Subverting Orientalism: Translating Maud Allan's "Vision of Salome"

BACKGROUND INFO

For my "alternative translations" assignment, I chose to focus on Maud Allan's Vision of Salome.  I initially ran across references to Maud Allan during our Cabaret Travels research (see my written assignment #2) on German kabarett, where the phenomenon of naked dancing was supposedly inspired by Allan's infamous Salome piece.  In that context, I was originally interested in how Orientalist embodiments of the Other by white western women gave rise to alternative possibilities for performing gender and sexuality.  Maud Allan was a white female Canadian-born, California-raised dancer whose dance career took off in Germany.  She was all the rage for a couple of years around 1908 in London, where she gave 250 performances of the Vision of Salome at the Palace Theatre.  She was the major figure in a complicated court case, in which she charged Noel Pemberton-Billings, a right-wing MP and publisher of The Vigilante newspaper, of libel for associating her name with an article titled, "The Cult of the Clitoris."  This article claimed that there was a black book containing the names of 47,000 British homosexuals who were being blackmailed by the Germans to undermine the British government.  (Pemberton-Billings was found not guilty, using a defense strategy that essentially flipped the case to put Allan and her choreography on trial.)  Allan was a complex figure: anti-suffrage despite being an unmarried, financially independent woman; whose longest romantic relationship was with her female secretary and lover, Verna Aldrich despite suing Pemberton-Billings for accusing her of being a lesbian; who performed sexuality through the guise of Orientalist spirituality.

In her article, "Dancing the Orient for England: Maud Allan's 'The Vision of Salome,'" Amy Koritz describes how the work toed a tricky line between titillating audiences with images of the erotic, exotic Eastern femme fatale and performing Victorian propriety for critics (Koritz 1994).  Koritz includes several excerpts of reviews, which, while varied in their assessment of the work's aesthetic quality, comment on her "lady-like performance" (74) "[that] is absolutely without the slightest suggestion of the vulgarities familiar to the tourists in Cairo and Tangier" (Koritz 1994: 70).  Allan's own choreographic intention, as documented in her 1908 publication, My Life and Dancing, portrays Salome as a relatively innocent girl, subject to obedience to her vengeful mother; her experience pushes her over the cusp of womanhood as she becomes drunk on power and enamored of John the Baptist, whose beheading she has caused (Allan 1908: 120-8).  As such, audience (vs. critical) reception of the work as overtly sexually titillating seems to go against Allan's choreographic intentions.

CREATIVE ASSIGNMENT
For my dance-text, I was drawn to a piece of publicity circulated by Alfred Butt, the manager of the Palace Theatre (Koritz 1994: 69).  I asked us to find a way to subvert the writing's intention; this subversion could be informed by the complicated history and politics surrounding Maud Allan and The Vision of Salome, or simply by the choreographer's own predilections and/or lived experience.

"The pink pearls slip amorously about her bosom and throat as she moves, while the long strand of pearls that floats from the belt about her waist floats languorously apart from her smooth hips.  The desire that flames from her eyes and bursts in hot flames from her scarlet mouth infects the very air with the madness of passion.  Swaying like a white witch with yearning hands and arms that plead, Miss Allan is such a delicious embodiment of lust that she might win forgiveness with the sins of such wonderful flesh.  As Herod catches the fire, so Salome dances even as a Bacchante, twisting her body like a silver snake eager for its prey, panting hot with passion, the fires of her eyes scorching like a living furnace"(cited by Buonaventura 2004: 34).

Here are our responses (password for all is "allan"):

Cyn translates Maud Allan from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.

Shyamala translates Maud Allan from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.

Sandra translates Maud Allan from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.

