«Crazed by the rigid stillness» : Maud Allan danza Salomé

As in the late-Victorian pornographic novel Teleny, or The Reverse of the Medal: A Physiological Romance of To-Day (1893) the overlap between musical reality and sexual instinct allows the description of a motionless orgasm as recognition of an unconventional sexuality, so Maud Allan, trained musician before being a barefoot dancer, in her solo The Vision of Salome (1904), inspired by Oscar Wilde’s tragedy, stages sexuality in all its destabilising danger through stillness as a condition of both desire and movement. As in Teleny, the solitary and rigid eros of a revealing kiss, here in its act of necrophilia, is revelation and at the same time perdition, perversion, and subversion of desire. Nevertheless, the scandal of Allan’s performance, and the further judicial consequences in her life, are nothing more than the measure of the destabilising danger that the active sexual knowledge of women represented for the heterosexual patriarchal social order. More briefly: in Teleny as in The Vision of Salome, the experience of music is associated with the perversion of a non-conforming sexuality that takes place through stillness.