In 1905, on the boards of Ernest Molier’s circus, Lady MacLeod peels off her memories like her veils as a Hindu dancer. Recently divorced, penniless, she is almost entirely stripped, in life as on stage. It is the memories of her former life in the Dutch colonies of Indonesia, alongside her husband, that will make her famous.
Fortunately, the traditional Javanese dances, of a refinement and a delicate slowness beyond the ordinary, of which each movement conceals a profound discourse, do not require any special skills to imitate them roughly.
Praise be to Shiva, the so-called scholars are not really. Thus, Émile Guimet, collector and founder of the homonymous museum, was dazzled by this lady who soon became the sun – Mata Hari in Indonesian. He arranges the rotunda of the museum library for her. She says she dances to honor Shiva, he arranges an altar for her on which is placed a bronze of the god in his form of Nataraja, king of dance.
Beneath his feet, he destroys and recreates the universe ad infinitum. Under those of Mata Hari, it is a place in society that is being built and which collapses twelve years later. For this show, which dubs the bayadere in the eyes of high society, Guimet preceded the “Brahmanic dances” with a conference on the subject and Mata Hari is adorned with jewelry from the museum’s collections.
Souvenirs or gifts, we will never see again the headdresses, the bracelets and the bras which constituted a curious getup for a dancer claiming the rites of Java. Because if the kejawen still defines Javanese culture today by intermingling Hinduism, Buddhism, animism and Islam, it is inconceivable that Mata Hari attended dances or theater involving women as naked as her on the improvised stage of the Guimet Museum.
Jewelery is a sacred art involving forces associated with the sun, fire and gold. The goldsmith touches on the esoteric and the fruit of his creation is gorged with a power of which he is no longer the master. The imperishable jewels are then part of a cosmology and can prove to be as beneficial as harmful for their wearers. For the moment, Mata Hari seems to benefit from it.
The day after this evening, the whole of Paris acclaimed him. Her fees fly away, she refines her stage costume with jewelers and Marguerite Cadolle, daughter of Herminie who invented the bra. For her, the Cadolle house creates metal adornments richly adorned with filigree cones and sprinkled with precious stones.
