Modernism and the Choreographic Imagination: Salomeв (Tm)S Dance After 1890, Girdwood Megan

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.

Loie 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-siecle myth, showing how the ephemeral stuff of dance became a constitutive element of the modernist imagination during this period.