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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