‘That Invisible Dance’: Symbolism, Salomé and Oscar Wilde’s Choreographic Aesthetics

Abstract

Oscar Wilde’s one-act play Salomé, written in French and performed at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre in February 1896, combined Fuller’s emphasis on the dematerialised body with the Symbolist themes and literary techniques he had gleaned from Mallarmé, Gustave Flaubert, and Joris-Karl Huysmans. Exploring Salomé’s controversial early performance history in Paris and London, this chapter resituates Wilde’s text within a late nineteenth-century ferment of avant-garde dramaturgy, Symbolist and Decadent aesthetics, and philosophies of embodiment and free will as applied to the figure of the dancing puppet, theorised most influentially by Heinrich von Kleist. This chapter places Wilde’s Salomé in dialogue with its key intertexts and related case studies, from Aubrey Beardsley’s decadent illustrations for the English translation, to various frustrated and successful attempts to play Salome by the French actor Sarah Bernhardt and the Russian dancer Ida Rubinstein.