The Story of Salome, from the 1998 Program
The Salome of history may have been a teenage girl of small stature, but as a figure of culture and mythology she is a giant. Elements of the story have resonance as far back as Caligula’s orgiastic court, yet in many ways the last one hundred years have seen the myth exercise its most powerful fascination. Salome has become the archetypal femme fatale, a figure of desire and doom, embracing her own destruction even as she lures men to their deaths. In modernity, references to the erotic dancer range from Oscar Wilde’s end-of-last-century play, Salome, all the way through to Kim Wilde’s end-of-century song. The House of Salome – that is, from the sublime all the way to the ridiculous.
Ironically enough, Salome’s name is probably better known now than it was by her contemporaries, or even succeeding generations. While her story first appears in the Bible, in the Gospels of Matthew [14:3-12] and Mark [6:17-29], as a character she is almost a cipher, her name not even rating a mention. Historically, she was the daughter by birth of Herodias. and the stepdaughter of Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee in Palestine. In the biblical allegory she is very much her mother’s tool of vengeance, dancing for Herod and claiming as her reward the head of John the Baptist on the instruction of Herodias, whom John had condemned as an incestuous adulterer. Herod Antipas’ father, Herod the Great, ruled over a dominion continually in a state of upheaval due to his brutal repression of the Jewish faith. Herod himself exhibits a kind of bond with John, whom he is loathe to execute for fear of reprisal from his followers and his God. In this way Johns strength of character is figured in opposition to Herod’s spiritual and moral weakness. and the mystical ascetic John is portrayed as the precursor of the coming Jesus.
The myth actually goes deeper than the Biblical story, though, with significant elements of the tale drawing on events that took place well before the death of Christ. The myth has its genesis in the physical, moral and psychological depravity of late Rome. Beheading a slave or military prisoner for the pleasure of one’s minions, or mistresses, was a known practice in the decadent Roman court. Plutarch reports an incident in which a prisoner was decapitated at a banquet for the pleasure of a boy lover. The elder Seneca, a Roman historian and Senator, is the first to make reference to such a beheading preceded by a dance, fixing the direction of the play’s narrative well before Salome was even born.
The myth of Salome and her dance has flourished since its transcription in the Bible. Over time there have been slight shifts in emphasis as successive generations found different aspects of the story revealing. Unsurprisingly, medieval representations of Salome were often made for the purpose of moral instruction. In the religious art and practices of the Middle Ages, the Biblical legend found echoes too numerous to mention in detail. As the reputation of John the Baptist grew in the centuries after the death of Christ, so did the myth of Salome’s evil. The story was used to illustrate the need to resist sexual temptations and the potential spiritual risks in the diversion of dancing. After 1000 AD, the story was represented on church walls, in stained glass, and on the pages of sacred manuscripts. Certain monastic sects, taking as their inspiration the ascetic figure of the John the Baptist, developed a culture that was anti-feminine in the extreme. Their artistic depictions of the legend show Herodias and Salome as witches on brooms, or medusas with snake-like hair, able to turn a man to stone by simply engaging his gaze.
In the Victorian era, a pre-modern flourishing of references laid the groundwork for our contemporary fascination with the myth. One researcher uncovered more than 2.500 French poets who had written on Salome. Great names associated with the story and its retelling include the poets Hemrich Heine, Stephane Mallarme and William Butler Yeats, novelists Jons-Karl Huysmans, Gustave Flaubert, and Laforgue. Great artists who have represented the characters include the sculptor Rodin and painters Bernardino Luini, Titian, Ghirlandaio, Moreau. Odilon Redon, Edvard Munch and Eugene Delacroix. Perhaps the image of the severed head exercised fascination for the French for particular historical reasons. One sculptor. Clesinger, used a victim of the guillotine as a model for his portrayal of John the Baptist. The criminal’s name, ironically enough, was Albert de saint Jean-Baptiste. In an even greater irony, the unfortunate model kept a memoir of his time in prison, in which he claimed he was driven to his crimes by his mistress.
In the late nineteenth century, and throughout the twentieth century, the myth has been refigured time and time again, pointing to a peculiar fascination with the way sex and power intersect in the drama. By far the most famous retelling, the Oscar Wilde play, makes the dance of the seven veils the dramatic conclusion to a story about the perverse passions of the various agents While drawing on previous representations. Wilde’s version is important in making Salome a creature with desires of her own She is elevated to more than merely her mother’s pawn, becoming the autonomous agent of Johns death From the nameless dancer in the Bible story she has become the focus of the drama, whose actions symbolise the sexual power of modern woman.
