Gilded Serpent presents...

Dreaming of the East


Orientalism in Early Modern Dance

by Iana Komarnytska
posted May 1, 2013

Introduction

As a belly dancer and a modern dance student at York University, my attention was captured by the fact that a number of early modern dancers performed variations on Oriental themes. I became interested in how they interpreted the Orient through their modern dance technique, and how they represented the Orient in their choreographies, since their performances could have been loosely associated with actual Middle-Eastern dances.

Before starting this discussion, it is important to understand the conditions and social environment of the early twentieth century that might have influenced a dancers decision to use Oriental themes. At the turn of the century, dance was generally regarded as vaudeville or circus entertainment, not as a serious art. It was a conservative era. Dance as a career was not a respectable profession in general, especially for women, because it was considered improper for women to exhibit themselves in public, especially in dance costumes. However, the beginning of feminist emancipation brought some freedom to women in the society. This trend was fused with a femme fatale image, popular from the nineteenth century, and refreshed by the premiere of Oscar Wilde‘s play "Salome" in 1896 (and the following Salomania).

After Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, the Middle-East became a popular place to visit for travelers from Europe. As a result, their writings inspired the imagination of Western readers.

Unfortunately it rarely reflected the true reality of the Orient, but presented what the authors wished to see as the Orient.

Such a constructed Orient can be understood through the European colonial domination over the Orient during that period, and later through Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism and Otherness.

Edward Said defines Orientalism as "the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it; ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restricting, and having authority over the Orient". Additionally, Said describes the Orient by introducing the term "European imaginative geography", the so called theatrical stage on which Westerners could explore their own hidden fantasies or compressed desires by projecting them onto the others, or Orientals. From a dance perspective, projecting a fantasy from their own alternative reality onto the Orient, allowed dance to be presented to a Western audience of the early twentieth century, while the status of traditional Western cultural and social norms remained intact.

Loie Fuller (1862-1928)

Loie Fuller was one of the first dancers who referred to Oriental themes. In 1895, she performed her first version of "Salome", a year before the premiere Salome detail from painting by Gustave Moreauof Oscar Wilde’s play, and more than ten years before Maud Allan‘s "The Vision of Salome". In 1907 she presented her second sketch on Salome. Compared to the first one, it was received by most critics as Wilde’s Salome dance variation.

As Tony Bentlay acknowledges in her book: "Loie Fuller has a special place in the Salome canon for having presented one of the first versions of the story". Fuller’s 1895 "Salome" production is remarkable because of several features. Loie Fuller ignored the popular Salome image of the femme fatale. In one of her interviews translated and quoted in Rhonda K Garelick‘s book, Fuller describes her Salome as "an innocent child who dances before Herod at the instigation of her mother. Salome does not ask for the head of John the Baptist and when it is delivered to her she falls to the ground in fright". Garelick argues that Fuller "insisted not only on Salome’s sexual purity, but also on her proximity to Christianity and, implicitly, on her distance from the Orient.” To support this idea Garelick analyzed the Gustave Moreau’s paintings which inspired Fuller’s costume designs. In contrast to the lotuses in Moreau’s painting, which, according to Garelick, were believed to be Oriental flowers with erotic overtones, Fuller decorated her costume with white roses. White roses belong to the iconography of the Christian tradition. They are considered to be the chosen flowers of the Virgin Mary. In this way, Loie Fuller transformed "the most famous femme fatale in history" into a Christian martyr. (see more on this subject Garelick 95-101).

Before Wilde’s play in 1896, the Salome story was associated with the Biblical character.

In both the 1895 and 1907 sketches, the theme of Salome serves Fuller merely as a frame for a variety of pantomime dances, but not as a central focus. In both productions, she danced representations of a storm and a dance of the Dead Sea. These dances from the first Salome," La Dance du feu" and "Le Lys", were later performed as independent pieces. For the 1907 version, Fuller used a completely different Salome image, not a biblical image, but a femme fatale, and focused more on the technical and electrical aspects of the dance spectacle.

Maud Allan (1873-1956)

Maud Allan, another North American dancer, is considered the most famous Salome dancer in a dance history. She started her dance career at the age of twenty seven with no previous dance training. She conquered Europe with "The Vision of Salome" from 1906 to 1908.

Comparing Maud Allan’s piece to Loie Fuller’s first version of Salome, Felix Cherniavsky argues that Maud Allan’s twenty-one minute version followed the original story line closely. He does not take into consideration that the original story lines of Maud Allan’s and Loie Fuller’s sketches were completely different. While Fuller based her dancing on the biblical story, Maud Allan was inspired by Wilde’s play from the very beginning.

