ABSTRACT
The turn of the century marked radical changes in the structure of dance, the role of the dancer in her own production, and her participation in the commodification of her body. Women performers in this period reconfigured the relationship of the spectator to the performer and of the public to the intimate. As the dancer takes up the word, she problematizes her status as work of art and artist in one by adding a critical voice to the realm of her production. Through a combination of performance, autobiography, and publicity, women artists reconceptualized the figure of the dancer while rewriting the aesthetics of femininity and women's sexuality. In order to reconstruct the parceled female body and reconnect women's public and private lives, these artists disrupted the models of nineteenth-century narrative and rejected bourgeois social models. Although this reconstruction might initially seem out of step with Modernist aesthetics, the anti-narrative production of these women artists in fact challenged the very notion of totalizing aesthetics as well as the boundaries between artistic disciplines. This chapter in no way suggests that the work of these women writers and dancers was improvised; rather, it argues that they represented their work as improvised in ways that questioned existing aesthetic models and that demanded of the reader or spectator a new way of reading the danseuse.