In this way the Christian tradition has come to provide a rich source of raw material for secular artistic approaches to the subject of sexuality and desire Aubrey Beardsley. who illustrated the text of Wilde’s play, draws on the medusa/witch aspect of Salome and Herodias in his depiction of mother/daughter pair. One other medieval reference that Wilde intended to draw upon was a depiction of Salome by the twelfth century prioress of the Sainte-Odile nunnery, who painted Salome standing on her hands. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Wilde had seen a dancer at the Moulin Rouge in Paris who performed in a similar inverted fashion, and had some enthusiasm to cast her in the original stage version.
For dealing with Biblical material, and for its dangerously subversive view of sexual passion, the play was banned in England, but premiered in Paris in 1894. The Freudian paradox of the struggle between the pleasure principle and the drive towards death is fought out under the proscenium. Herod loses control of his desire, and potentially the wealth of his kingdom, caught up in the voyeuristic pleasure of holding his stepdaughter in his lustful gaze. Salome, her sexual advances rejected by the almost super-human saint, uses Herod as a tool to have John on her own terms, his decapitation a symbolic castration at the hands of the wanton female. The innocent, her lusts awakened by the unlikely figure of John, the mad, pale, emaciated prophet, pursues her unfulfilled desire to its logical conclusion, her own bloody end. Life mirrors art, and Salome was a personal work, not just a dramatic one. for Wilde As he wrote in The Ballad of Reading Gaol, in another phrase that has peculiar resonance in this century of perversity, “Yet each man kills the thing he loves.”
Wilde’s play was in turn adapted into a libretto by Richard Strauss, which premiered in Dresden in1905, also creating much controversy. The Viennese Court censor noted that the portrayal of events from the Bible raised serious questions about the legitimacy of the work, and banned it on the grounds of the “moral repugnance… and perversion” of the subject matter One of Strauss’s correspondents. French novelist Romain Rolland, sums up the prevailing attitude of moral conservatives about the play: “It has a nauseous and sickly atmosphere about it: it exudes vice and literature. Wilde’s Salome, and all those who surround her are unwholesome, unclean, hysterical or alcoholic beings, stinking of sophisticated and perfumed corruption. I fear that you have been caught by the mirage of German decadent literature. The difference between them and you is the difference between an artist who is great at one time and an artist who is – or should be – great for all time. You are worthy of better things than Salome.”
In 1922, Alia Nazimova. a Russian-born theatre actress, made the first film version of Salome, drawing heavily on Wilde’s text, and Beardsleys illustrations for visual style. While rumour had it that the entire cast of the film was gay, as a homage to Wilde’s controversial lifestyle, the story seems apocryphal A critical and commercial failure, the film was the actress’s attempt to make a film with merit, and without compromise. Its production cost of $350,000, a big budget for the time, was never recouped, and Nazimova retreated back to her career on the stage. In 1953 Hollywood tried again, without success, to popularise the Salome myth. This time Rita Hayworth was in the lead role, with Charles Laughton as Herod. While set in authentic Holy Land exteriors, the story was heavily laundered for the American censors and public – Salome danced, not for the head of John the Baptist on a platter, but to save him from execution.
Contemporary versions include works by filmmaker Ken Russell, and stage director Steven Berkoff. An interesting story attaches to each of these productions. In the Ken Russell film, the historical Wilde gets involved in the private performance of his own play, taking part in the action, and becoming caught up in the tragedy. The script idea was probably based on a photograph that, until 1992, was presumed to be a picture of Oscar Wilde, dressed in drag as Salome, at a private London performance Subsequent research has shown that this is in fact a mistake and that the picture is actually of a female actress who happens to bear some small resemblance to the playwright. Steven Berkoff. daunted by the mythic resonance of Salome’s dance, chose merely to indicate it, rather than stage it in full.
The emergence of the figure of Salome, from nameless dancer in the Bible story through to the focus of modern versions of the story, can be seen as parallel with the empowerment of women in the political sphere, as representative of increasing acknowledgement of what Freud called the “Dark Continent” of female sexuality, or linked with the increasing public tolerance of sexual desires previously thought perverse. Throughout the long history of the myth, though, it is Salome’s dance more than any political reading of it that is the focal point around which our fascinations spin. Dance, all dances, is the pleasure of listening embodied. Nowhere will this be more apparent than in Sydney Dance Company’s current production, latest in a long line of myth making about Salome. Perhaps it is only in dance that a myth so concerned with the power of dance can be fully realised. A saucy striptease, a revelation in movement of our own hidden desires and sexualities, and a transcendent moment that embodies what it means to be human, dance itself is the essence of the tale of Salome.