Chalk Line (de Clotilda à Joséphine)

Chalk Line pays tribute to the dazzling personality that was Joséphine Baker. An American citizen who became a French national, a patriot and a feminist, she joined the resistance against the Nazis with the same fervor with which she campaigned for American civil rights. Driven by a strong awareness that the world was now predominantly mixed-race, Joséphine Baker nevertheless chose to live in France, where she practiced her art and raised a family, adopting 12 children from around the world, a rainbow tribe that would become the ultimate epic realization of her humanist ideal.
The vocal and textual inspiration for the piece draws its main source from Joséphine Baker’s speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington on August 28, 1963, during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom led by Martin Luther King. In the radio archive recording of this historic day, we can appreciate both the warmth and dignity of the speaker, whose natural swing inspires all the musical motifs of the piece. The particular coloration of the
microphones of the time gives the recording a kind of halo around the spoken voice, whose orchestration weaves a complete harmonic field, so as to envelop the solo singing voice in a contemporary spectral setting.
Thus, Chalk Line takes the form of a journey between two times and two worlds, with Joséphine Baker as the mediator. The Clotilda, the last known American slave ship in 1860 (even though the practice had been banned since 1808 and punishable by death since 1820), was set on fire and sunk in Mobile Bay after unloading its cargo of human goods in the swamps. Their owners used the same tactics as escaped slaves to hide them. The story of the Clotilda became that of 110 Africans of different languages, ethnicities, and origins, held captive by a crew of 12 sailors on a 26-meter-long schooner, who became fugitives and were then “freed” five years later in a highly segregated state. They fed my imagination and convinced me of the communicative necessity of staying alive as human beings through music, even before they had the opportunity to find a common language. All emotions are expressed through the vitality of the rhythm, and the expressive force is all the more powerful because their basic rights are denied: their civil status, their own names, their own roots, in short, their own humanity. Dance thus becomes a caricature of survival, wobbly and chaotic, Ragtime or Cake-walk parades where you have to be the most beautiful in rags but above all stay in your place and never cross the chalk line that marks the boundary of the right to laugh like monkeys at carnival.Bringing together disparate elements to create a common style and build coherence, humanizing the absurdity and injustice of the conditions of survival: this is the social project that American music has taken on to bring out a vibrant identity from its 50 states. Ultimately, our crossing of the Chalk Line takes place in three stages. First, there is the encounter with the heterophony of work songs passionately collected by Alan Lomax in the prisons of the South. Then there is the immense surge of pacifist confidence spread by the civil rights march. And finally, there is Daisy Bates’ ever-vivid exhortation for equality and education.