Salomé: Woman of Valor is a collaborative multimedia artwork—a multivalent and multisensory experience—crafted by poet and professor Adeena Karasick and composer and musician Frank London which de- and re-constructs the popular mythos of Salomé through a self-referential nexus of the printed word, visual art, and music. As Karasick notes in her introduction to the 2017 University of Padova Press edition of the poem, “throughout Christian tradition, Salomé has been tagged as an evil murderess notorious for beheading St. John the Baptist”.[1] Karasick, London, and their collaborators, instead, present the figure of Salomé in new light, as “a hero – a freedom fighter; a liberationist [who] rejoices in her sexuality, in transgressive passion and female eroticism”.[2] Be it in print (through which one’s reading experience is rendered immersive through engaging typesetting and prefaced with visceral artwork), experienced as a multimedia staged production, or as made possible most recently, a recorded album, Salomé: Woman of Valor seeks to reclaim the figure of Salomé by confronting her representational history established through the media—the ground—in which she has been cultivated, reconfiguring the recovered Salomé herself as the ground to the figure of her previously established mythos.
“With phallocentric fervor” the figure of Salomé, Karasick further explains, “has been serially exploited by Gustave Flaubert, Charles Bryant, Oscar Wilde, Richard Strauss, forever entrenching her in social consciousness, as a dangerous woman, a praying mantis who cannibalizes the head of her lover”.[3] The multimedia and multiformat experience of Salomé: Woman of Valor affords confrontation with each of these perpetrators of falsified myth simultaneously, reappraised from the perspective of the digital age. Marshall McLuhan proposed in Understanding Media that, “artists in various fields are always the first to discover how to enable one medium to use or to release the power of another” and it is the totality of the Salomé myth to which the project constitutes an anti-environment, a vantage point from which to probe unquestioned patterns of our environment.[4] Noting the centrality of anti-environments to social equilibrium, McLuhan, in his collaboration with Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting, mused that “it is not that there is anything wrong with the old environment, but it simply will not serve as navigational guide to the new one”: a point made abundantly clear through Adeena’s introduction and author’s note, which displaces the presumed authority of past artistic renderings.[5]
Karasick, in fact, concludes her author’s note stating that by “seizing and displacing the colonial narrative, [Salomé] accumulates a heredity. And thus, through the linking of modalized histories and referents, Salomé: Woman of Valor restages cultural temporalities into the invention of tradition and history becomes an irreducible legacy inscribed through a labyrinth of vertiginous exigencies, a vortex of possibilities and substitutions that makes untenable any supremacist claim to cultural mastery”.[6] Self-referentially emerging from and collapsing into her own legacy, Salomé: Woman of Valor is the work of what Marshall McLuhan would call ‘serious artists.’ As Richard Cavell recalls, “it is the ability to discern the pattern within the whirling vortex that distinguishes the artist”.[7] Salomé, as she appears in Woman of Valor, deconstructs the vortex which surrounds her, seduces it, and ultimately renders herself a functional anti-environment of her own history.
Deconstruction
The work of ‘serious artists’ who strive to erect anti-environments, for McLuhan, “becomes a necessary kind of research and probing” and Salomé: Woman of Valor is a product of several years of dedicated research and development.[8] If one choses to encounter the work, first, through the previously mentioned University of Padova Press edition, the introduction and author’s note offers a detailed deconstruction of Salomé’s historiography and representation, amusingly prompting one reviewer to call the appended critical apparatus “pretty heavy going”, recalling times they were “back in one of those Derrida seminars in grad school”.[9] The reviewer, Mark Scroggins, suggests “this prefatory material does a sturdy job of tracing the theoretical underpinnings and implications of what Karasick’s up to” with which I agree, despite Scroggins’ questionable suggestion to “save it for later, and immerse yourself directly into Salomé’s wild, whirling dance of language and desire”.[10] For those who only know Salomé from the sounds of Strauss, surprising revelations derived of deconstruction abound which, in my opinion, only invite the uninitiated further within the experience.