Meena translates Maud Allan from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.
I was struck by the different strategies used to subvert the eroticized, feminized Orientalism in the studies.  Shyamala converted the sensual into the grotesque; Sandra queered the text by positioning herself as a female desiring spectator; Meena "neutralized" the words through dryness and objectivity (literally working with objects); while I performed an aggressive, fighting masculinity inspired by Koritz's description of the English Morris dance, the polar opposite of the feminized East:

"It is, in spirit, the organized, traditional expression of virility, sound health and animal spirits.  It smacks of cudgel-play, of quarterstaff, of wrestling, of honest fisticuffs.  There is nothing sinuous in it, nothing dreamy; nothing whatever is left to the imagination....It is the dance of folk who are slow to anger, but of great obstinacy -- forthright of act and speech: to watch it in its thumping sturdiness is to hold such things as poniards and stilettos, the swordsman with the domino, the man who stabs in the back -- as unimaginable things.  The Morris Dance, in short, is a perfect expression in rhythm and movement of the English character."  (Cecil Sharp, in Flitch's Modern Dancing and Dancers, quoted by Koritz 1994: 72).

WRITTEN REFERENCES
Allan, Maud.  1908.  My Life and Dancing.  London: Everett and Company.  https://archive.org/details/mylifedancing00allaiala

Bland, Lucy.  1998.  "Trial by Sexology?: Maud Allan, Salome and the 'Cult of the Clitoris' Case."  In Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires, eds. Lucy Bland, Laura Doan.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 183-97.

Buonaventura, Wendy.  2003.  Something in the Way She Moves: Dancing Women from Salome to Madonna.  Cambridge: Da Capo Press.

Koritz, Amy.  1994.  "Dancing the Orient for England: Maud Allan's 'The Vision of Salome.'"  Theatre Journal 46 (1): 63-78.

IMAGE
http://reflectionsinverse.blogspot.com/2013/07/maude-allan-salome-dancer-who-caused.html

Queering Abhinaya Assignment 4: Translations of Teachings (Shyamala and All)

I chose some text from a padam called Velavare, that I had learned from Medha Yodh.  However, the English versions of the poem were not translated poetically, but rather in a literal word for word fashion that was useful for learning the dance, but somehow did not inspire me to make interesting interpretations of it.  It seemed more fruitful to translate my written dance notes of what Medha had taught me.  So it became more similar to Lionel Popkin's translations of Ruth St. Denis' instructions on how to do her dances then just a re-choreographing of the text.  Each of us did our own interpretation of the same words/descriptions as seen below. 

passwords for all are: medha

Shy translates Medha from Post Natyam Collective on Vimeo.

Meena translates Medha from Post Natyam Collective on Vimeo.

Sandra translates Medha from Post Natyam Collective on Vimeo.

Cynthia translates Medha from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.

Queering Abhinaya Assignment #4: alternative translations

Inspired by one of Lionel Popkins’ approaches to his full length trio “Ruth Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” I am interested in translating texts describing dance into alternative movement interpretations than the original intention.  In my memory of the piece, Lionel tells the audience that he is using Ruth's dance directions of her work quite loosely, in a similar manner to how she treated the dances from the multiple cultures that she represented/appropriated in her work.  
 

As we recently discussed in an in person session, abhinaya  traditionally interprets texts, and literally means to “carry across” (like the word translation).   As we are queering abhinaya, I invite us to find alternative interpretations that may open up, subvert, or even create contrary interpretations to the original text and dance that the text was written about.

So, find a text that describes or gives directions for how to do a dance.  Then create your own alternate version of the dance that relates to the text but somehow explodes the expectations of your chosen text.  For example, if the text says “turn”, there may be many ways to turn the body, or turn the perspective, or turn a body part, or to say “turn” in various languages, or to get someone else to turn etc.

Cyn's Assignment #3: triple weave

For my assignment, I decided to do a textual choreography that investigates (my) Taiwanese aboriginal and Chinese colonizer heritage and histories.   The piece uses three streams of text: the left column is by Atayal (泰雅/Taiya) poet Walis Nokan, the middle column are personal musings/memories written by myself, and the right column consists of Qing Dynasty colonial travel writings from the 1600s, sourced from Emma Teng's Taiwan's Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683-1895.  For ease of reading, click on each page for a larger image.