Maud Allan's Salomé : a case study into the psychology of costume, dance and performance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Maud Allan (1873-1956) was a trailblazer of modern expressionist dance and costume design who drew from her family’s tradition of shoemaking and her experience in corset making to design and construct a novel costume for her renowned and controversial performance, The Vision of Salomé (1906). She wore this costume more than 250 times to perform on the international stage, becoming one of the most successful dancers of her era from 1906 to 1925. By challenging the customs and conventions of Edwardian London through the use of her revealing costume and performance, she was also pioneering costume design, and yet scholarship to date has largely ignored the costume itself as an important material culture object. By using a material culture approach, and performing an object description and analysis of the two sets of Salomé costumes held at Dance Collection Danse in Toronto, this major research project establishes for the first time the many important innovations of Allan’s costume design techniques such as illusion mesh, pearl netting, bejeweled breastplates, eyelet hook bra fasteners and other novel details. Furthermore, I argue that scholarly object analysis used alongside theories of enclothed cognition allows us to elucidate the powerful affective link between psychology and dance costumes, further heightening our appreciation of Allan’s dance costume, while also specifying the details of her problematic appropriation of elements of Orientalism and the Femme Fatale in constructing the costume. More than a century after its creation, the aesthetic of Allan’s costume innovations continues to resonate in other dance costumes today.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".