speak--but the book rarely ventures beyond that. We hear from other characters, all of whom are painted with a shade of tragedy, and while surely it is Phillips's intent to convey that tragedy, the resulting novel and its characters are one-note. Even the fall half of the rise-and-fall arc is unbearably depressing.
June 19, 2008
This book tells the tale of Bert Williams, one of America's first black Vaudeville performers. It is basically historical fiction, told from a first-person perspective, but it is fascinating nevertheless. Set in the early half of the 20th Century, it outlines the struggle of black performers to gain credibility in an all-white theatre environment, during a time when white actors were still doing 'black-face'. This book is unflinching and touching, and although the storyline can get a little confusing at times, it is well worth the read.
March 16, 2015
A somewhat confusing narrative that shifts regularly from character to character and from fiction to reality. Of course, this is in the cause of underlining the ambiguities of any claim to 'truth', but it can occasionally lead the reader to tear at his hair.
The text itself weaves news clippings and interviews, and extracts from the original musicals and songs made famous by Bert Williams, once said to be the most famous black man in America. It has it's merit, but I'm not sure that it made me any the wiser about its central protagonist.
The text itself weaves news clippings and interviews, and extracts from the original musicals and songs made famous by Bert Williams, once said to be the most famous black man in America. It has it's merit, but I'm not sure that it made me any the wiser about its central protagonist.
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