Dance, Salome! Dance!

Not so long ago, on the front page of the Arts section of the New York Times was a full-length photograph of a principal dancer from the Pacific Northwest Ballet. The image was startling, a bit obscene: the dancer was in attitude, and hanging from her ankle was a price tag—printed on it $100,000. The caption read, “For the art patron who has everything, ballet companies are offering something novel: the dancers themselves.” To raise funds, premier American ballet companies were auctioning off their principal dancers to the highest bidder for exorbitant sums. Works of art are often auctioned, but a person?

Dance, Salome! Dance! is set in the rehearsal studio of a premier ballet company. It plays off of Oscar Wilde’s decadent reinterpretation of the biblical story of Salome, the original text of dance and patronage. Like Wilde’s play, this piece is a full-length work in one act where the question that propels it is: “Salome, will you dance for me?” This points to the ethical limits of what it means to desire and collect. We know the price of the dance: the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter.

Dance, Salome! Dance! examines the perplexing entanglement of patronage, commodification, and desire. There is a twist to the play. In this meditation on the arts and society, the principal dancer is a Black ballerina.

Through text and dance, this play explores questions of patronage, politics, and history to ultimately ask: Why do we create art? What is its meaning?