missed butoh, wrote this
Thesis?
Oscar Wilde was a gay homosexual. He was the emblum of queer. What does Salome’s dance have to do with this man and his life? What does his play have to do with Maude Allen and her dance performance? The point is that there was a web of deceit built around gendered dance performance at this time. It functioned at once to entertain the people of the community, showcase the exotic and erotic, perpetrate desire, and harbor madness. By madness I mean the hysteric… The women, who is caught between her lived reality riddled with misogyny and suppression of desire as well as the imagined reality of action. The realm of the body, which manifested the internal, unspoken truths of desire, fear, anger, sex and violence. Salome perfectly crystallizes all of these themes, but more than that, the act of dance within the play is a mimetic gesture, perfectly suited to transpose these truths into the third reality of the stage. This dance functioned as the missing link for the female body to inhabit a third reality, which provided ample space to express and act according to deep provocations. As most women’s thoughts and feelings were being ignored and silenced an equal number of women’s bodies were being showcased and fetishized. The Dance of the Seven Veils becomes a forum or form in which the intersection of the impulses of women to manifest in action on the body. The vehicle of this manifestation was, of course, wrapped in spectacle. And it was the spectacle which masked the resistance seated at the core of the performance.
The third reality of the body in performance exists in a limnal space. It fills a separate time, which lies outside the quotidian world. Victor Turner describes the limnal space as that which lies betwixt and between, or a threshold. The body in performance is necessarily occupying this space, which is designated as separate from the everyday world in which women were not allowed to act and express themselves freely. Moreover, Turner believes that this performative realm lies within the subjunctive mood, so it provides us with the chance to see into the future and project possibility of change. In the story of Salome, a young “hysteric” woman forces a king to act on her behalf. She uses her body in performance to perpetrate and execution of a male prophet even the king can not kill. Salome presents the possibility of complete overthrow of patriarchal order, but only through the use of the female body in performance, through dance. Because of these circumstances surrounding performance, the performance of women throughout history has been met with mixed fear, loathing, and desire. It is all of these emotions and vibrations which create the spectacle of the hysteric. And it is the body of the hysteric, on stage, in performance, which structured the response of audiences of Wilde’s Salome and Maude Allen and allowed them to simultaneously fear and desire the female body and the feminine reality, which was generally ignored. The work of these performances was to enact and present physicic and corporeal truths of suffering denied by the quotidian world.