Traces of Light: Absence and Presence in the Work of Loie Fuller, and: Electric Salome: Loie Fuller’s Performance of Modernism (review)

Two new studies by American scholars on the performer, dancer, and choreographer Loie Fuller have been published; both appeared in the same year—an odd coincidence that signals new interest in a hitherto marginalized historical person. Ann Cooper Albright’s book is beautifully made, with an unusual amount of care and attention to print and design detail. The cover is ablaze with yellow colors merging into orange and dark red. That must be the light onto which a photographic figure is projected, a figure whose costume of billowing silk forms the powerful wings of an archangel, rising in forceful movement and captured as an image at the most intense moment of motion. Rhonda Garelick’s book is also handsomely put together. It has a dark green cover that shows us a slightly ghostly photographic negative of a female figure. This figure does not seem to move but is still, sitting on a brick wall and posing for her picture to be taken. The focus of both volumes on the photographic image of a figure—gender ambiguous in one and visibly female in the other—is of course intentional. The use and integration of photography, light, electricity, and other new technology into stage performance made Fuller famous. Whereas one scholar indulges in movement, the other emphasizes stillness.

At the beginning of both books we are reminded that Loie Fuller, who captured and enthralled a Parisian audience and the French intelligentsia for three decades around the turn of the twentieth century, has been unjustly forgotten. Both scholars therefore attempt to “reweave Loie Fuller back into performance history” (Garelick 2007, 200). Cooper Albright in particular questions modernist assumptions, in which a canon is accepted that consists of either movement “abstraction” or “expression.” Fuller followed neither principle: she eluded a simple classification with her metamorphosis of performance and performer.

Cooper Albright’s research method—an “embodied approach” (3)—is dictated by her own career as a dancer and much “gut feeling” (5). Her flamboyant appropriation of Fuller is physical as well as intellectual. The attempt at reconstructing, or more precisely, experiencing, the physical aspect of Fuller’s performances dictates her understanding and analysis of the choreographies. The exploration begins as we witness the performer slipping into the costume and preparing for the performance; this performer is Cooper Albright. She identifies movement signatures—the “serpentine spiral”—as figurative motions (15). Her point of departure is thus the recognition that she has to “trace the inside action, the central torque and its sequential expansion into the periphery.” For her, these two forces—“inside torque and outside visual effect”—put Fuller’s performances in a category all their own (124) and offer a “substantially innovative and modern way of moving, one that also precipitated a radical new way of seeing bodies in motion” (15). This volume has six chapters that explore specific themes in Fuller’s oeuvre: inscriptions and representation in Fuller’s early period; dynamics of color and space in Fuller’s dances; Fuller and the World Exposition in 1900; female strategies employed by Fuller; expressions of the self and autobiographical acts; and the future of the relationship between body, image, and technology.

Cooper Albright’s view of Fuller is concentrated; she thus mentions little outside of Fuller’s strict performance career. Neither Italian futurism nor German expressionism is discussed. Yet surely these movements represent modernist worlds that emerged parallel to Fuller, whose relationship to Marinetti (for instance) was significant and has seen remarkable academic interest in the past years. Music exists only under the rubric “group compositions.” It is therefore impossible to find out what kind of music Fuller preferred and chose...