“Nothing but a string of beads”: Maud Allan’s Salomé Costume as a “choreographic thing”

Schweitzer, Marlis

doi:10.1057/9781137402455_3

Cited by 9 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Marlis Schweitzer (2014) echoes the tenants of enclothed cognition that highlight the embodied nature of a costume. She writes: "A costume develops an intimate relationship with the body: shaping, molding, protecting, disguising or transforming the physical form, while marking gender, class, age and various other identity categories" (p. 38).…”

Section: Costumes and Enclothed Cognitionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Maud Allan's Salomé : a case study into the psychology of costume, dance and performance

Kwong¹

2021

Preprint

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Maud Allan (1873-1956) was a trailblazer of modern expressionist dance and costume design who drew from her family’s tradition of shoemaking and her experience in corset making to design and construct a novel costume for her renowned and controversial performance, The Vision of Salomé (1906). She wore this costume more than 250 times to perform on the international stage, becoming one of the most successful dancers of her era from 1906 to 1925. By challenging the customs and conventions of Edwardian London through the use of her revealing costume and performance, she was also pioneering costume design, and yet scholarship to date has largely ignored the costume itself as an important material culture object. By using a material culture approach, and performing an object description and analysis of the two sets of Salomé costumes held at Dance Collection Danse in Toronto, this major research project establishes for the first time the many important innovations of Allan’s costume design techniques such as illusion mesh, pearl netting, bejeweled breastplates, eyelet hook bra fasteners and other novel details. Furthermore, I argue that scholarly object analysis used alongside theories of enclothed cognition allows us to elucidate the powerful affective link between psychology and dance costumes, further heightening our appreciation of Allan’s dance costume, while also specifying the details of her problematic appropriation of elements of Orientalism and the Femme Fatale in constructing the costume. More than a century after its creation, the aesthetic of Allan’s costume innovations continues to resonate in other dance costumes today.

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Section: Costumes and Enclothed Cognitionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Maud Allan's Salomé : a case study into the psychology of costume, dance and performance

Kwong¹

2021

Preprint

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“…Some things may captivate us with vibrant energy, exerting a thingly presence that acts as a gravitational pull. This type of metaphysical presence has been acknowledged by philosopher Martin Heidegger in a painting of shoes by Van Gogh (Heidegger 2008), by theatre scholar Marlis Schweitzer in a Salomé costume worn by Maud Allan (Schweitzer 2014), and by political theory scholar Jane Bennett in a pile of debris that included a dead rat and a plastic glove (Bennett 2010). Critical theory scholar Bill Brown identifies the power of objects that attract our attention as things:…”

Section: Ingrid E Midamentioning

confidence: 99%

On Objects and Things: The Wilkie Wedding Dress and the Drawings of Sarah Casey

Mida¹

2019

Mus. Soc.

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Clothing is often cherished long after memories have begun to fade and the inevitable process of decay have begun. Such is the case with the silk wedding dress and bridal veil worn by Evelyn Normand Wilkie (1902-1969) in her 1927 wedding to Douglas Howard in Nova Scotia, Canada. Her homemade dress has now yellowed and the silk is shattered and given its poor condition the dress is an unlikely candidate for acceptance into a museum or study collection. This object biography probes the thingly presence of Wilkie's wedding dress as an object and as the source of creative inspiration for the drawings of artist Sarah Casey that became the focus of a 2019 exhibition at Ryerson University in Toronto.

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“…For me, in my borrowed white jumpsuit, the surrounding grass and dirt (not to mention food and wine) all felt slightly menacing; I experienced them as potential stains. Expanding "choreographic things" (Schweitzer 2014) toward choreographic topographies, I want to spend a moment considering how Dîner's white costuming orients picnic goers within their environment. The decision to mandate white apparel is situated as a pragmatic choice by Dîner's founder, François Pasquier, who insists that, in the early years of Dîner, picnic goers wore white simply so that "participants could recognize each other and distinguish themselves from one another in the park" (Rodriguez 2018).…”

Section: Culinary Choreographiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Crowded White Spaces: Dîner en Blanc and the Place-Based Contingencies of Choreography

Gerecke

2023

Dance Res. J.

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This spatial and contextual approach to the performance of assembly takes Dîner en Blanc, an annual pop-up picnic, as a case study. Ethnographic and choreographic analyses of the 2018 picnic event in Vancouver, Canada, ground a critique of the dynamics of site specificity and host/guest relations that drive this local expression of a global event. Drawing on a range of performance and decolonial theorists, this place-based movement analysis of the event foregrounds the recolonizing implications of staging aesthetically whitewashed culinary choreographies on the unceded and traditional territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

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“Nothing but a string of beads”: Maud Allan’s Salomé Costume as a “choreographic thing”

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

Maud Allan's Salomé : a case study into the psychology of costume, dance and performance

Maud Allan's Salomé : a case study into the psychology of costume, dance and performance

On Objects and Things: The Wilkie Wedding Dress and the Drawings of Sarah Casey

Crowded White Spaces: Dîner en Blanc and the Place-Based Contingencies of Choreography

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