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.

Ballet and modern dance are aesthetic endeavors which utilize the human body as their primary instrument of expression. It therefore has been suggested by some dance theorists and authorities that competent aesthetic performance in these idioms requires support from enhanced physiologic capabilities including flexibility; muscular strength, power, and endurance; and cardiovascular endurance (American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, and Recreation, 1974, p. 405; Arnheim, 1980, pp. 74-85; Fitt, 1988, pp. 318-319; H'Doubler, 1974, pp. 150-151). However, original scientific investigations of dance physiology are in their infancy and have not yet fully substantiated these commonly held assumptions.

English sociologist of art Janet Wolff says that all art is situated both historically and in relation to the status groups that produce it and share a taste for it. Tracing the relationships between the situation and the art is the difficult task of the sociology of art.

The theoretical model used by art historians results in their focusing heavily on the body of art itself, showing how styles influence and develop out of each other. Alternatively, the “interpretive” theory of anthropologist Clifford Geertz—described in his essay, “Art as a Cultural System” —emphasizes the idea that the meaning system of the art participates in the larger meaning system of the culture: the larger system provides the key to the art.