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Of the four American dancers who changed the course of dance history at the turn of the century, only Isadora Duncan and Ruth St Denis remain well - known; Loie Fuller and Maud Allan are all but forgotten. In The Salome Dancer: The Life and Times of Maud Allan, Felix Cherniavsky remedies part of this deficit.
Maud Durrant was born in Toronto in 1873 and moved with her family to San Francisco when she was six years old. A musical prodigy, she went to Berlin at the age of 22 to study the piano. While she was there, her brother Theo committed, and was executed for, two gruesome murders. Letters now destroyed showed that Maud believed Theo was guilty, but she never admitted this belief to anyone but her mother. Probably because of her emotional distress, she gave up her music studies (which included master classes with Ferruccio Busoni) and became a dancer. By the time she made her debut in Vienna in 1903, she had adopted the name Maud Allan, and never shook off the burden of trying to conceal the fact that she was a murderer's sister. Cherniavsky believes that, by exacerbating Maud's...