Body Knowledge: Performance, Intermediality, and American Entertainment at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

While female performers in the early 20th century were regularly advertised as dancers, mimics, singers, or actresses, they wove together techniques and elements drawn from a wide variety of genres and media. Onstage and onscreen, performers borrowed from musical scores and narratives, referred to contemporary shows, films, and events, and mimicked fellow performers. Behind the scenes, they experimented with cross-promotion and new advertising techniques and 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 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 Genée and Bessie Clayton's danced histories, Hazel Mackaye and Ruth St. Denis's pageants, and Anna Pavlova's opera and film projects. As a whole, it re-imagines early twentieth-century art and entertainment as both fluid and convergent.

Table of Contents:
List of IllustrationsList of Musical ExamplesAcknowledgementsPrologue: Staging Intermediality: Darktown, Downtown 1. Choreographing Salome: Recreating the Female Body 2. Acting Ancient: Hellenism, Pageantry, and American Modernity 3. Dancing Music: Isadora Duncan and Wagnerism in the American Imagination 4. Dancing Pictures: Rita Sacchetto's Tanzbilder 5. Moving Images: Adeline Genee and Bessie Clayton's Danced Histories 6. Opera on Camera, Opera on Stage: Anna Pavlova and The Dumb Girl of Portici Finale: Performing Intermediality in The Passing Show of 1913 BibliographyIndex

About the Author :
Mary Simonson is Assistant Professor of Film & Media Studies and Women's Studies at Colgate University.

Review :
"Beautifully researched, rich with compellingly told stories, Body Knowledge offers very smart analyses of how representations and performances of embodiment leap media and genre barriers. A must-read for scholars of musical embodiment."--Suzanne G. Cusick, New York University"A compelling and deeply researched book that weaves together dance, music, cultural history, gender roles, faddishness, fandom, historical awareness, emerging media, and multimedia interaction in a complex but highly readable fashion. Its strengths are the focus on women's performance, particularly the negotiation of their bodies as display and identity - something at great stake in an era when women were fighting for the vote even as issues of race complicate matters mightily - and the nuance of reading individual moments and their relationships to each other." -Robynn Stilwell, Georgetown University"Simonson moves us expertly through the rich interchange of live and mediatized American stage cultures of the early 20th century. Through tableaux vivants, filmed opera, pageantry and other spectacles, Simonson resituates our understanding of modernist/post-Victorian performances by giving them the intermedial context they merit. Of great interest to anyone in performance studies, whether in stage, film, music, and especially dance."--Caryl Flinn, Professor of Screen Arts and Cultures, University of Michigan