Electric Salome: Loie Fuller’s Performance of Modernism (review)

Two years ago a distinguished film scholar, visiting my campus to deliver a lecture on technology, cinema, and the 1900 World's Fair Exposition, characterized Loie Fuller as someone "lost to history." This was news to me, and I suspect to others in the audience, as well. Certainly the fame Fuller enjoyed during her lifetime evaporated long ago, but dancers and dance historians have never lost sight of her. Together with Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Dennis, Fuller is one of the trinity of founding mothers of twentieth-century American dance, innovators working at the same time, and in the same spirit, as those writers, painters, and musicians who created the forms we now call modernist. Fuller is no more lost to dance history than her contemporary (and admirer) Stéphane Mallarmé is lost to literary history, as a review of recent scholarship makes plain: Fuller's life and work lately have become a rich source of material for the investigations into gender, technology, sexuality, ethnicity, and performance that inform the burgeoning discipline of dance studies.

Try to find connections linking this scholarship to contemporary analyses of modernism, though, and we are forced to acknowledge the truth within the claim of Fuller's lostness: modernist studies has been slow to include dance within its scholarly investigations, a slowness that becomes notable when we consider the degree to which film, music, and the visual arts have been incorporated. Fuller may be far from lost to dance history, but most of dance history remains terra incognita for scholars of modernism (the long-canonical Ballets Russes and the recently canonized Josephine Baker being the exceptions that prove the rule). Thus Garelick's Electric Salome is important not only for its acutely intelligent reading of Fuller's work but also for its compelling demonstration of the importance of dance to contemporary mappings of the terrain of modernism.

A great deal of today's scholarly work on Fuller attends as much to her person as to her art. Born in 1862 in what is today Hinsdale, Illinois, Marie Louise Fuller was in many ways a typical American vaudeville trouper. She made her stage debut at the age of four and gamely took on every theatrical opportunity that presented itself before hitting the big time in 1892 with her "Serpentine Dance." Opening later that year at the Folies Bergère, and rapidly moving beyond the skirt dance genre of her early success, Fuller became such a sensation in Paris that she was given her own theater for the 1900 World's Fair. In ways that have become important for contemporary researchers, however, Fuller was anything but typical. Never conventionally beautiful, her years of celebrity came during a saftig middle age; a lesbian who enjoyed a long-standing relationship as well as passionate affairs (Queen Marie of Romania is believed to have been a lover), she produced quasi-abstract theatrical spectacles routinely praised for their "purity" and "chastity." A theatrical innovator and an early experimenter in cinema, she protected her commercial and artistic interests with an independent zeal unprecedented among women performers: her numerous technological inventions were covered by a series of patents, and she refused to employ house technicians for her performances, maintaining instead a private crew "sworn to secrecy about their techniques" (33–34). These aspects of Fuller's history understandably have tended to dominate recent scholarship, but it's easy to overplay the importance of her technological know-how, sexual self-determination, and shrewd Yankee business sense—to risk making the novel, even revolutionary, aspects of the life shoulder the interpretive interest that belongs to the dance. Electric Salome manages not only to sidestep this danger but also to show how an excessive interest in Fuller's biography distorts appreciation of her art. Keeping Fuller's work at the center of her analysis, Garelick reveals how, in emphasizing Fuller's "radical otherness . . . scholars have managed to overlook her deep connectedness to and relationship with dance...