Morcashani: Playing with Race and Gender on the Music Hall Stage

A short documentary film exploring the life and performance of Josephine Morcashani, a star performer who has since fallen into obscurity.

About the project

This project explores the life and performance of Josephine Morcashani, a star performer from the turn of the twentieth century who has now fallen into obscurity. Morcashani was a black singer and dancer from London who wowed audiences across Europe and further afield with performances that crossed gender boundaries and played with racial stereotypes, shapeshifting by appropriating and adapting popular musical forms as well as those specifically associated with African Americans of the day. By recovering the lost story of this celebrity, we hope to better understand the challenges and opportunities presented to black women who sought success on the music hall stage. How Morcashani navigated those challenges and seized opportunities, the choices and sacrifices she made, offer lessons relevant to this today as we continue to grapple with structures of sexism and racism in popular entertainment.

This is the continuation of a project that first began in 2021, producing a 10-15 minute documentary on the life of Morcashani. It draws on Dr Bowersox’s own historical research as well as a range of historical artifacts provided by Morcashani’s descendants, who have graciously shared their family archive, in addition to a one-of-a-kind audio recording of her singing only recently discovered by a German collector. The project is seeking at least one, if not two, interlocutors from outside academia, ideally entertainers and musicians themselves. Working with such creatives will allow for greater reflection on the relevance of a historical figure like Morcashani for understanding the operations and politics of popular culture in the present, the experience of playful performance that she embodied, and the material and structural challenges of working within an industry that profits from black inheritance despite not always giving credit and resources where they are due. Once complete, the documentary will be hosted by UCL and be freely available to view online to facilitate the broadest possible access to the work.

Our latest collaboration with filmmaker Graham Riach explores the life of Josephine Morcashani (1870-1929), a Black British music hall star known across Europe as a glamorous cross-dressing diva. We hear tales of brandishing pistols, a flight from wartime Berlin, and discover in the archives the only known recording of Morcashani’s voice.
 
‘Hearing Ghosts: The Life & Times of Josephine Morcashani’ traces the life of a major star of the music hall stage in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Through that story it reflects on the conditions of performance for Black British artists, both then and now. The video features researcher Jeff Bowersox and performer Helen McDonald, and investigates Morcashani’s acts of self-creation, the lengths she was willing to go to in order to succeed, and the politics of preserving the archives of black performers.
 
The film was created by filmmaker Graham Riach in collaboration with Jeff Bowersox and the UCL European Institute's Claudia Sternberg. Many thanks to Rainer Lotz the use of his recording of Josephine Morcashani.

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By and with

• Dr Graham Riach is an academic and documentary filmmaker based in Oxford and Brussels. As an academic, he specialises in world literature, with a particular interest in questions of form and aesthetics. As a filmmaker, he specialises in working with academics to tell the story of their research in words, images, and sound.
• Dr Jeff Bowersox is an Associate Professor of German History at UCL, where he teaches and researches German colonial history, Black European studies, and the history of toys. He is currently working on a book following Black stage entertainers across central Europe before the jazz age. Jeff is also the managing editor of blackcentraleurope.com, a web resource offering 1,000 years of Black histories in the German-speaking lands. Also check out his recent academic article on racial and ethnic difference in Playmobil toys.
• Helen McDonald is an activist singer and storyteller, poet and performer.