Brainchild of Adeena Karasick and Frank London, Salomé: Woman of Valor is a radical re-telling of the story of Salomé.  This multi-disciplinary performance re-visions Salomé through a feminist Jewish lens, translating the apocryphal figure not only as a narrative of violence and desire, but of scapegoating and our contemporary preoccupation with erotic and aesthetic transgression.

Salomé: Woman of Valor is comprised of Karasick's libretto and Spoken Word performance; the Jewish/ Arabic/ Bhangra/ Free Jazz compositions of Grammy award winning composer and musician Frank London; internationally celebrated dancers, Rachel Brice (Tribal Belly Dance) and Jesse Zarritt (Ballet Modern Jazz); Tony Award winning Broadway Set Designer and Visual Director, Paul Clay; the soaring percussion of Deep Singh, virtuoso keyboardist/producer, Shai Bachar; the lettristic This Poem slides of Blaine Speigel; and the vispoetical animisms of Jim Andrews--who has also created this web site, which contains--especially for audience members with 'smartphones'--an interactive stir fry of Karasick texts, 17 short short vispo videos, and a page of links to Karasick youtube and pennsound videos and audio.

Violently misrepresented through history, throughout Christian tradition, Salomé has been tagged as an evil murderess notorious for beheading St. John the Baptist. With phallocentric fervor, she has been serially exploited by Gustave Flaubert, Charles Bryant, Oscar Wilde, Richard Strauss and Atom Egoyan, forever entrenching her in social consciousness as a dangerous woman, a female praying mantis who cannibalizes the head of her lover. But, ironically according to Jewish history (Scholion to Megillat Ta’anit, Shevat 2), Salomé, who descended from Jewish Royalty, (as the daughter of Herodias and stepdaughter of Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee), was not typified as a villain, but hailed a hero – a freedom fighter; who, in fact, liberated all the Jewish noblemen Herod had imprisoned. (Ant. 17: 173–9; 193). A liberationist who rejoices in her sexuality, in transgressive passion; the ardorous fervor of female eroticism.

The text itself is inscribed with this sentiment. Between the revealed and the concealed, hidden and manifest, it traverses through Conceptual homophonic translations of the Strauss play and Oscar Wilde’s monologues, midrashic interpretations, Kabbalistic infusions, as well as a re-working of the Song of Songs (now Song of Salomé).

Drenched with semi(o)tic desire and in the spirit of feminist re-visionism, Salomé is re-contextualized, made new. Selections of the work were debuted opening night at the Tribeca New Music Festival in May 2014 at the Cell Theatre in New York and included screen projections by Guggenheim and Rome Prize winning filmmaker Abigail Child featuring a conceptual re-working / distorted mash-up of Charles Bryant’s 1923 black and white film with my text overlaid.

A selection of it was published in Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies & Gender Issues (Indiana University Press), The Daily Forward, performed in New York and Paris. The full show will debut Aug 13, 2015 at Drom in New York.

Salomé: Woman of Valor opens up an erotic arena where Salomé is not repeatedly victimized, scapegoated and silenced, but occupies a space of otherness and desire.