Sisters of Salome -- Excerpt 3
Ida Rubinstein’s Cleopatra, with her great height, small breasts, slim boyish hips, and long legs heralded the entrance into the twentieth century of the phallic female who towered over the feminized, magnetized male. She presented a startling modern image, an early metaphor for the athletic, demanding woman ruling her fearful, emasculated man.
As Diaghilev’s Cleopatra, Salome had arrived barefoot in the land of the toe shoe. Ida’s performance embodied the complete integration of the music hall Salome of Maud Allan and Mata Hari, the improvisational sensibility of the new “modern dance” as presented by Loie Fuller, Ruth St. Denis and Isadora Duncan, with ballet, the most classical of dance forms. For a ballet company with a centuries’ old tradition, Cléopâtra presented a modern novelty -- there were no tutus, no pointe shoes, more turn-in than turn-out, and bare midriffs glowing with body paint.
Most radically, the ballet, based on a story, Une Nuit d’Egypte, by Théophile Gautier, told a tale of unbridled sexuality. Cleopatra’s harem from the Arabian Nights was a distant place indeed from the fairy-tale castle where Sleeping Beauty waited a hundred years for her Prince Charming. This was not the waif-like Giselle pleading to save the life of her lover, but a statuesque woman demanding the death of her lover. This was a ballet no longer about spiritualized romantic love; it was a fin de siècle version of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.
Salome was infiltrating the shores of Swan Lake, the land where promises of eternal love dominate the aesthetic, with her own version of romance: the one-night stand. This infusion of veils into the world of tiaras represented the sexualizing of the virgin ballerina. The dusty sylph of the Romantic ballet was replaced by the Queen of Hedonism.
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