Salomé  ☆☆☆☆☆
EDIFICE Dance Theatre
The Place, London

Salomé is the biblical gift that just keeps giving, from Wilde’s scandalously decadent take on it and the Aubrey Beardsley drawings it inspired, to the curate’s egg of Ken Russell’s film version. Last year, I reviewed for Queerguru a production that cast Salomé as a pretty blonde boy, and this dance version by Edifice is a worthy addition to the canon, full of sexual energy and spectacular dancing.

As the lights come up, we see a writhing pile of semi-naked, masked figures, touching each other as King Herod [Fabio Dolce] watches lasciviously before joining in. (By the end of the piece, that bed has become a catafalque). The music [composed by Philip O’Meara] here recalls 1920s Paris or Weimar Berlin and the decadence of Herod’s court is raunchily visible. Salomé [Harriet Waghorn] strides onto the scene, an Amazonian with short, bleach blonde hair and unbridled sexual confidence.

Herod is smitten, but she’s having none of it, spurning his overtures and rejecting the red dress he entreats her to don. As she walks offstage, Herod gives the dress to one of the boy dancers before kissing him. The music transforms to guttural, primitive chanting as John the Baptist/Jokanaan [Carmine De Amicis] makes his transcendental entrance, with armpits like chalices and abs you could wash you nylons on.

His movements are full of fluid grace and athletic force and at one point his pale skin seems to glow in the dark. You can see why Salomé wants him so badly. When he rejects her advances – after a sexually charged tug of war in which her attempts at seduction are as insistent as his refusals of them, his temptation as palpable as the conflict it precipitates – she determines to have him, even if it’s his corpse she will play with and fondle and ride. You’re unlikely to see a hotter dance sequence this year.

The thing I like most about dance is that the body becomes a language, and for a writer that’s exciting. Nonverbal, physical communications of a narrative, emotions played out in the flow of movement. Waghorn and De Amicis are the choreographers for Edifice, and they deliver a vibrant and sexy interpretation of Wilde’s play which focuses, with theatrical sophistication, on the twin forces of Herod’s decadence and Jokanaan’s spirituality, and foregrounds the erotic charge between the Holy Man and the sexually precocious young woman who sets out to have him and, failing, reeks revenge. Hell hath no fury…..

This Production is now going on Tour : for details  https://www.edificedancetheatre.com/copy-of-salome-2

Review by Jonathan Kemp

Queerguru London Contributing Editor Jonathan Kemp writes fiction and non-fiction and teaches creative writing at Middlesex University. He is the author of two novels – London Triptych (2010), which won the 2011 Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, and Ghosting (2015) – and the short-story collection Twentysix. (2011, all published by Myriad Editions). Non-fiction works include The Penetrated Male (2012) and Homotopia?: Gay Identity, Sameness and the Politics of Desire (2015, both Punctum Books).