Anyone wanting a window into the vibrant tradition of Baby Dolls in New Orleans must watch You Can’t Stop Spirit, a short documentary directed and produced by Vashni Korin. The film will be screened at the New Orleans Film Festival as part of a program titled “We Outside,” which includes three other shorts on political protests in Puerto Rico, Junkanoo parades in the Bahamas and Congolese wedding traditions. Both the in-person and virtual screenings will be free.
Vashni Korin
The in-person event is November 13, 8:45 p.m., at The Broadside, 600 N. Broad Street. The shorts are also available as part of the film festival’s virtual cinema screenings from November 5 to 21.
You Can’t Stop Spirit is a documentary that takes on the the artistic appearance of a music video. Music and interview segments are tightly integrated with strong visuals. The film starts with an introduction to New Orleans and the Black masking and music traditions of Mardi Gras, not just the Baby Dolls but also Mardi Gras Indians and the Northside Skull and Bones Gang, along with second line parades and voudou practices.
An aerial shot brings the viewer into Congo Square where a traditional Sunday dance and drumming ceremony is underway. Soon the strong voices of Cinnamon Black (Voodoo Baby Doll Queen), Shannon Paxton (Queen Chocolate), and Kadrell Batiste (Renegade Rebel Baby Doll) are integrated into the scene, each of them celebrating why they choose to be Baby Dolls. “I am a queen every day when I put this dress on!” says Alana Harris of the Creole Belles. “I mask because it gives me energy, it gives me life. You are like a diva in your community.”
The film focuses on the celebration of the Baby Dolls on the streets, the creation of the women’s costumes, and stunning fashion shoots of the groups at the Marigny Opera House. Baby Dolls, who annually appear on Mardi Gras, wear satin dresses accessorized with elaborately decorated parasols and gloves, and often carry baby bottles. The Baby Doll tradition had been a fairly underground tradition in New Orleans for decades but has recently become much more visible due to the research of historian Kim Vaz-Deville, a professor at Xavier University.
Vaz-Deville authored the groundbreaking book The “Baby Dolls”: Breaking the Race and Gender Barriers of the New Orleans Mardi Gras Traditions (2013) and edited the anthology Walking Raddy: The Baby Dolls of New Orleans (2018). She also curated the Louisiana State Museum’s 2013 exhibition “They Call me Baby Doll: A Mardi Gras Tradition” and co-curated “Mystery in Motion: African American Masking and Spirituality in Mardi Gras,” on view at the Presbytere through November 28.
Shannon Paxton of the Wild Tchoupitoulas Baby Dolls along with Cagney Goodly and Leslie Dedmond, photo by DP Calvin Blue Jr.
The Baby Doll tradition is thriving. There are currently about a dozen Baby Doll groups in New Orleans. While that is small in comparison to the more than forty Mardi Gras Indian tribes, the Baby Dolls presence in the city is on the increase, more young women are joining, and they are invited to participate in more events outside Carnival or St. Joseph’s Day, when they traditionally appear.
You Can’t Stop Spirit is the first film by Vashni Korin, a young filmmaker from New York who attended Xavier University in New Orleans and now works in the film industry in Los Angeles. At Xavier, Korin was pursuing a journalism degree when a documentary film class in her senior year led to her become involved in a student film project about Baby Dolls under the guidance of Dr. Vaz-Deville and Dr. Tia Smith. The film changed Korin’s career focus.
“It turned on a light in me, and overtime I began to examine why,” said Korin. “This was my first look at women that embodied inner power and agency within their community, unapologetically. They were rebellious and bucked the system of what and how a woman should be. I loved that.”
After finishing school, Korin worked in New Orleans and directed a music video for the Hot 8 Brass Band. Her love for Baby Dolls led her to create an artistic piece that pays homage to New Orleans and the women who she found inspiring. “I wanted to do an artistic film from my point of view,” she said.
Constance Matthews, photo by Calvin Blue Jr.
Korin also wanted to focus on the renegade spirit of the Baby Doll tradition. “There’s Shannon Paxton of the Wild Tchoupitoulas Baby Dolls,” said Korin. “I love her so much, she is so honest, so unapologetic and free spirited. She’s not concerned about what others think and to me that’s completely inspiring. She’s taught me life lessons that I couldn’t extract from any text.”
Korin is a fan of free jazz and spiritual jazz and she wanted the voices recorded in the interviews to be in conversation with the music of the soundtrack. She sought out a young jazz artist from Chicago, Angel Bat Dawid, to compose for the film and used other jazz pieces to create a distinct soundscape.
You Can’t Stop Spirit has been shown at several other film festivals, including Third Horizon, Caribbean Tales International, Camden International and the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival. As Cinnamon Black calls out in the film, “You can’t stop spirit. Spirit doesn’t have a name and neither does feeling. For what is real, is!”
Tickets for both the in-person and virtual screenings of the New Orleans Film Festival, visit here.
