Loie Fuller

American choreographer

• Born: January 15, 1862
• Birthplace: Fullersburg, Illinois
• Died: January 1, 1928
• Place of death: Paris, France

A pioneer in the art of modern dance, Fuller created choreography that featured the manipulation of fabric and novel lighting effects. Her spectacular dances helped to create an enthusiastic audience for solo American dance performers.

Early Life

Loie (LOH-ee) Fuller was born in rural Fullersburg, Illinois. She apparently took a few dance lessons as a child, but it is doubtful that either the quality of instruction or her own interest in dance was high. She took singing lessons and appeared as a child performer at temperance lectures, holding colored charts depicting the liver. From this unlikely background emerged one of the pioneers in American modern dance.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the United States was a nation in the middle of reform fervor: dress reform, health reform, temperance, utopian communities, “physical culture” all movements destined to intertwine with the woman suffrage movement and influence the course of both theater and dance in the twentieth century. Loie Fuller, a shrewd, ambitious, and innovative young woman, was able to capitalize on these unique currents in health, politics, and the arts and create a novel form of theatrical presentation that was widely imitated.

Fuller did not set out to become a dancer. Dance as a performing art in the mind of the American public was either ballet (which was imported from Europe) or a combination of folk and social dances, acrobatic tricks, and burlesque performed as variety acts in vaudeville theaters or as part of touring pageants. Dance contests were popular entertainment, and men were the featured performers through the 1870’s and 1880’s. Audiences came to see familiar dance forms done by those who could do them better than they could themselves. Women seldom appeared without a male partner until the 1890’s, when a new form of entertainment called “skirt dancing” captivated audiences and legitimized solo women performers.

Large theatrical spectacles, part circus and part pageant, dominated the touring circuits. With names such as Nero and the Destruction of Rome (1886) and Egypt Through the Centuries (1892), these extravaganzas were often loosely based on historical events, with scant regard for authenticity. They included ballet, pantomime, acting, special technical effects, sets, costumes, and fantastical stories and legends, and they often featured casts of hundreds.

An actor who worked her way into the profession more by determination than by talent, Fuller entered the theater at a time when women with distinctive personalities were successful: All the major stars had, according to Elizabeth Kendall in Where She Danced (1979), “an unmistakable personal style. All the women headliners were idiosyncratic performers.” Fuller appeared in a variety of theatrical presentations, including comedies such as Little Jack Sheppard (1886), Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, and even her own play Larks. It was while rehearsing Quack, M.D. at the Harlem Opera House in were chosen in 1889, however, that she made the discovery that was to catapult her to world fame: The manipulation of silk fabric created fleeting impressions of flowers, animals, wind, water, and fire. (Fuller gave several accounts of the exact time and place of her fateful discovery over the course of her career, but 1889 is the most likely date.)

Life’s Work

Fuller was quick to recognize the marketability of her invention. She understood what audiences wanted to see and knew how to capture the spirit of the time and reflect popular taste. Sensing that her discovery was “artistic,” Fuller decided that the best place to showcase her art was Europe, the center of Western arts and culture. In 1892, she made her debut at the famous Folies Bergère in Paris. With special sticks hidden under yards of silk, she twirled, undulated, and waved her arms to music. Her body, hidden by the voluminous fabric, lit by electric lights under frosted panels of glass, performed the simplest of dance motions, accompanied by arm gestures. According to Kendall, “What she had found . . . was actually more an idea than a new method. It was ordinary dancing concealed and surrounded by veils.”

The dances Fuller choreographed all involved the creation of spectacular visual effects through the manipulation of fabric, color, light, and motion. Her “Serpentine Dance” of 1892 consisted of twirling around under yards of draped silk: Lights that shone onto the silk created the impression of clouds, butterflies, birds, flames, and flowers. Equally successful was her “Fire Dance”; when she stood on a glass panel that was lit from below, the changing red, yellow, and orange lights illuminating the silk made her appear to be consumed by fire, to the delight and astonishment of her audiences.

Fuller’s dances, with their curvilinear forms and organic shapes, combined with her use of technology, made her the darling of the Art Nouveau and the artistic circles of Paris. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec made a lithograph of her, Raoul Larche modeled her in an ormolu lamp, Art Nouveau glassworkers consulted her about colors and dyes, and poets and artists William Butler Yeats, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Auguste Rodin publicly praised and admired her.

A pioneer in technical lighting design, Fuller was fascinated by science and technology. She had her own laboratory in the basement of her house, where she worked on new discoveries, corresponded with scientists Pierre and Marie Curie about the use of newly discovered radium as a costume enhancement, and designed slide projectors with slides painted with liquid gelatin to create unusual lighting effects. Her first film, made in 1905 for Pathé, used slow motion, shadows, and negative printing.

From her success at the Folies Bergère, Fuller went on to perform at the Paris Exposition in 1900, return in triumph to the American stage, and tour Europe with a group of young dancers, billed as “Loie Fuller and Her Muses.” In Paris, Fuller’s work was seen by future dance pioneers Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis. According to Joseph Mazo (1977), Fuller predated Duncan in discarding the corset, using classical music, and training a company of dancers in her own style. Duncan joined Fuller’s troupe briefly, traveling with Fuller to Berlin and Vienna following the Paris Exposition.

