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 Gen'ee 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.

About the Author
Mary Simonson is Lecturer in Womens Studies and Film & Media Studies at Colgate University.

Reviews
Delves into scholarship that has been either ignored or misinterpreted by other researchers... The superior research and clear prose make this book a welcome addition to the scholarship on this era. Highly recommended. * Choice *
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 *
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 *



Book Information
ISBN 9780199898039
Author Mary Simonson
Format Paperback
Page Count 304
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 440g
Dimensions(mm) 234mm * 155mm * 21mm