Performing Sappho’s Fractured Archive, or Listening for the Queer Sounds in the Life and Works of Natalie Clifford Barney

Abstract

This chapter excavates the remaining traces of pseudo-ancient Greek musical and dance performance that took place in Natalie Clifford Barney’s Parisian home in the first decades of the twentieth century. Barney’s discovery of Greek antiquity came about at the same time that she became aware of her own sexual identity. She perceived a freedom in the culture of ancient Lesbos and Athens that she felt was lacking in early twentieth-century American and French culture, and she used her passion for studying ancient Greek poetry under the tutelage of the best Greek scholars in Paris to channel both her creative and erotic interests in a very public way. This chapter focuses on the alterity of queer performance and reception within Barney’s Parisian circle by exploring how queer performance and identity were mapped in her cultural salon. The evidence of these performances remains in fragments, scattered across public and private collections, preserved in photographs, memoirs, letters, and anecdotes told third-hand. The chapter draws on theories of performance and queerness to make sense of the archival materials relating to re-enactment of ancient Greek dance and music hosted at the heiress’s home. This illustrates the role of ancient Greek–inspired music and dance in defining queer subjectivity in early twentieth-century Parisian salons. In piecing together fragments, this chapter offers new ways for musicologists to think about performance and the archive.