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Maud Allan spanned the social dichotomy between purity, chastity, and otherworldliness opposed to sexual provocation of her era, the twilight of the Victorian Era. Her achievement was gained despite a troubled family history, which surfaced publicly. Nevertheless, she was able to lead her audiences to question their assumptions about female sexuality and identity through her Salome performances. She embodied spectators' hidden desires, and they in turn projected them onto her.

This chapter continues the discussion of the career of dancer Maud Allan. In 1900, Maud turned to dancing as a means to gain attention, respect, and money, engaging in the new, emerging form of dance that came to be called modern dance, which was just beginning to find devotees. Her version of Salome became the first notable dance rendition independent of Wilde's play and Strauss's opera. Maud's ensuing fame rested entirely on this one twenty-minute dance.

This opening chapter considers Loïe Fuller’s veiled dance performances in the 1890s as formative touchstones for Salome’s later modernist appeal. Drawing on Stéphane Mallarmé’s influential notion of dance as a form of ‘bodily writing’, as well as Jacques Rancière’s more recent reading of Fuller’s ‘unlocatable body’, this chapter explores how Fuller purposely cultivated an aesthetics of radical disembodiment that paradoxically depended on her body’s material capacity to perform. Collapsing the distinction between her body and her veil, Fuller’s choreographic practice intervened in Symbolist and Decadent images of Salome as a degenerate femme fatale, modelling a new approach to this figure that was predicated on a type of feminist aesthetic potential located in the body. Tracing Fuller’s career from her landmark serpentine dances via two Salome-themed choreographies – Salome (1895) and La Tragédie de Salomé (1907) –, this chapter ultimately examines her influence on women’s modern dance through the controversial figure of Maud Allan, whose Vision of Salome (1906) refocused the queer implications of both Fuller’s dematerialised performance style and Salome’s more explicitly unorthodox sexuality.

This chapter describes the life and career of Canadian dancer Maud Allan. Maud's career as the “Salome Dancer” presents the tale of a woman escaping herself, her past, and her family. As the Judean princess, Maud, perhaps more than any other Salome of the time, could best express publicly, with ironic anonymity, the pain of her own life.

This chapter describes the story behind the libel suit of Maud Allan and its disastrous impact on her reputation and career. In January 1918, the right-wing weekly broadsheet, the Imperialist, alleged that a German prince had compiled a “Black Book” detailing the depraved and lecherous behavior of 47,000 British men and women. With the threat of exposure and blackmail, the Imperialist theorized, these forty-seven thousand corrupted souls were under complete German influence and were thus responsible for British losses in the trenches. Behind this outrageous story was Noel Pemberton-Billing, the Independent M.P. who ran the Imperialist. It was later suggested that subscribers to the upcoming Maud Allan Salome production were among the degenerate “47,000.” On 8 March, show producer James Grein and Maud sued Pemberton-Billing for obscene and defamatory libel.

As a historical context for La Meri’s work, this is a short discussion of Western cultural borrowings and fusions from the Renaissance to the 20^th century. After considering the early developments, this chapter mentions Maud Allan and Loie Fuller—two early 20^th century dance artists who presented themes from non-Western cultures in their performances—and the later creations of Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, who also drew on international sources for their creative choreographies. It then briefly discusses how La Meri’s work gradually came to include the study and performance of authentic dances from various world cultures.

This introductory chapter first describes the author's inspiration for writing this book, namely the image of French novelist Sidonie Gabrielle Colette's left breast, which symbolized something that the author wanted for herself, though she was not sure exactly what that was. Her search was furthered by a second vision that came a few years later, after watching a strip show at the Crazy Horse Saloon in Paris. The discussion then turns to the four heroines of this book: Maud Allan, the Canadian modern dancer; Mata Hari, the Dutch spy; Ida Rubinstein, the Russian performance artist; and Colette.