Fifteen Years of a Dancer’s Life , Fuller’s autobiography, was published first in France in 1908 and then reprinted in English in London in 1915. In it, she describes her philosophy of art and dance, reflecting the aesthetics and enthusiasms of the early twentieth century. For Fuller, dance was motion, expressive of sensation and emotion. She wrote, “In the dance . . . the human body should . . . express all the sensations or emotions it experiences.” She believed that her art was naturally expressive, and disparaged formal dance training. Her dance, like Art Nouveau, attempted a return to natural and organic forms, using the discoveries of science and technology.

Although she was American, “La Loie” spent most of her performing career in Europe, where she was revered. Only after she acquired the cachet of a star “foreign” dancer was Fuller acclaimed in the United States. In this way, she was much like the slightly younger dance pioneers Duncan and St. Denis. Of the three, only St. Denis returned home from European success to create and sustain an American audience for modern dance. For the European audiences, jaded by centuries of academy-based ballet and art, these three American women were astonishingly vibrant. In Europe, according to Kendell (1979), “They were thought to be not just new kinds of artists but new kinds of personalities . . . they found in Europe the approval of an old, refined, and self-aware culture; Europe found in them a pre-civilized freshness.”

In 1909, Fuller toured New York and Boston, accompanied by fifty electricians and her group of women dancers. She performed her “Fire Dance” and danced as Salomé to the music of the Peer Gynt Suite. Although reviews in the New York Dramatic Mirror complained about the flimsiness of the women’s costumes, the shadowy effects of the lighting kept serious scandals at bay. True to her dress-reform upbringing, Fuller denounced the corset and proclaimed the dignity of her dances.

In the 1920’s, Fuller returned to her laboratory, finding further technological innovations to inspire her dances. Her so-called Shadow Ballets, performed in London in 1923, featured dancers who were sometimes only partially visible, and included an ominous, large shadow of a hand reaching for terrified dancers. Other dances from this period include choreography in which only certain parts of the dancer’s body are visible through streaks of light across the stage. In these and other dances, Fuller clearly demonstrates a multimedia approach to dance that was to be expanded in the 1960’s by choreographer Alwin Nikolais.

Fuller died in Paris of pneumonia in 1928. She had kept working until her death, always searching for new ideas and new methods of expression. She had many imitators, but none who created the same degree of magic and illusion.

Significance

Fuller’s pioneering spirit as an artist provided the inspiration for a second generation of American women dancers. She demonstrated that a woman alone on stage could command the attention of an audience and that other forms of dance besides classical ballet could be expressive and artistic. Her innovations in lighting design and stage technology influenced theatrical production for decades after her death. Fuller paved the way for later dance artists and their audiences to perceive dance as a serious art form capable of evoking deep emotions. Although her technique was not sophisticated, her emphasis on dance as a medium of expression that integrated music, motion, lighting, and costume paralleled the revolutionary ideas of the Russian ballet choreographer Michel Fokine and the innovations of the Ballets Russes.

American dancers Duncan and St. Denis both admired her work and drew inspiration from it. They also profited from Fuller’s popularity opening up venues for performance that had not existed previously and preparing audiences for an appreciation of the new dance forms.

Fuller’s rise to fame coincided with the rise of the woman suffrage movement, and she shared much of the missionary zeal of its founders and supporters. In championing a woman’s right to wear clothing that was healthy and liberating; in her unconventional life as a lesbian, artist, and celebrity; and in her emphasis on the dignity of women, Fuller was a pioneer in all aspects of her life, not simply as a dancer.

Bibliography

Anderson, Jack. Ballet and Modern Dance: A Concise History. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Book, 1986. An entertaining overview of the development of theatrical dance forms. Although Anderson’s material on Loie Fuller is not substantial, he does help place her work within the context of the emergence of modern dance.

Brown, Jean Morrison, ed. The Vision of Modern Dance. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Book, 1979. A compilation of essays by important modern dance choreographers and dancers, edited and introduced by Brown. The chapter on Loie Fuller features an excerpt from Fuller’s autobiography and gives a clear sense of what Fuller thought about her art.

Current, Richard Nelson, and Marcia Ewing Current. Loie Fuller, Goddess of Light. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997. The first English-language biography examines Fuller’s career and her influence on dance and art.

Kendall, Elizabeth. Where She Danced. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979. A thorough history of the emergence of modern dance at the turn of the century, with an emphasis on the social, political, economic, and aesthetic forces that shaped the women who were the pioneers of this art. Although Kendall focuses more on Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis than she does on Fuller, the social and historical information that she includes provides an essential background for understanding Fuller’s importance and contributions.

Kraus, Richard G., et al. History of the Dance in Art and Education. 3d ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1991. A general text that helps to contextualize the pioneers of Fuller’s generation and the early development of dance education in America.

Mazo, Joseph H. Prime Movers: The Makers of Modern Dance in America. 2d ed. Highstown, N.J.: Princeton Book Company, 2000. Mazo features eleven choreographers, from Loie Fuller to Twyla Tharp, whom he considers trailblazers of modern dance. The chapter on Loie Fuller is detailed and anecdotal, and it contains photographs of her dancing.