The Resurrection of Loïe Fuller

Loïe Fuller, born Mary-Louise Fuller in Illinois, has been variously thought of as a progenitor of cinema, modulated theatre lighting, and modern dance. Dancing and choreographing in Paris around the turn of the century as La Loïe, she embodied the art nouveau movement. As early as her first important audition she scrupulously protected the integrity of her art from a trail of imitators. This pivotal figure and feminist pioneer has received too little attention in full-length studies, argue the authors of two new books on Fuller. They also reveal clues as to why Fuller’s work was disavowed. Her art and feminism still challenge convention, and her “unfeminine” electrical innovations overshadowed her dancing. Her own writing about her work is overblown; her large personality wasn’t inviting, and she was not physically glamorous. Audiences and artists of the day made an icon of her nevertheless. But sexist and ageist attitudes persisted. An overweight and dowdy thirty-three year old Fuller was ridiculed when she danced Salome. When modernity established itself, art nouveau was dismissed as “decorative” and Fuller with it. These historians resurrect her, confirming Fuller’s own prescient belief in herself.

In Electric Salome Rhonda Garelick compares Fuller’s performance to the peeling of onion skins that Ibsen wrote about in Peer Gynt. The study can also be read in that spirit, as a spiraling toward deeper intuition about its subject—a peeling of skins to reveal not a kernel of truth, but the big picture. Though Ann Cooper Albright’s Traces is prepared by similarly iterating the work of Fuller, it is through performance that she arrives at her exhaustive portrayal, which is loaded with kernels of truth but somehow not as revelatory. We hear much about her affinity with Fuller through performing her dances and about her process of researching Fuller. As an artist, Albright draws a visual picture for us. Her empathy is evident in her description, for example, of a sketched Fuller solo, La danse des mains, “which portrays four sets of hands in different expressive gestures; clawing the air, commanding attention, holding something, or simply reaching toward the sky.” Though neither book can offer the luxury of first-hand observation of Fuller’s movement, Albright can make us feel that we had.

Albright’s thesis is metaphysical and existential; one anticipates this from her subtitle Absence and Presence, though she doesn’t get to the meat of that until late in the book. She discusses Fuller in visual terms: light, space, and color. Fuller wanted to dance with light. She brought modulation to theatrical lighting and was inspired by looking at fountains with light coming through the streams of water. She presaged modern dance’s notion of activation of stage space, from her origins in the dancehall. The nineteenth-century mistrust of color as promiscuous and feminine is the context in which Fuller’s work was received. But its effect and her achievement were diminished, dismissed as being too variable and dependent on conditions and perceptions. In describing the formal, painterly elements in Fuller’s work, Albright quotes Baudelaire, “Color coalesces our knowledge of the thing rather than defines.” She offers Mallarmé’s notion that the dancer leaves a signature, “a corporeal writing.”

Traces employs the word “phantasmagoria,” a blurring of the truth, to describe the way in which Fuller’s art participated in blanketing fin-de-siècle economic realities. The symbolist painters and writers articulated a similar spirituality and Albright draws on their outlook. For example, she reads Fire Dance as a work in which Fuller battled the dark with her flame-like body. Albright also makes the important point that Fuller’s art came about at a time when women’s bodies were restrained by corsets, and that Fuller’s manipulation of her costume had bold implications for sexual identity—she, inside her silks, took...