“According to Jewish History”, the reader discovers, “there were three women named Salomé” who are collapsed in one in the historic imagination. “Salomé”, Karasick suggests, “thus carries the weight of both her genetic lineage and the cultural heredity of her name”.[11] Indeed, the totality of Salomé is self-referentially confronted with herself throughout the book component of the project and as Karasick explains, “Salomé has long been fraught with contradiction, and as such, the work intertextatically references both ancient and pop cultural idioms, drawing from and celebrating this conflictual history”.[12] Following the introductory notes are the series of poems which constitute the particular edition of the book, a chapbook, and libretto of the musical and stage productions. I chose to investigate the poem itself via the chapbook available through Gap Riot Press in Toronto.
Turning to the chapbook’s cover art (identical to that of the University of Padova Press edition), the reader is immediately confronted with the image of Salomé, portrayed by Karasick, displaying the severed head of London as John the Baptist. Karasick reads the imagery of the severed head as firmly rooted in historical ritual, and in the work functions as a “site of multidisciplinarity, multiplicity, dialogy. Separated, the head foregrounds the thinking body, a site of the absence presence, of lost referents, of apostrophic spectrality. And also, crucially, the separation of the head from the body pays homage to the Kabbalistic notion of the separation of the primordial letters”.[13] The staunch irony, for this reviewer, was that the emphasis on the head—situated in the foreground of the photograph—additionally implies that it is the vicious past-history facing judgment against the background of Salomé herself who appears fiercely unapologetic.
Seduction
The chapbook features a relatively short introduction, which fulfills the same foregrounding function as the previously discussed academic introduction, reinforcing the flipped perception of narrative implied by the cover art. The poems proceed as scenes in a larger narrative and collapse historical references with popular culture, retelling the narrative while contesting it. The typesetting of the book likewise critiques its own structures, with several scenes appearing in specially formatted arrangements forcing attention to both form and content.
Karasick’s play with form and content is made most evident in the penultimate and concluding scenes of the narrative. Scene 13 begins with an address from Herod to Salomé, probing her desires. Upon turning the page, one is confronted with a blood-spattered arrangement of text encapsulating Salomé’s response to Herod’s inquiry: “Just use your head or turn your head, but Give me head”.[14] Despite the lack of historical justification for her original depiction, Karasick’s Salomé erotically demands that history; reclaims it as her own, and by providing a means of reflection thereof, effectively neutralizes it. Salomé’s appropriation of her own mythos is secured in the final scene in her concluding monologue, a direct address to John the Baptist: “And i will kiss thy myth, Iokhanam. i will kiss it now. i will bite it with my teeth as one bites rapt truth”.[15] The poem, and Salomé’s address concludes “And on your lips, the taste of bold lobbying the taste of love; love they say, like scattered lace. I have kissed your myth”,[16] both accepting and rejecting her history on her own terms.
Function
The poem, presented as a libretto, is no less imaginative. Though, given its functional nature, it is not as copiously adorned with typesetting gloss, some poems still receive special treatment, drawing attention to the form and content of words. Most importantly, however, is that the libretto underpins both the staged production and album.
Frank London’s music for Salomé: Woman of Valor is derived from a number of sources. He told reviewer Alexander Varty that “people know [him] from klezmer, but really avant-garde jazz is [his] home turf, and also different Middle Eastern musics and Indian musics and Arabic musics are all things [he’s] studied”.[17] He elaborated to the reviewer that what he “tried to do with the music is that [he’s] taken all these elements and created kind of a dreamy world that is a mix of intellectualism and popular culture. It’s abstract, but it’s got a narrative. It’s intellectual, and then it’s really a punch in the gut. It’s very literal, and then all of a sudden it’s nothing but an abstract dance piece. What we’re trying to do is to create a new world—one which goes with a new way of telling this old story”.[18]
The album opens with Karasick’s alluring performance of Salomé’s invocation, “Come / in the thickness of / history mystery mastery matrices” and invitation to the audience to join her within her vortex, “come with me / through borders orders laws codes / of urgent perversion”.[19] Following the conclusion of the opening scene we encounter what London titles the “Song of Salomé”—a sultry number which appropriately also accompanies Salomé’s concluding address to John the Baptist and her entire constructed history. For a musicologist approaching this work, the musical curiosity remains “The Dance of the Seven Veils”. While vaguely evocative of the exoticism utilized by Strauss to mark Salomé’s alleged ‘otherness’, the use of musics such as those chosen by London once again renders Salomé a background from which such exoticism can be observed in the foreground. London admitted in the previously mentioned interview that he “[wished he] could be so smart to say that [he] intentionally focused on that intersectionality in [his] choice of musical references,” but “alas, it’s not exactly so. But [he thinks] it will read that way”.[20] Despite the lack of intentional musical referential meaning, London’s score, once again, allows Salomé to construct her past on her own terms, acting as a functional anti-environment to her earlier representations.
