On Stage Alone: Soloists and the Modern Dance Canon

FIVE: Exotica and Ethereality: The Solo Art of Maud Allan

119 five Exotica and Ethereality The Solo Art of Maud Allan Julie Malnig In March 1908 a prominent British critic reported that The Vision of Salome, performed by the aesthetic dancer Maud Allan, “was so haunting a fascination that many people cannot keep away from it and return to the Palace to see it night after night.”1 Allan, the Canadian-born, San Francisco-bred “barefoot” dancer who performed in the mode of Isadora Duncan, had the London theatergoing public in thrall for a record-breaking 250 performances. In The Vision of Salome, her signature piece, Allan was a striking figure in beaded breastplates, strands of pearls hugging her bare waist, and a translucent skirt revealing her shapely thighs. She dared to plunge herself into a long-standing controversy over theatrical representations of this biblical figure who had become a symbol of female sexual excess and decadence. With The Vision of Salome, Allan (and her promoters) knew how to attract and keep her audiences. Throughout her repertory Allan moved between purity, chastity, and otherworldliness, on the one hand, and sexual provocation on the other. 120 In slipping in and out of several female cultural ideals of womanhood—the spritely nymph, chaste maiden, and so-called New Woman as well as the femme fatale—Allan led her audiences to question their assumptions about female sexuality and identity at a time when Victorian conventions of femininity were under assault. More than a cultural symbol, Allan became a participant in dialogues about women as expressed in the social, intellectual, and aesthetic practices of her day. In a kind of synchronistic relationship with her audiences, Allan embodied many of the beliefs and desires of spectators , who in turn projected them onto her. Generally in the Dance Studies literature, Maud Allan (1880–1956) has not been held in the same esteem as her better-known and more-documented competitors: Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and Loïe Fuller.2 RecentscholarshiponAllan ,though,particularlythatofAmyKoritzandJudith Walkowitz, makes clear that this trio was indeed a quartet and that Allan was aninfluentialmember.3 AllanwasofthefirstgenerationofAmericanwomen solo dancers who broke ranks with the corps de ballet and the lighthearted dance fare characteristic of vaudeville and musical theater dance to forge a new form of art dance. The reasons for Allan’s slide into obscurity, until recently, are several. For one, Allan was primarily popular in England and on the Continent; her British performances were widely reported on by the American press, but by the time she came to the United States in 1910, the so-called Salome craze was on the wane.4 Also, unlike the case with Duncan, we have rather limited visual and written documentation of Allan’s performances. Reviews and articles (and Allan’s own writings) provide a sense of the movements she employed but not how she structured dances or what movement qualities she exhibited.5 Perhaps another reason for the neglect is that Allan has been considered a Duncan imitator. Allan expanded on the movement vocabulary and style established by Duncan; one of the reasons she added Salome to her repertory, in fact, was to distinguish herself from Duncan and to increase her popularity . Unlike Duncan, though, Allan was more of a popularizer than an innovator . While Duncan performed primarily on elite concert stages, Allan made her mark in the popular theater, where she appealed to a broad range of audiences . Finally, Allan’s reputation clearly suffered after a bruising court case Julie Malnig 121 instigated by the conservative Parliament member Noël Pemberton-Billing, in 1918. Allan had appeared in a performance of playwright Oscar Wilde’s Salome produced by the theater impresario J. T. Grein. Although greeted successfully by the public, the production earned the scorn of PembertonBilling , who accused Allan and Grein of lewd acts in his right-wing newspaper the Vigilante. (The article, by Pemberton-Billings’s colleague Harold Spencer, appeared in February 1918 under the headline “The Cult of the Clitoris .” It alluded to published rumors about a German blacklist of several thousand “sexual perverts,” many of whom had attended her performance.) Allan sued for libel but lost. The publicity was damning though, as it brought to light Allan’s previously well-kept secret about her brother Theodore, who had been convicted for murder in 1898.6 The scandal hovered over Allan for the remainder of her life. Born in Toronto and raised in San Francisco, Allan, unlike some of...