Dance Discourses: Rethinking the History of the "Oriental Dance"

Abstract

Once oriental dance became a genre, created by western devotees with eastern ideas and values and extended by dancers from places that seemed to Europeans oriental, the style influenced dancers who arrived in Europe from the Orient,1 and also dancers in the Orient.2 In the early twentieth century when Diaghilev brought his Ballets Russes to Parisian audiences, oriental arts were already admired and sought by connoisseurs. Then and later, artifacts of Art Nouveau and Art Deco were heavily influenced by oriental design, particularly by japonaiserie. Japanese prints were in the collections of Degas, Monet, and Whistler. Earlier, Romantic artists like Ingres and Delacroix had sought sources for their fantasies in North Africa and the Near East, while writer Pierre Loti aroused Parisians’ literary interests with his novels of women secluded in harems. Oriental arts were composed of strange and exotic figures,3 redolent of veiled and mysterious women, surprising the eye with vibrant color and elaborate design, with an aesthetic valuing the harmony of movement and stillness. Interest extended from and to scholarship, with departments of oriental languages established at universities on the continent and in Great Britain. Even before Diaghilev, Frank Kermode notes, “The circus, the vaudeville, the bal, were serious pleasures; the primitive, the ugly, the exotic were in demand.”4 In America, as in France, international exhibitions and world fairs brought exotic dancers, curious music, novel artifacts, and strange scents from the East. Thus the opportunity to promote programs of oriental dance at the beginning of this century occurred in an atmosphere of curiosity and yearning for exotic entertainment, where dancers represented living embodiments of the unfamiliar.

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