Salomania: a scandalous theatrical dance craze that thrilled early 20th-century audiences—and opened doors for women on stage and in society.
A scholarly review of Cecily Devereux’s Salomania and the Representation of Race and Gender in Modern Erotic Dance (2023) — a feminist, postcolonial history of the Salome dance craze.
In 1922, Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. saw Nyota Inyoka dance in Paris and announced that he would put her in the Ziegfeld Follies. He called her “mighty dark.” On August 5, 1922 , The New York Age, a leading Black newspaper, praised him for casting her without expecting her to “pass for white.” She reached New…
When Richard Strauss attended a Berlin theater production of Wilde’s play Salome in 1902, he imagined a Salome opera, feeling the play “cried out for music.” By choosing this provocative story for operatic treatment, Strauss courted controversy—perhaps in hopes of drawing attention. As Alex Ross notes, the composer “felt drawn to sexually charged material throughout…
In early 20th-century performance, art dance emphasized expressive movement, innovation, and aesthetic depth, as seen in modern dance and ballet. Erotic dance focused on sensual display and physical allure, often for popular entertainment. Art dance sought cultural legitimacy; erotic dance catered to titillation, though the boundaries were often blurred, especially when it came to Salome…
The Salome painting has a strange four-hundred-year arc. For most of that time she is a supporting character in someone else’s crime—a girl carrying a platter, doing the bidding of her mother, Herodias. Then, in the space of a few decades around 1900, she becomes the most dangerous woman in European art. That change was…