Conclusion
Where Karasick and London’s collaboration challenges the content of Salomé’s mythos, other reviewers have noted the challenge this work, performed as a stage production represents to broader established traditions of performance art. Marshall McLuhan spoke of the importance of “total understanding of the artistic function in society,” elaborating that “it will no longer be possible merely to add art to the environment”.[21] From this perspective, their collaboration is not an addition to the Salomé mythos but a collapsing and retrieval of it, and a challenge to the means of its dissemination.
The stage show mirrors the multivalent nature of the overall project, collapsing Karasick’s poetry, London’s music, choreographed dance, and film into a production which one reviewer was lost for words to describe. Despite garnering some comparison, “spoken word accompanied by music isn’t [exactly] opera,” writes Chris Ruel.[22]Interestingly, the reviewer continues to describe the advantageous perspective Karasick and London’s work provides, seemingly echoing McLuhan’s stated purpose of the ‘serious artist’: “since London and Karasick did a significant amount of research on the historical Salome, the work is worth an opera fan’s time as it places Strauss’ “Salomé” in context as historical fiction, not fact, and it enlarges our toolbox for understanding operatic work in a cross-disciplinary way”,[23] rendering the invisible visible as par McLuhan’s notion of anti-environment.[24]
Indeed, for McLuhan, “the role of the artist is to create an anti-environment as a means of perception and adjustment. Without an anti-environment, all environments are invisible”.[25] By confronting past biases on their own terms through an intertextual, multisensory web of media, Karasick and London’s hot take through cool media renders the figure of Salomé an anti-environment who flips from to figure to ground, affording a vantage point to reappraise not only her myth but the means through which it has been propagated.
[1] See: “Introduction” in Adeena Karasick, Salomè: Donna di Valore (Padova: University of Padova Press, 2017).
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Routledge, 1964), 60.
[5] Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), xxiii.
[6] See: “Author’s Note” in Adeena Karasick, Salomè: Donna di Valore (Padova: University of Padova Press, 2017).
[7] Richard Cavell, McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 10.
[8] Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), xxiii.
[9] Mark Scroggins, “From the Page to the Stage – Mark Scroggins Reviews Adeena Karasick’s Spoken-Word Opera ‘Salomé – Woman of Valor,” The Dreaming Machine, December 1, 2018.
[10] Ibid.
[11] See: “Author’s Note” in Adeena Karasick, Salomè: Donna di Valore (Padova: University of Padova Press, 2017).
[12] Ibid.
[13] See: “Introduction” in Adeena Karasick, Salomè: Donna di Valore (Padova: University of Padova Press, 2017).
[14] Adeena Karasick, Salomé: Woman of Valor (Toronto: GapRiot Press, 2017).
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Alexander Varty, “Salomé: Woman of Valor reimagines a mistold myth at the Chutzpah Festival,” The Georgia Straight, March 1, 2018.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Adeena Karasick, Salomé: Woman of Valor, libretto.
[20] Alexander Varty, “Salomé: Woman of Valor reimagines a mistold myth at the Chutzpah Festival,” The Georgia Straight, March 1, 2018.
[21] Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 7.
[22] Chris Ruel, “Off the Beaten Track: Setting the Salome Record Straight with London/Karasick’s ‘Salomé: Woman of Valor,’ Opera Wire, October 3 2020.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Marshall McLuhan, “The Emperor’s Old Clothes,” in The Man Made Object (ed. By G Kepes); reprint in Marshall McLuhan Unbound, edited by E. McLuhan and W. T. Gorodon (LA: Ginko Press), 20.
[25] Reproduced in: Robert K. Logan, “Awareness, Involvement, and Detachment: Understanding McLuhan’s Notions of the Subliminal, Narcissus Narcosis, Figure/Ground, and the Anti-Environment,” New Explorations in Media Ecology 18 1&2 (2019): 102.
