Epilogue

Abstract

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.