During the first two decades of the twentieth century, dancer Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) regularly appeared on concert hall and opera house stages in New York and other American cities. Audiences were taken with her striking persona and nontraditional conception of dance, and impressed by her success in Europe. Duncan's artistic, intellectual, and personal self-association with Richard Wagner—a mythological being in the contemporary American imagination—also captured the attention of many audience members. Duncan danced to excerpts from Tristan und Isolde, Parsifal, and other works while rejecting Wagner's conception of dance; she borrowed language and ideological formulations from his writings while dismissing his aesthetic theories. The American Wagner cult has long been associated with the Gilded Age and conductor Anton Seidl (1850–1898). Isadora Duncan's American performances demonstrate that American Wagnerism persisted well into the twentieth century, albeit in a different form. Conjuring herself as a rebellious disciple of Wagner, Duncan modeled a second generation of American Wagnerism that combined contemporary cultural debates and early modernist aesthetics with strains of Wagner's art and ideologies.

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Media is generally conceptualized as any communicative conduit that conveys ideas or meaning between one place or person and another. However, media products—and particularly intermedial products—do not always transmit meanings and ideas smoothly. This chapter explores a series of historical and contemporary media objects and performances that do not facilitate “successful” transfers of meaning, partly due to their intermedial configurations. Each of these media objects and performances both conceal and reveal, either accidentally as a byproduct of experimentation with the medium’s modalities or purposefully as an aesthetic, social, or cultural intervention. The author argues that these concealments and intermedial “gaps” generate new modes of expression, new artistic experiences for audiences and performers, and new conceptual understandings of existing genres and media.

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