Dance and American Art: A Long Embrace

6. Loïe Fuller, Art Nouveau, and the Technological Present

177 Loïe Fuller, Art Nouveau, and the Technological Present 6 A merican-born Loïe Fuller (1862–1928) became, for a few decades, the world’s most famous dancer. Her relationship to the exotic dances of the “Orient” has been introduced in a previous chapter, but it was Fuller ’s parallel promulgation of technology that made her a unique cultural presence early in the twentieth century. In her practical adaptation of science to art, she was regarded as quintessentially American. Largely self-taught as dancer and choreographer, Fuller’s colorful background included appearances with American rodeos and the touring Wild West extravaganzas of Buffalo Bill.1 She dreamed of becoming an opera star as she began her career acting and doing a bit of dancing. Not until 1891, when she conceived a dance routine involving the waving of a filmy robe upon which varicolored lights were projected, did she attract real attention as a dancer. Fuller’s act was billed as the “Serpentine Dance,” and it would be the centerpiece of her early career because—and this is crucially important—it was seen as “artistic.” An early critic in New York declared that the “dancing garments of Miss Fuller, thrown into all sorts of lines and graceful rotatory movements, with ever-changing illumination are infinitely more artistic than the toe-dancing of the greatest prima ballerina.”2 And no less a poet than Yeats recalled, When Loie Fuller’s Chinese dancers enwound A shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth It seemed that a dragon of air Had fallen among dancers, had whirled them round Or hurried them off on its own furious path.3 In reality, Fuller began in the tradition of “skirt dancers,” her yards of billowing costumes controlled by hidden sticks and carefully orchestrated swoops and sways. But her antiformalist approach soon moved her beyond New York’s dance halls. The critical praise she received was Fuller’s ticket abroad, where greater glory awaited her on the continent. Her timing was remarkably fortunate , for her dance seemed eminently compatible with the ephemeral aspects of Symbolism and its visual expressions in Art Nouveau. Both were vital components of her art, although her use of ephemeral light effects was hardly unique. In late nineteenth-century painting the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists 178 “the comPlete actual Present” had already shown that changing light effects themselves could create a provocative new visual dance. One thinks of the tremulous light skipping across Monet’s sequential cathedral facades, of the glimmer of light on Renoir’s dancers, or the shimmering surfaces of Seurat’s studies for Le Chahut. In Fuller’s nonnarrative dances the body nearly disappeared under the abstract play of light on moving drapery. And, like Seurat specifically, she attempted to remove all trace of the artist ’s personality from the work. What all those visual artists learned, and what Fuller demonstrated onstage, was that light could perform the dance of time. Like light flickering over painted water, dance ennobles ordinary human movement . The convergence of painting’s obsession with changing light, combined with the evolving technology changing gaslight to electrical illumination—these things accompanied and influenced Loïe Fuller’s innovations in dance. Among the first visual artists to witness Fuller’s performances in Paris was James McNeill Whistler, who, as we have seen, had already drawn and painted many dancers. Not long after Fuller’s debut at the Folies Bergère on November 5, 1892, Whistler made a whole sheet of drawings of her (fig. 106).4 The dancer at rest stands in the central upper portion of the sheet, while in the surrounding images Whistler attempts to capture the swirling, evanescent draperies that describe complex curvilinear shapes around her as she moves. These are patterns comprising airy linear arabesques, which all but obscure the dancer’s body in several of the images—exactly the effect Fuller desired. In this sheet of drawings of Fuller, Whistler went far beyond his earlier dance subjects, which mostly caught dancers at rest.5 Now, watching Fuller, the artist had something a bit more challenging to draw: ephemeral but readable patterns Figure 106 James A. McNeill Whistler, Loïe Fuller, c. 1892, pen and black ink on off-white wove paper, 81 ⁄4 × 129 ⁄16 inches. (Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow) 179 loïe fuller, art nouveau, and the technologIcal Present traced by brilliantly lighted veils. It...