‘Unlocatable Bodies’: Modernist Veiled Dancers from Loïe Fuller to Maud Allan

Abstract

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.