I am sure you have heard of the Dance of the Seven Veils, but do you know who created it? Dancer Maud Elizabeth Allan (c.1873- 1956), born Ulla Maud Durrant in Toronto, Canada, was raised in San Francisco. Musically talented on the piano, she went to Germany to study. While she studied there, her brother committed a brutal murder in San Francisco.
Unable to return, she changed her name, and encouraged by the director of the Meister-schüle, gave up the piano and took up dancing professionally. For five years, she toured Europe dancing to classical music.
In 1906, she performed the dance Salome based on the play by Oscar Wilde in Vienna. She used a sensual dancing style similar to that of Isadore Duncan. Although attacked for portraying a religious subject in a provocative manner and for basing her work on a play by a convicted “sodomite,” she successfully toured European cities. Part of her success was the shock-value of her costume. She wore nothing except discretely placed jewelry and see-through veils.
She continued to have success, hiring Debussy to compose music for her biggest production Khamma, which she choreographed. In 1915, she appeared in the silent movie, The Rug Maker’s Daughter, performing an excerpt of Salome.
In 1918, during WW1, she was hired to do private performances of the Vision of Salome in London’s West End. Her dance became known to Noel Pemberton-Billing, owner and editor of the Vigilante, an advocate for purity in public life. In an article titled the “Cult of the Clitoris”, he accused her of being a lesbian and of having an affair with the former prime minister’s wife Margot Asquith. Because she had studied in Germany, he accused her of being a sex-crazed German spy.
Allan took him to court and sued him for libel. Pemberton-Billing claimed he didn’t know what the cult of the clitoris meant, but Allan did so he wasn’t guilty.
Even though the jury found Pemberton-Billings had committed libel, the judge amplified the public outcry against Allan. In his closing remarks, he declared the Oscar Wilde play not suitable for public or private performance and the clothing she wore for the performance “worse than nothing.”
Lesbianism was not illegal at the time, but the aftermath of the case led to a 1921 bill in the House of Commons to make it illegal.
The following excerpt is from her biography My Life and Dancing.
There was a romance about my first dancing dress. It hailed from Greece, and was perhaps 200 years old, having once been the undergarment of some Greek peasant maiden. It was of cotton, and as simple as it was clinging and graceful, and light as it was almost curiously warm. This I used for practising. But I was also studying dresses as well as pose in the museums and libraries. The Melpomene in the old museum, Berlin, furnished the model for the sandals that I subsequently wore in some of my religious numbers that are more suited to a small than a large public audience. I used butter-cloth for the dresses that I designed and made myself, if ” made ” be the right word for what was really an arrangement of draperies and clasps and girdles, with an eye to soft folds and undulating lines. Very exquisite folds may be obtained by damping the material, rolling it up tightly, and keeping it thus for some while.
So, with studying, designing, experimenting and striving to attain continuous musical expression spreading from the fountain-thought in a kind of wave over the body to finger-tips and toes and rhythmical equilibrium, my time was very completely filled.
Sometimes I would dance without music. At others Marcel Remy would come to my study. He possessed the gift of improvisation. I would obey my impulses and try to interpret whatever he might play. At other times I would try to give expression to some piece by Bach, Beethoven, Schubert or Schumann. Art is long, and not the butterfly, effortless business some people seem to think it is. It was in 1900 that the idea crystallised before Botticelli’s ” Spring” in Florence, and it was not until 1903 that I gave my first performance in Vienna.
Source My Life and Dancing by Maud Allan pp 79-80
And here is the description of her costume from the trial transcript.
Note: “The Prisoner” is Pemberton-Billings. He represented himself.
After the trial, she continued to perform, touring around the world. When she first arrived in the United States, many theater owners banned her show. This only inflamed more interest in her dance and helped her publicity. She went on to establish the West Wing School of Dancing for underprivileged children. After it was destroyed in the bombing of WW2, she moved to Los Angeles and worked as a draughtswoman for MacDonald Aircraft.
Autobiography by Maud Allan
My Life and Dancing available at https://archive.org/details/mylifedancing00allaiala
More About Maud Allan’s Life
LGBTQ+ History: Maud Allan and Unnatural Practice among Women by Vicky Iglikowski-Broad National Archives
Collection of Photos Messy Nessy https://www.messynessychic.com/2023/05/26/maud-the-cult-of-the-clitoris/
“Willing to be Thrilling” Canada History https://www.canadashistory.ca/explore/women/willing-to-be-thrilling
“Maud Allan and the Cult of the Clitoris” by Destiny Rodgers QNews https://qnews.com.au/maud-allan-the-cult-of-the-clitoris-the-trial-of-the-century/