Vision of Adorée Villany: The Naked Dancer's Body as Art

This article contributes to the analysis of the naked dancer's body as art in the emergence of modern dance. Using the dance artist Adorée Villany and her extensive touring in the Nordics from 1914 to 1920 as a case study, the article highlights a cultural conflict regarding the view of nude dancing as art. Villany was controversial during her time for insisting that the dancer's naked body is an artistic material and expression. In moral debates, she was accused of ‘decadence in disguise’. Despite her frequent touring in the Nordic countries, Villany is largely absent in Swedish dance history. In this article, Villany's dance work and art theory, described in her 1912 book Tanz-Reform und Pseudo-Moral, are examined in discourses of dance in the Swedish national and regional press, and her photographs are situated as part of the visual culture of modern dance. It is revealed that there was an opening for a more radical reformation of dance at the turn of the century, in which the naked body was decoupled from being primarily an object of moral indignation.