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.
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
Buonaventura, Wendy. 2003. Something in the Way She Moves: Dancing Women from Salome to Madonna. Cambridge: Da Capo Press.
IMAGE
http://reflectionsinverse.blogspot.com/2013/07/maude-allan-salome-dancer-who-caused.html
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.
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
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