Ebook: Modernism and the Choreographic Imagination: Salome’s Dance after 1890

An account of Salome’s dance and its centrality within modernist performance

• Offers a new account of the Salome myth that underlines its centrality to modernist performance across different genres and forms, including drama, dance, and silent film
• Draws on interdisciplinary methodologies from literary and performance studies to illustrate the importance of dance to modernist writing about Salome, providing a set of both conceptual and historical co-ordinates within modernism more broadly
• Builds a conceptual framework drawing on the writings of Aby Warburg, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jacques Rancière in order to analyse key ‘scenes’ and sites of performance in the genealogy of this particular choreographic theme
• Engages in fresh readings of plays by canonical playwrights – Wilde, Yeats, Beckett – alongside the work of lesser-known performers and filmmakers in order to destabilise the gendered and aesthetic hierarchies often germane to literary histories of the period

This book explores Salome’s quintessential veiled dance through readings of fictional and poetic texts, dramatic productions, dance performances and silent films, arguing for the central place of this dancer – and her many interpreters – to the wider formal and aesthetic contours of modernism.

Loïe Fuller, Maud Allan, Oscar Wilde, Ida Rubinstein, Alla Nazimova, Djuna Barnes, Germaine Dulac, Edward Gordon Craig, W. B. Yeats, Ninette de Valois and Samuel Beckett are foregrounded for their innovative engagements with this paradigmatic fin-de-siècle myth, showing how the ephemeral stuff of dance became a constitutive element of the modernist imagination during this period.