Even though it was based on Wilde’s play, Maud Allan’s Salome had her personal interpretation. The main part of the dance starts after the seductive "Dance of Seven Veils" is finished. "The Vision of Salome" is not a reproduction of a dance given before Herod, but is the vision of Salome after it is finished, a retrospective.

The dancer represents Salome as a child accustomed to Oriental luxury who is transformed through the dance into a woman who realizes her superior female powers and wishes to be conquered by sexual desire. Having never traveled to the East, it is likely that Maud Allan, consciously or unconsciously, represented the Western women’s desires in a suppressed conservative Victorian society, rather than the dance of an Oriental princess.

The fact that she explores the theme of female sexuality through the Oriental one, is an example of Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism. It confirms that the Orient was a fabricated theatrical stage for Europeans on which they could project their desires without the fear of being judged unacceptable. Even the statement that Western women could understand and represent the essence of the East itself reaffirmed the West’s superiority based on the political and cultural colonialism of the period. It is interesting to compare how that audience perceived Maud Allan’s performances in comparison to traditional Middle-Eastern dance shows. In The Academy (21 March 1908) we find a review titled "Miss Maud Allan’s Salome Dance" in which the author states: "While authentic Eastern dancing calls attention to the sexualized body of the dancer, making it ugly, Allan’s version is Eastern but beautiful ". That supports the popular idea of that time, that authentic Eastern art, including dance, should be transformed and adopted according to Western aesthetic principles in order to be perceived as a high art.

Maud Allan’s dancing could not be described as authentically Eastern as it does not have any specific location. Amy Koritz argues in her article that: "Her [Maud’s] Salome was not Egyptian, Algerian or Syrian, but Eastern in a vague, homogenizing sense of the word. While Westerners might have national identities, the East, like Women, is characterized by eternal qualities shared by all its inhabitants". In this context "The Vision of Salome" is a classic dance example of Said’s idea of "European imaginary geography.”

Maud Allen

Ruth St. Denis (1879-1968)

Ruth St. Denis, an American dancer, is the most notable modern dance pioneer who introduced Eastern art to Western modern dance. She began her career as an actress performing small dancing roles from time to time in different vaudeville shows. In 1904, St. Denis launched her solo dance career. Later, with her husband Ted Shawn, she established a dance school, Denishawn, and they became famous for their numerous Oriental productions. A number of their students became well-known dance artists of the twentieth century, including Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Lillian Powell, Evan-Burrows Fontaine, and Charles Weidman.

a cigarette posterThe starting point of Ruth St. Denis’s dancing career was an occasion during a tour in 1904. The following is a description from her autobiography. "We have reached Buffalo on our way west with the Dubarry company. … [Pat and I] went to a drugstore to get a soda. We were laughing as usual over some joke, and sipping our sodas, when my eyes lifted above the fountain and I saw a cigarette poster of Egyptian Deities”. From then on she was intrigued by everything Oriental, with almost a scholarly approach. However, she never tried to reproduce or imitate authentic Eastern dances in her productions.

The central idea for her was the mood. She suggests that the dance artist, including the musician, should never "steep themselves in the environment they wish to represent".

Being a highly spiritual person, and yet influenced by the vaudeville environment, Ruth St. Denis’ productions successfully combined these contrasting concepts. The hypersexualized image of Orientals was represented by Ruth St. Denis as a highly spiritual symbol in all her Oriental productions and dances. As Philip Hale wrote in Herald Magazine: "Miss St. Denis has never been in the East. Perhaps for this reason her art is the more Oriental, for the imaginative one, dreaming at home, is the most observing and receptive traveler. There is a spirit in this creative girl that saves her individuality from being tampered with by lesser minds".

Ruth St. Denis’ interpretations of Indian and Egyptian dances often borrowed common images and used similar movement vocabulary. For instance, Suzanne Shelton in her analysis of Egypta’s scenes concludes:

Her lively dance in the Egyptian banquet hall recalled the "Rektah" dance of Radha and The Nautch, and the opening moments of "The Mystery of Isis" duplicated the priestly processional from Radha. For "The Invocation to the Nile" St. Denis used the arm ripples of Incense, and she borrowed the flower chains from Radha’s "Dance of Smell." The source of her sun-worship ritual which opened the "Dance of Day" may have been a Genevieve Stebbins drill which instructed the Delsarte practitioner to [perform a certain sequence of movements]. The drill was part of Stebbins’ Eastern Temple Drill, adapted from various forms of oriental worship.

