Body Knowledge: Performance, Intermediality, and American Entertainment at the Turn of the Twentieth Century by Mary Simonson (review)

Abstract

Body Knowledge: Performance, Intermediality, and American Entertainment at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. By Mary Simonson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. [x, 278 p. ISBN 9780199898015 (hardcover), $99; ISBN 9780199898015 (paperback), $29.95; (e-book), various] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. In the summer of 1908, black choreographer, dancer, and singer Aida Overtoil Walker performed a dance on the stage of New York's Majestic Theater. Though her dance drew inspiration from the infamous striptease of Richard Strauss's 1905 opera Salome, Walker's performance garnered praise for its modesty and artistry rather than its eroticism. While many turn-of-the-century dancers embodied the character as a means of escaping physical and social restrictions on stage, Mary Simonson suggests that, for Walker, Salome was alluring because of her connection with high art, opera, and respectability (p. 41). By subverting audiences' expectations for a dance, Walker sought to expand the ways in which she could articulate her identity as a black performer and, indeed, as a black woman. Throughout the early years of the twentieth century, female artists turned to and a number of other figures, dances, and motifs to construct innovative, intermedial performances. By using the concept of intermediality, a term more often associated with postmodern arts and media, to frame her discussion of these turn-of-the-century performances, Simonson emphasizes the convergence of diverse genres and media in this much earlier era and, moreover, identifies the efforts of female performers in making such connections onstage and onscreen. Simonson's rich discussion of these creative women and their performances, which draws upon rare films, photographs, and other archival documents, as well as descriptions culled from over forty periodicals, offers a fresh perspective on early-twentieth-century American art and entertainment, arguing that the boundaries separating these worlds were much more permeable than many scholars have thus far acknowledged. But, as Simonson articulates in her prologue, Body Knowledge not just about intermedial performance; it is also an act of intermedial performance in and of itself (p. 26). Throughout the book, Simonson challenges longstanding scholarly narratives--especially those that have historically valued the work over its performance, the voice over the body, art over entertainment, and the live over the mediatized--in an effort to construct an interdisciplinary framework for future studies of performance. desire to rehabilitate performance as a meaningful subject of study in its own right--rather than as a lens through which to better understand a musical work--forms one of the driving forces of Simonson's project. In the first and sixth chapters, Simonson examines the intermedial reverberations of two operas that have garnered significant scholarly attention in recent years: Strauss's and Daniel Francois Esprit Auber's 1828 La muette de Portici. In her first chapter, Simonson argues that Walker, Gertrude Hoffmann, and Mary Garden turned to Salome's of the Seven Veils as a creative vehicle. Throughout her sixth chapter, Simonson again highlights the expressive potential of the dancing body in her discussion of the opera La muette di Portici and its film adaptation, this time with reference to Anna Pavlova's performance as Fenella in simultaneous stage and screen versions of the work. Crucial to both of these chapters is Simonson's effort to valorize embodied performance as an authoritative, creative act that rivals vocality and, indeed, the operatic work itself. One dancer's attempt to challenge composerly authority forms the topic of Simonson's third chapter. In a 1903 speech, The Dance of the Future, Isadora Duncan synthesized the ideas of Charles Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, and especially Richard Wagner as she outlined her artistic values and her outlook on dance's future developments. …