Felix Cherniavsky - Correspondence with Dance Collection Danse 2

Added 19th Mar 2022 by Beth Dobson (Archives and Programming Assistant, DCD) / Last update 19th Mar 2022

Maud Allan 1243a 51 2008-2-71.jpg
Maud Allan 1243a 51 2008-2-71.jpg
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Felix Cherniavsky - Correspondence with Dance Collection Danse 2

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Maud Allan Research Collection
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Amirahan Drama Strude . April 1993 154 REVIEWS THE SALOME DANCER 155 Felix Cherniavsky , The Salome Dancer ( Toronto : McClelland and Stewart , 1991 ) Canadian - born Maud Allan's deeply personal art flowered in the first decade of this century and has had to wait till the last to be authoritatively chronicled . Conceived initially as avant - garde dance , and developed through a series of experimental appearances in Germany , it made her an international star only when it was transferred during her London seasons of 1908-10 to the ambiguous world of vaudeville . The response to these seasons was strikingly divided . Publicity directed at male theatregoers stressed the sexual allure of a performer who by the standards of the time had a great deal of her body on display : Herbert Read recalled her as ' the Marilyn Monroe of my youth ' . Women , on the other hand , seem to have found her performances empowering in ways which deserve to be more fully explored than they are in this book . Off - stage she was welcomed in feminist and lesbian circles , though she also had male lovers . Part of her attractiveness to Edwardian women seems to have been a fluidity of movement which was of a different nature , because less minutely programmed , than that of professional ballerinas . They were also more drawn to the joyful ' Spring Song ' than the torrid ' Salome ' , in which , as Diana Cooper vividly remembered , she was all but naked and had St John's head on a plate and kissed his waxen mouth ' . Needless to say the piece was routinely denounced and several times banned . Historically Allan's place is in a tradition of ' classical ' or ' free form ' dance that originated with her fellow North Americans , Isadora Duncan , Loie Fuller and Ruth Saint - Denis . Younger than these , Allan also claimed an originality that her rivals and some reviewers were quick to question . ( She had made some contact with Duncan and worked in France for a time with Fuller's company . ) Cherniavsky records her as naming Greek vase - painting as a source of her style , but does not suggest any particular illustrations that may have been used : in any case he is also wisely convinced that little she said about her career is to be trusted . Her favourite pose for photographs with hands extended upwards seems more Egyptian than Greek . To an Australian there is an irresistible suggestion of the pastoral world of Sid Long's and Norman Lindsay's Arcadian landscapes . Perhaps they saw her . Certainly there can not have been much technique in the conventional sense : Allan had no formal training as a dancer and did not appear professionally as one until she was thirty . Her earlier training had been as a concert pianist , and reviewers stress an astonishing ability to translate musical nuance into physical movement . The world of her student years in Germany , as Chemiavsky presents it , has much in common with that of the piano students in Henry Handel Richardson's Maurice Guest . It is possible that her real gift , if professional barriers had not forbidden its development , might have been that of an orchestral conductor ( a self - confessed ambition ) : as it was she had to submit to having her costume vetted for indecency by Gustav Mahler before appearances in Vienna . Accounts of her performances stress the expressiveness of her hands . She was also an irrepressible mime . We are told of an early occasion when she embarrassed friends by performing a spontaneous ' Chinese dance in the main street of a Thuringian village . Otherwise Allan's success seems to have relied strongly on what Nellie Stewart liked to call ‘ magnetism ' and on her ability to articulate powerful but till then unexpressed cultural and sexual energies . Once her cultural moment had passed , much of the magnetism seems to have gone with it , though not the arrogance that sustained her through two more decades of a career which only rarely regained the peaks of her 1908-10 seasons . Her popularity in Britain was ended in 1918 by an unsuccessful libel suit against a muck - raking politician who had alleged that hers was one of 47,000 names in a black book ' of sexually depraved persons which was being used for purposes of blackmail by the King of Albania . One must agree with Chemniavsky that this was not one of the finer moments of British justice . The crucial evidence against Maud's moral character seems to have been that she understood the meaning of the word clitoris . Her 1914 tour of Australia , marred by ill - health and a leg injury , drew a revealingly varied range of responses . First - night audiences in the major cities were respectful , but miners in Kalgoorlie interpolated shouts of ' Open up yer legs more darlin ' and ' Get down on yer back again , Maudie ' . She was unfortunate in being preceded not only by a local clone , billed as “ the Australian Maud Allan ' , but a devastating burlesque : Fred Bluett's Tivoli version of the Salome dance , with a sheep's head substituting for John's , had been performed as early as 1909 , being directed at the clone not the original . The Salome Dancer is to be welcomed for its sympathetic , carefully researched outline of a historically important career , but will disappoint readers looking for technical descriptions of Allan's creations , as well as those seeking adventurous cultural and psychological interpretations . Although Nietzsche and decadence are invoked , there is little sense in Cherniavsky's pages of dance as a force in intellectual life or as a way of enacting ideology . For this one needs to turn to Frank Kermode's The Sense of an Ending and Elaine Showalter's Sexual Anarchy : Gender and Culture at the Fin de siècle ( which contains a stunning photo of Maud at her most Egyptian ) . Cherniavsky reductively attributes both her switch from pianism to dance and her many personal failings to the effect on her of her brother Theo's execution in 1898 for the mutilation murder of two young women from a Baptist church choir . But Allan was an adult living in Germany by the time of Theo's arrest and certainly capable of detachment . A diary entry of the period reads : God save all of us - protect us from the climax that seems upon us . Bring forth some proof- before it is too late that will bring Theo back to us . O Heavenly Father have mercy . Cleaned skates , practised . Rather than being an exorcism of her brother's crime , the Salome dance was a re enactment of it with a reversed sex - polarity : the violent woman destroying the sexually virtuous male ( also a Baptist ) . Like all good artists she knew how to draw coolly and professionally on the materials handed to her by experience . Indeed , this seems to have been a characteristic of her limelight - hugging family . Theo , in one of his chatty letters from the death cell , wondered whether she might consider making a gramophone record of an appeal for clemency she had written to the governor of California . He was sure it ' would perhaps get $ 800 all told ' , particularly if she a