Conclusion

Loie Fuller, Maud Allan and Ruth St. Denis never presented their dances as authentically Eastern. They established themselves as Oriental interpretive dancers, and that might have been one of the key factors to their successful careers in early twentieth century. It is interesting to note that all three of them were originally from North America, but they received their most enthusiastic recognition in Europe.

While there may be several explanations for such a phenomenon, I think it has its roots in Edward Said’s term "European imaginative geography". The Oriental interpretive dances at the turn of the twentieth century might have been less accepted in North America due to the vigorous social campaign against Little Egypt and other hootchy-kootchy performers of that period. Europe seemed more open to Oriental themes, and this might be because several Eastern countries were under its direct imperial influence. In its turn, because it was under colonial rule, the Orient was speechless and subject to representation and interpretation in European imagination in any way they wished to see it.

Iana by Paul Yang

Bibliography:
  • Allan, Maud. My life and dancing. London : Everett, 1908.
  • Bentley, Toni. Sisters of Salome. New Haven : Yale University Press, 2002.
  • Buonaventura, Wendy. Serpent of the Nile: women and dance in the Arab world. Northampton, Mass.: Interlink Books, 2010.
  • Caddy, Davinia. "Variations on the Dance of the Seven Veils" in Cambridge Opera Journal by Cambridge University Press, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Mar., 2005), pp. 37-58.
  • Cherniavsky, Felix. Maud Allan and Her Art. Toronto, ON: Dance Collection Danse Press, 1998.
  • Cherniavsky, Felix. The Salome dancer: the life and times of Maud Allan. Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1991.
  • Desmond, Jane. "Dancing out the Difference: Cultural Imperialism and Ruth St. Denis’s "Radha" of 1906" in Signs by The University of Chicago Press. Vol. 17, No. 1, Autumn, 1991, pp. 28-49.
  • Fuller, Loie. Fifteen years of a dancer’s life: with some account of her distinguished friends. New York: Dance Horizons, 1976.
  • Garelick, Rhonda K.. Electric Salome: Loie Fuller’s performance of modernism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.
  • Koritz, Amy. "Dancing the Orient for England: Maud Allan’s "The Vision of Salome" in Theatre Journal. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Vol. 46, No 1 (Mar., 1994), pp. 63-78.
  • Leoni, Stefano A.E. "Western Middle-East Music Imagery in the Face of Napoleon’s Enterprise in Egypt: From Mere Eurocentric Exoticism, to Very Organized Orientalistic Ears" in Croatian Musicological Society: International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music. Vol. 38, No 2 (December 2007), pp. 171-196.
  • Lewis, Reina. Gendering orientalism: race, femininity and representation. New York, NY: Routledge, 1996.
  • Lewis, Reina. Rethinking orientalism: women, travel, and the Ottoman harem. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004.
  • MacKenzie, John M. Orientalism: history, theory, and the arts. New York: Manchester University Press ; 1995.
  • Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York : Vintage Books, 1979.
  • Schlundt, Christina L.. "Into the Mystic with Miss Ruth" in Dance Perspectives, no. 46 (Summer 1971).
  • Shelton, Suzanne. Divine Dancer. A Biography of Ruth St. Denis. Doubleday & Company, Inc. Garden City, New York, 1981.
  • St. Denis, Ruth. Ruth St. Denis, an unfinished life: an autobiography. Brooklyn: [Dance Horizons], 1969.

Resources:

 

use the comment box

Have a comment? Use or comment section at the bottom of this page or Send us a letter!
Check the "Letters to the Editor" for other possible viewpoints!

Ready for more?

