Invisible Ink: Destiny and the Dance of Mata Hari

A dance/theater performance based on the life of Mata Hari. Written and directed by Nikki Appino with original choreography by Wade Madsen and an original score by Wayne Horvitz.

Project Description

Invisible Ink is a dance/theater performance based on the life of Mata Hari (1876-1917). The work is created for two actors, one singer, and a three-piece orchestra. Marguerite Zelle, a.k.a. Mata Hari, lived with her husband in the Dutch East Indies where she learned the native sacred dances of Java and Sumatra. She incorporated them into her "performances" (stripteases) when she changed her name to "Mata Hari" and hit the cabaret circuit of pre-WW1 Paris. This combination of the sacred and the profane created a sensation.

The enigmatic Mata Hari had little to do with the Dutch girl born Margaret Gertrude Zelle in 1876. At eighteen she married an officer and moved to Banjoe-Biroe, in the Dutch East Indies. There her abusive husband drank and kept a string of mistresses. She also had a child supposedly poisoned by a jealous servant. But the two remained together creating cons and blackmailing local landowners. She finally divorced her husband and was intent on supporting herself as a dancer, emulating the dances she had seen performed in Java. She traveled to Paris in 1903 to make her reputation, but only found work as a stripper, and her ambitions were dashed. After a year or two as a streetwalker she returned to Holland, gathered as much money as she could and returned to Paris with a new wardrobe and a new name, Mata Hari. Her plan worked and she was summoned by the curious nightclub owners who wished to see "the most exotic dancer in the world". She became a smash hit and toured the great European capitals. She kept a book of all her press clippings and a second book full of hundreds of letters from Europe's most powerful men, correspondences that could easily be converted to blackmail. In 1912 the story goes that she "became a spy" for the Germans. After the machinations of war and conflicting details about her spy activities she became expendable and was executed by a French firing squad in 1917.

Mata Hari created and recreated herself using the tools she had, her mind and her body. We will never know who she really was, but Invisible Ink constructs her story using text, dance, and song in an attempt to capture this "elusive spy".