This final chapter asks what became of the veiled woman-in-movement as Salome’s popularity waned and the period of canonical modernism drew to a close. Briefly discussing Salome’s mid-twentieth-century afterlives in Martha Graham’s Herodiade (1944) and Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), this epilogue primarily traces references to Salome across the work of Samuel Beckett. Scattered and disparate though they may be, these traces point to Beckett’s deeper absorption of this paradigmatic modernist dance as a ‘metamorphic phantom’ that he would harness to the demands of his own theatre. If his late nineteenth and early twentieth-century precursors imagined the dancer to be ‘invisible’ beneath her veils, Beckett at once deconstructed and paradoxically re-embodied this dancer in his abstract stage choreographies, organising his works around dramatically reduced gestures and forms of movement. Beckett’s work provides us with one way of recovering the often-underplayed continuities between late nineteenth-century Symbolism and modernist theatre at its most abstract, showing how the forms associated with Salome’s dance were adopted and transformed in the second half of the twentieth century.
The lively gesture; antiquity has permitted it.
—Aby Warburg
On 15 March 1914, the Washington Post printed an article by an American academic, Professor David Edgar Rice of Columbia University, who was anxious to alert readers to an alarming rise in cases of adultery and divorce involving dancers: women whose profession seemed to signal their moral disrepute....
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