ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

lack Americans. That arrow may have lead to a puppet that represents its target as a sex
object, but it drew the tradition away from subhuman grotesques. Paris’s object
demonstrates that racialized exaggerations are not inevitable results of depicting a race in
performance. The Josephine Baker marionette proves that, for all the impact the co-
present heritage of minstrelsy might have on puppeteers, there were alternatives to
blackface stereotyping even in the 1930s.
Paris broke with the standard categorical distinction by applying his highest
artistic practices to a local blackface puppet. Granted, Josephine Baker’s European
performance credits placed her vaguely outside the idea of a standard American “negro”
that a marionettist might imagine. Nonetheless, she was an African American woman.
Paris depicted this African American woman through a puppet, with the same
realistic detail he applied to marionettes of Henie and Zorina. Other vaudeville
puppeteers, among them the Lauer Sisters, manifested the distinction Paris rejected. The
Lauer Sisters did so with nearly schizophrenic visibility. 233
Little is known of the career of the three nightclub performers/puppeteers known
as the Lauer Sisters. Sometime prior to 1937, they played an elaborate variety production
that included two “Spanish Dancer” marionettes, as well as portrait puppets of the sisters
themselves. These objects performed with a portrait puppet depicting popular screen
actor Greta Garbo on roller skates, a Tap Dancer, a Ballerina, a Music Professor at a
piano, and a Seal marionette. The amusing diversity of the Lauer Sister acts and
233 I am using this word in the linguistic (referring to any psychotic disorder characterized by a
withdrawal from reality), rather than the medical sense (the dellusion that imaginary persons or beings
communicate with the patient inside her/his head). From a medical perspective, the Lauer Sister puppets
capture an artistic impression not of Schizophrenia but Multiple Personality Disorder.
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