The Woman Who Stole Her Own Identity
I guess if she had been famous, I wouldn't be talking about her. The fact that her name appeared only once, during one of my wanderings through some obscure archival website, was enough to make me curious.
Why was she forgotten? Well, we all know how easily history forgets women. But that's not what we're here for. What interests me is how fantastically strange she was.
First of all, she wasn't particularly easy to grasp. Even her name kept changing, as if she were constantly trying to outperform herself.
Daisy Peterkin, La Belle Dazie, Mlle Dazie, Le Domino Rouge. Four names, one woman. Or perhaps four women, depending on how you look at it.
I'll make a few assumptions along the way. There isn't an abundance of information about her, and I'm not pretending to write an academic paper. This is the fruit of my research and imagination, which is rather the point of the Cabinet of Poetic Defiance: to find inspiration in the cracks of history.
So, who was Daisy?
An American dancer who conquered stages across Europe and the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. A celebrated toe dancer, an eccentric performer, an experimenter who borrowed from her contemporaries, including Loïe Fuller and her revolutionary use of colored lights.
She was filling theatres, winning praise, making a name for herself.
And then, for some reason, she decided to get rid of that name.
Or rather, to hide behind another.
Enter Le Domino Rouge.
A mysterious woman with a face concealed behind a red mask. Nobody knew who she was. She appeared onstage, in hotels, in restaurants, refusing to reveal her identity. She reportedly spoke with a foreign accent, allowing people to imagine she was Russian.
The press went mad for her.
Who was this woman in the red mask? Where did she come from? What was she hiding?
The less she revealed, the more everyone wanted to see her.
The whole thing was apparently a carefully orchestrated publicity stunt, devised with her manager, Mark Luescher. But I like to imagine that, somewhere along the way, the disguise took on a life of its own.
Because the most fascinating part is that she was already famous. Why would someone who had worked so hard to become somebody suddenly decide to become somebody else?
Perhaps because a mystery is sometimes more interesting than its answer.
And then, just when the mystery had done its job, she removed the mask.
Le Domino Rouge was none other than Mlle Dazie.
A revelation! The great unveiling! The woman everyone had been talking about was the woman they already knew.
She had managed to make herself famous twice, simply by disappearing in between.
Before Margiela or Banksy, there was Le Domino Rouge.
What's interesting is that all three understood the power of a missing face, but played entirely different games with it.
Martin Margiela withdrew his image from the fashion industry, refusing the cult of the designer-celebrity. No public portrait, no conventional interviews, no grand bow at the end of a show. His absence redirected attention towards the clothes, the process, the work itself.
Banksy turned anonymity into an artistic signature. His hidden identity became inseparable from his mythology. The unknown person behind the work became a story almost as compelling as the work itself.
Dazie, meanwhile, did quite the opposite.
She concealed her face to attract attention, then revealed it to attract even more.
Margiela disappeared so we would look at the work. Banksy remains hidden so the mystery survives. Dazie disappeared so we would look at her twice.
Three different ways of manipulating the same thing: anonymity.
And Dazie wasn't finished playing with appearances.
She incorporated jiu-jitsu into her dancing, an unlikely combination of grace and combat. At a time when women were fighting for their right to vote, and some suffragettes were learning martial arts to defend themselves against the police, it's tempting to see something political in her movements. Whether that was her intention, I couldn't say. But I do enjoy the image of a ballerina who could also throw you across the room.
Then came Salome, and the Dance of the Seven Veils.
A woman dancing her way through layers of fabric, revealing herself piece by piece, until there was supposedly nothing left to hide.
Another disguise, another unveiling. At this point, one might suspect she had developed a slight obsession with the subject.
And eventually, history forgot it all.
Daisy Peterkin, La Belle Dazie, Mlle Dazie, Le Domino Rouge.
Perhaps she would have enjoyed knowing that, more than a century later, someone is still trying to figure out who she was.
written by Anne-Lise
