Disappearing Mermaids: Staging White Women’s Mobility through Aquatic Performance at the New York Hippodrome

Oct 26, 2026

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Disappearing Mermaids examines the New York Hippodrome’s recurring tank act in which rows of women in martial costumes marched into a deep water tank and vanished. Tracing the act from early-1920s programs that framed the missing performers as a spectacle, the study links audience fascination and anxiety to broader cultural concerns about modern white women’s mobility during the Progressive Era. It situates the Hippodrome within evolving practices of female choreography, chorus formation, and the managed production of uniform whiteness.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages21

Reading Time53 min

AccessFree to download

Disappearing Mermaids: Aquatic tank spectacle

The repeated “disappearing” act and audience reaction

Progressive Era context for white women’s mobility

Chorus girl staging and choreographic management

Theatre Survey (2023), 64, 3–23 doi:10.1017/S0040557422000527 ARTICLE Disappearing Mermaids: Staging White Women’s Mobility through Aquatic Performance at the New York Hippodrome Sunny Stalter-Pace English, College of Liberal Arts, Auburn University, Auburn, AL, USA Email: [Sls0009@auburn.edu](Sls0009@auburn.edu) The New York Hippodrome theatre brought together many different types of performance on its massive stage. Its opening production in 1905, for instance, included circus acts, a ballet, and a fictionalized Civil War battle (Fig. 1) . Many of the acts focused on a key feature in the theatrical environment, a water tank beneath the apron of the stage that could be filled to a fourteen-foot depth. High divers plunged into the tank; in shows with an “ice ballet,” its water was frozen into a skating rink; for a production of HMS Pinafore, a replica ship floated in its water with Brooklyn Navy Yard sailors in the rigging. Yet one tank act repeated and was recalled more than any of the others: a phalanx of women in martial costumes who marched solemnly, row after row, into the water and disappeared. Somewhere between a military drill and a magic trick, the sight of the girls submerging in the tank stood out even among the many spectacular acts. Like other large chorus routines, it highlighted the group’s size and synchronization. What made the act most striking, though, was its end in self-destruction. Hippodrome prima donna Nanette Flack recounts the scene’s effect: “With each descending row, the gasps from the audience became louder and louder. It was realized that over a hundred girls weren’t drowned at every performance, but the effect was absolutely weird, and how it was accomplished mystified nearly everyone beyond the footlights.”1 By the early 1920s, the disappearing girls—sometimes called mermaids or “water guards”—were a standard part of the show.2 Programs for Good Times (1920) and Better Times (1922) called attention to their absence, following their act listing with the question,“Where do they go?” In the genealogy of this evolving act, I suggest that the audience’s ambivalent fascination with the disappearing mermaids stood in for a broader cultural interest in and anxiety over modern white women’s mobility. The New York Hippodrome was most dominant as a cultural institution during the second half of the Progressive Era, a period in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American life when technological innovation, political reform, and waves of immigration and internal migration reshaped the country. One of the defining characteristics of this period was the growing presence of young, active © The Authors, 2023 . Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Society for Theatre Research, Inc. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence ([https://creative](https://creative)[ ](https://creative)[commons.org/licenses/by/4.0/](commons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. [https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040557422000527](https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040557422000527) Published online by Cambridge University Press 4 Sunny Stalter‐Pace Figure 1 . Vintage postcard view of the New York Hippodrome showing signage for The Raiders and A Yankee Circus on Mars (12 April–9 December 1905) . Souvenir Post Card Co., New York. From the collection of Michael Gnat. women within urban life.3 Women moved to American cities for economic opportunity, engaged in sports and dancing that allowed them increasing physical freedom, and, while grouped together into large assemblies, demonstrated for their right to strike, and protested for their right to vote. Women dominated the popular stage during this time as well. Whether they sang, imitated other celebrity performers, or danced the “Dance of the Seven Veils,” female performe

FAQs

What is the main spectacle discussed in the article?

The article centers on a repeated Hippodrome tank act where women in martial costumes march into the water and then disappear.

Why did the disappearing mermaids stand out among other Hippodrome performances?

The act’s end result involved self-destruction-like disappearance, producing a heightened and ambivalent audience reaction compared with other stage effects.

How does the article connect the act to the Progressive Era?

It situates the Hippodrome as a key cultural institution in the Progressive Era, linking interest in staged female mobility to broader social transformations involving women’s urban presence and physical freedom.

Oct 26, 2026

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