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

For three decades, beginning in 1892, Fuller captivated Paris with her spectacles of swirling fabric and colored light. Heavy of build, formed by vaudeville, resolute in projecting American innocence, and litigiously protective of her discoveries, she may have been as unlikely a modernist as she was a force in the history of dance. Without diminishing this singularity, Garelick aims to uncover important connections between her subject and modern drama, modern dance, Romantic ballet, and the rhetoric of empire. Some arguments work better than others—brilliant on Fuller's play with balletic priorities, Garelick is less convincing on how la Loie served "France's imperialist agenda"—but even the least persuasive readings of Fuller's metamorphic magic are sharp eyed, interesting, and informed. And for readers less familiar with the architect of The Phosphorescent Dance, the "mirror room," and the Ombres gigantesques, the book's greatest appeal may lie in its evocation of Fuller's technical inventiveness, her altogether startling genius for making the space of theater new.