Dance of the Seven Veils
From here, there is much lengthy dialogue in which Herod offers her a reward, she requests the head, Herod tries to talk her out of it, and eventually gives in. Upon receiving it, she waxes eloquent about her love for this man that she had barely met, then kisses the corpse's lips.
As you can see, this script does not specify in the text that the dance must be seductive, or that it must consist of removal of veils one after another. Although I have not yet read historical records describing how it was actually staged in the 1896 and 1902 productions, it's possible that Wilde may have instructed the director to interpret his script that way.
Richard Strauss' Opera
Inspired by Wilde's play and its enormous success in its 1902 debut in Berlin, Richard Strauss created an opera based on the story. In 1905, the opera made its highly successful premiere performance in Dresden.
The opera further popularized the story, and provided a sort of appeal to prurient interest during a sexually-repressed era when "art" was the only publicly acceptable vehicle for portraying nudity. The seven-veil striptease of Salomé and the Orientalist paintings depicting nude or nearly-nude Middle Eastern women were the pornography of their time.
Today, when Strauss' opera is performed, many opera companies choose to clothe Salomé solely in her veils, leaving her completely naked when she removes the final one.
Meanwhile, in the U.S.
In 1893, Middle Eastern dance arrived in the U.S. at the Chicago world's fair and stirred up a scandal of its own, as shocked Americans watched fully-clad dancers move their torsos in ways that the fashionable corsets worn by U.S. women of the time would never have permitted. A promoter named Sol Bloom advertised this scandalous dance form as "belly" dancing, and that's how Oriental dance came to be known by that name in the U.S. and Europe even today.
The Vaudeville circuit gleefully embraced the public interest aroused by the scandal and created their own interpretation of it called the "hoochy coochy". Over the ensuing decades, this eventually evolved into the modern-day striptease.
In parallel, Hollywood picked up on the inspiration created by Wilde's play and Strauss's opera. Maude Allen made her acting and dancing debut in "Vision Of Salomé" in 1903.
Soon, follow-on movies did their own interpretations of Salomé and stage productions of Wilde's play and Strauss's opera made their own contributions to the awareness of the "dance of the seven
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