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

In this vibrant and scholarly text, Rhonda Garelick re-examines Loie Fuller's contribution to the development of modernist dance and drama performance at the start of the twentieth century. She examines the distinctive role played by Fuller – an untrained American dancer with a background in cabaret and burlesque – as she established an unparalleled career in dance in Paris, which she sustained and renewed for over three decades from 1892 to her death in 1928. Throughout this text, the author draws upon the narrative of Fuller's extraordinary life in lively detail, including her managing to live openly as a lesbian in Paris. Equally compelling is Garelick's persuasive skill in resituating Fuller within a range of contemporary contextual strands. For instance, Fuller's immersion in the study and development of new, imaginative lighting designs and projections brought her into close contact with contemporary innovations in medical science (observation of cancer cells), cinema (she made several films), and the use of phosphorescence (used to increase luminosity in the costumes for her dancers).

Fuller speedily absorbed an eclectic range of innovations and used them in her stagecraft. For example, Garelick writes, "When [Thomas] Edison placed her hand inside the machine [a fluoroscope] she was thrilled to see her flesh turn translucent, to see her body's solidity dissolve. She imagined at once a theatrical application" (39). Such sharp aesthetic focus, combined with business acumen, seems to fit uneasily with Fuller's public image as "the dancing fairy" (213). In highlighting the apparent contradictions in Fuller's public personae, Garelick exposes how the spectacular and ephemeral quality of Fuller's art form was grounded in rigorous, experiential research that spanned and fully engaged with the different art movements of the period.

Throughout the text Garelick repeatedly calls Fuller "disingenuous," as her statements about her art and methods are shown to conflict with her behaviour. Fuller avowed that her carefully crafted stage creations were reliant on good fortune – "She habitually insisted, for example, upon the accidental nature of her discoveries" (19), writes Garelick – but in her treatment of, for instance, Hoffman's The Sandman, Fuller was judicious and aesthetically calculating, "shunting aside [Hoffman's] concerns of adulthood, sexuality, and obsession" (142). A similar process is noted in Fuller's presentation of Salome as "an innocent little girl" (142). Garelick suggests that these moves act "as a cover for a more complicated affect" (143), which allowed Fuller to explore human nature, sexual drives, the relationship between illusion and reality, and the transformation of the body through mechanized means.

Dissatisfied with the tendency of critics to "relegate Fuller to 'Pioneer Status"' (9), Garelick addresses the subtle and complex relationship Fuller had with modernist performance: she embraced, and indeed anticipated, many of its emerging tenets, while she retained links to earlier forms, such as Romantic ballet. For instance, rather than following the conventional view of Fuller as a clear transition from European ballet to American modern dance, Garelick suggests that Fuller's performances exhibit an unsettled dialogue with each form. Informed by her detailed research into the traces left by Fuller's performances, including contemporary responses to them, Garelick reinterprets selected productions by comparing them with the themes and staging of Romantic ballet in chapter three and with developments in American modern dance in chapter four. I was not always convinced by the links suggested, particularly between Fuller's performances and Martha Graham's Lamentation, in which the differences seem more obvious than the similarities. However, the significance of the book is not in whether the reader concurs with the fine details but in the reopening and exploration of the debate about Fuller's relationship to several forms of dance.

It is unusual and refreshing to read a text on Fuller that seeks to reappraise her work by bringing together her technical achievements in stagecraft and her bodily means of engaging with them. Garelick makes very good use of contemporary photographic, written, and filmic sources in undertaking the...