Maud Allan was a Canadian pianist-turned-actress, dancer and choreographer who is remembered for her "impressionistic mood settings".
Early life
Allan was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada as Beulah Maude Durrant or Ulah Maud Alma Durrant to William Durrant, a shoemaker, and his wife, Isabella Durrant. The family emigrated to San Francisco, California in 1877 or 1879. She spent her early years in San Francisco, moving to Germany in 1895 to study piano at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. By the age of nineteen, she was teaching piano as a private music teacher. She would start her own Concert Agency. She later changed her name, prompted in part by the scandal surrounding the crimes committed by her brother, Theo, who was hanged in 1898 for the murder of two women in San Francisco. After her brother's execution, she abandoned piano-playing and found self-expression in dance.
Stage and dance career
In 1900, in need of money, Allan is said to have illustrated an encyclopaedia for women, Illustriertes Konversations-Lexikon der Frau. Shortly thereafter, she began dancing professionally. Tall, athletic, and having great imagination, she had little formal dance training. She was once compared to Isadora Duncan, which enraged her as she disliked Duncan. She designed and often sewed her own costumes, which were creative. In 1906, her production Vision of Salomé opened in Vienna. Based loosely on Oscar Wilde's play, Salomé, her version of the Dance of the Seven Veils became famous and she was billed as "The Salomé Dancer". Her book, My Life and Dancing, was published in 1908. That same year she toured England, giving 250 performances in under a year. In 1910, she left Europe to travel. Over the next five years she visited the United States, Australia, Africa, and Asia. In 1915, she starred as "Demetra" in the silent film, The Rug Maker's Daughter.
In 1918, British MPNoel Pemberton Billing, in his own journal, Vigilante, published an article, "The Cult of the Clitoris", which implied that Allan, then appearing in her Vision of Salome, was a lesbian associate of German wartime conspirators. Allan sued Billing for libel, based on the following counts:
The act of publishing a defamatory article about Maud Allan and J. T. Grein, her impresario.
The act, a separate offence, of including obscenities within the article.
This led to a sensational court case, at which Billing represented himself. Lord Alfred Douglas also testified in Billing's favour. Allan lost the case. The trial became entangled in obscenity charges brought forth by the state against the performance given by Allan in her dance. She was accused of practising many of the sexually charged acts depicted in Wilde's writings herself, including necrophilia. The Lord Chamberlain's ban on public performances of Wilde's play was still in place in England and the Salomé dance was at risk. Her brother's crimes were also cited to suggest there was a background of sexual insanity in her family.
From the 1920s, Allan taught dance and lived with her secretary and lover, Verna Aldrich. She eventually settled in the Los Angeles during World War II and worked as a draughtswoman at Macdonald Aircraft. Allan died in Los Angeles in 1956, aged 83.
Fiction and theatre
Allan's Salomé dance, the reactions to it and its significance in terms of the sexual, social and political mores of the time appear in Pat Barker's 1993 novel, The Eye in the Door, the second part of the Regeneration trilogy. Allan's libel suit was the subject of a "fictography", The Maud Allan Affair as well as a stage play, Salomania. Salomania premiered at Berkeley, California's Aurora Theatre in June 2012.