  • The Great American Belly Dance Veil Routine
    After having said all that, I must add that American style Oriental/Belly dance is a distinctive style composed of creative elements that are simply outstanding.
  • Serena Wilson (1933-2007) A Student of Ruth St. Denis, Part 1: Childhood
    Serene Blake was born in the Bronx on Aug. 8, 1933 into a Vaudeville family of performers called Blake & Blake. Her mother sang and her father played the banjo. Her childhood and adolescent years intersected with the Vaudeville stage, on which she often appeared with her parents in the 1930s.
  • Serena Wilson (1933-2007) A Student of Ruth St Denis, Part 2: Salome and Her Impact
    When suited to the context, she also had no hesitation in using the term belly dance as she considered the dance as evolving as an Americanized version based on primarily Middle Eastern as opposed to North African influences.
  • Serena Wilson (1933-2007) A Student of Ruth St Denis, Part 3: Serena’s Books
    Serena’s approach saw women as joyful, soft, and feminine. They were responsible for and in control of their sensuality and by extension their sexuality. The dancers were not encouraged to challenge men by their physical presence, but neither was their physical presence and personal desire controlled by men.
  • Who Died and Made You Queen of Dance?
    This lack of background basic performing experience would be unheard of and un-tolerated in any other dance form.
  • Get Over It! Soundbyte Bellydance Part Two
    Imagine yourself dancing inside of a huge plastic jug full of gel or detergent. Pull and push your movements through the viscosity with conviction!
  • Sound-Byte Bellydance, Part One: Evolution of Bellydance
    Through her clear description of what she wanted to learn, I was able to look inside our recent dance evolution and see what we dance teachers in the west have done to change Bellydance here in the U.S., how we have changed and modified it into something it never was in the lands of its origins.
  • Fantasy Bellydance, A New & Ancient Reality
    This trend has been growing steadily since I can remember, but caught fire recently, due to the instantaneous broadcasting of ideas and styles on the worldwide web and the proliferation and availability of video for this generation of dancers.
  • Painting Dance -Fabulous!
    I’d like dancers to understand how the ideas of color, texture, tone, shading, etc. can also apply to the art of speaking through movement.
  • Maud Allen: La Femme Fatale
    For, as the trial progressed, in effect, it became a trial of female sexuality. No respectable woman, it was claimed, could possibly take on the sadistic role of Salome unless she was a sadist in real life, and sadism was regarded at the time as a practice verging on the criminal.
  • Thoughts on Teaching Belly Dance, Responsibility, Flexibility, Experience, Knowledge, Leadership and More,
    Teaching belly dance can be extremely fulfilling and enjoyable. It’s lots of fun, and rewarding for the instructor and students alike. Unfortunately, in the belly dance community, perhaps more than in any other dance form, there will always be instructors who have absolutely no business teaching…at all.
  • Sold Out Mosaic of Dance in North Carolina!Raqs Layali 2013, Asheville, North Carolina,
    A few pics from the Raqs Layali show held March 22-24, 2013 in Asheville, North Carolina. The show was a joint effort between artistic director and principal dancer Mahsati Janan, principal dancers Lisa Zahiya and Teejei Brigham, and the BeBe Theater. We sold out every night! The goal of the show was to introduce people to many of the different styles that are a part of belly dance, from the folkloric roots to modern fusions.
  • Tale of the Rat, Beginning to Teach, Part One
    He warned me! My German speaking mentor and dance partner, Bert Balladine, told me one day that teaching would change my dance—not necessarily for the better.
  • The Third Annual San Jose Showcase for Gothic Dance, The Third Annual Lumen Obscura, April 5-6, 2013, Hoover Theater, San Jose, California
    Here are some of my favorites from both the Mayhem Matinee (afternoon show) and the Shiver N Shake Showcase (evening show). "Lumen Obscura is a NorCal annual Dark Fusion & Theatrical belly dance event that showcases some of the best in the genre". Produced by Deidre Anaid.
  • Old School Stardom Shines in a New Land, Tito’s First Visit to Taiwan
    No matter how much splendor and glamor is presented on stage, bellydance should always preserve the fundamental spirit and vision of the culture. So he prefers to create a homey atmosphere to remind the audience that dancing and singing at a family gathering is also an essential feature of Middle East performance arts.
  • Is the Bedlah from Hollywood?, The Origin of Our Costume
    As long as I can remember, the origins of the bedlah (the two piece costume of Middle Eastern dancers) has been widely controversial and debated among the artists of Raqs Sharqi (belly dance). The dance itself, along with the costume, has gone through many centuries of changes and name identifications in accord with period fashion as well as contact with outside influences.
  1. Renee Rothman

    May 24, 2013 - 10:05:24

    This is a beautifully written and solidly researched essay. Thank you! I also love the addition of websites where we can buy the literature cited. There are a few new references here I’m anxious to look up.

  2. Iana

    May 26, 2013 - 03:05:11

    Thank you for your lovely comment, Renee! I’m very glad that you enjoyed the article.
    And lots of credits to GildedSerpent editors who did an additional research and added all these links for the books!

  3. Sadira

    Jun 23, 2013 - 02:06:24

    Excellently researched and referenced!  I especially like the reference to Edward Said’s definations of Western interpretations of Oriental dance.  The fantasy and romance etc.
    Enjoyed! 

Sorry, comments for this entry are closed at this time.