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Valentine de Saint-Point

On April 3,1917, dancer Valentine de Saint-Point performed at New York City's Metropolitan Opera House. It is accepted as common knowledge (a term which may be stretching the point somewhat, given the relatively small body of writings which refer to her) that she was a) a Futurist, b) one of the very few, if not the only, female Futurists, and c) the only, if not one of the very few, Futurists to perform in New York. Actually, none of these “facts” is entirely documented. In this essay, I will leave the third point untouched, assuming this aspect of Saint-Point's singularity to be at least relatively accurate. The second point I will deal with obliquely; that is, rather than debating whether her position as a woman among the Futurists was unique, I will consider how she saw being female as meaningful in her work. The first point interests me as well—again, obliquely. I will not argue here for or against Saint-Point's definitive categorization as a Futurist. Instead, by verbally reconstructing a performance and analyzing a body of written work related to it, I will examine Saint-Point's associations with Futurism and other experimental movements in performance taking place within the same general timeframe.