In the early twentieth century, female performers regularly
appeared on the stages and screens of American cities. Though
advertised as dancers, mimics, singers, or actresses, they often
exceeded these categories. Instead, their performances adopted an
aesthetic of intermediality, weaving together techniques and
elements drawn from a wide variety of genres and media, including
ballet, art music, photography, early modern dance, vaudeville
traditions, film, and more. Onstage and onscreen, performers
borrowed from existing musical scores and narratives, referred to
contemporary shows, films, and events, and mimicked fellow
performers, skating neatly across various media, art forms, and
traditions. Behind the scenes, they experimented with
cross-promotion, new advertising techniques, and various
technologies to broadcast images and tales of their performances
and lives well beyond the walls of American theaters, cabarets, and
halls. The performances and conceptions of art that emerged were
innovative, compelling, and deeply meaningful.
Body Knowledge: Performance, Intermediality, and American
Entertainment at the Turn of the Twentieth Century examines these
performances and the performers behind them, highlighting the
Ziegfeld Follies and The Passing Show revues, Salome dancers,
Isadora Duncan's Wagner dances, Adeline Genee and Bessie Clayton's
photographic danced histories, Hazel Mackaye and Ruth St. Denis's
pageants, and Anna Pavlova's opera and film projects. By
destabilizing the boundaries between various media, genres, and
performance spaces, each of these women was able to create
performances that negotiated turn-of-the-century American social
and cultural issues: contemporary technological developments and
the rise of mass reproduction, new modes of perception, the
commodification of art and entertainment, the evolution of fan
culture and stardom, changing understandings of the body and the
self, and above all, shifting conceptions of gender, race, and
sexual identity. Tracing the various modes of intermediality at
work on- and offstage, Body Knowledge re-imagines early
twentieth-century art and entertainment as both fluid and
convergent.
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