Loie Fuller
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Loie_Fuller".

Loïe Fuller

Loie Fuller (also Loïe Fuller, born Marie Louise Fuller) (January 15, 1862 – January 1, 1928) was a pioneer of both modern dance and theatrical lighting techniques.

Career

Born in the Chicago suburb of Fullersburg, now Hinsdale, Illinois, Fuller began her theatrical career as a professional child actress and later choreographed and performed dances in burlesque (as a skirt dancer), vaudeville, and circus shows. An early free dance practitioner, Fuller developed her own natural movement and improvisation techniques. Fuller combined her choreography with silk costumes illuminated by multi-coloured lighting of her own design.

Although Fuller became famous in America through works such as Serpentine Dance (1891), she felt that she was not taken seriously by the public who still thought of her as an actress. Her warm reception in Paris during a European tour persuaded Fuller to remain in France and continue her work. A regular performer at the Folies Bergère with works such as Fire Dance, Fuller became the embodiment of the Art Nouveau movement. Her Serpentine Dance was filmed in 1896 by the pioneering film-makers Auguste and Louis Lumière.

Portrait of Loïe Fuller, by Frederick Glasier, 1902.

Loïe Fuller at the Folies Bergère

Fuller's pioneering work attracted the attention, respect, and friendship of many French artists and scientists, including Jules Chéret, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, François-Raoul Larche, Henri-Pierre Roché, Auguste Rodin, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Marie Curie. Fuller held many patents related to stage lighting including chemical compounds for creating color gel and the use of chemical salts for luminescent lighting and garments (stage costumes US Patent 518347). Fuller was also a member of the French Astronomical Society.

Loie Fuller's original stage name was "Louie".In modern French "L'ouie" is the word for a sense of hearing. When Fuller reached Paris she gained a nickname which was a pun on "Louie"/"L'ouie". She was renamed "Loïe" - this nickname is a corruption of the early or Medieval French "L'oïe", a precursor to "L'ouie", which means "receptiveness" or "understanding".

Fuller is responsible for the European tours of the early modern dancers (she was the first American modern dancer to perform in Europe), introducing Isadora Duncan to Parisian audiences and developing the acceptance of modern dance as a serious art form. Her 'Chinese dancers' were the subject of the second section of W.B. Yeats' poem 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen'.

After the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900, Fuller toured Europe with Sada Yacco and company, acting as manager and press agent for the Japanese performers ^[1].

Fuller formed a close friendship with Queen Marie of Romania; their extensive correspondence has been published. Fuller, through a connection at the U.S. embassy in Paris played a role in arranging a U.S. loan for Romania during World War I. Later, during the period when the future Carol II of Romania was alienated from the Romanian royal family and living in Paris with his mistress Magda Lupescu, she befriended them; they were unaware of her connection to Carol's mother Marie. Fuller initially advocated to Marie on behalf of the couple, but later schemed unsuccessfully with Marie to separate Carol from Lupescu.^[2] With Queen Marie and American businessman Samuel Hill, Fuller helped found the Maryhill Museum of Art in rural Washington State, which has permanent exhibits about her career.

Fuller occasionally returned to America to stage performances by her students, the "Fullerets" or Muses, but spent the end of her life in Paris where she died of breast cancer in 1928. Cremated, her ashes are interred in the columbarium at Cimetière du Père Lachaise in Paris.

Continuing influence

Fuller depicted by Koloman Moser (1901).

Fuller painted by Toulouse-Lautrec.

Fuller’s work has been experiencing a resurgence of professional and public interest. Sally R. Sommer has written extensively about Fuller’s life and times^[3] Marcia and Richard Current published a biography entitled Loie Fuller, Goddess of Light in 1997.^[4] And Giovanni Lista compiled a 680-page book of Fuller-inspired art work and texts in Loïe Fuller, Danseuse de la Belle Epoque, 1994.^[5]

Fuller continues to be an influence on contemporary choreographers. Among these are Jody Sperling who re-imagines Fuller’s genre from a contemporary perspective. Sperling has gained an international reputation as an expert on Loie Fuller and as a re-interpreter of Fuller’s style of dancing. She has lectured and/or performed at colleges, universities, festivals, and conferences in the US, Canada, France, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands and Russia. Sperling’s interest in this historic figure began in 1997 with The Butterfly Dance, (http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/dihtml/divideos.html#vc013) a collaboration with film choreographer/dance historian Elizabeth Aldrich commissioned by the Library of Congress. Since then, Sperling has created five Fuller-inspired solos—The Serpentine Dance [1] (after the 1891 original), The Magic-Lantern Dance [2] (a collaboration with the American Magic-Lantern Theater http://www.magiclanternshows.com/), her signature work Dance of the Elements [3], La Nuit [4] set to the music of John Cage, and her virtuosic Debussy Soirée [5]. Recently, Sperling has expanded the Fuller vocabulary into group works: Ghosts (to premiere in October 2008 at the Ailey Citigroup Theater); the trio Roman Sketches [6] (2007), co-commissioned by Vermont Performance Lab, LLC and Marlboro College, and excerpts of which are in the repertory of the Netherland’s Introdans [7] youth ensemble; and the septet Ballet of Light [8] (2007), a reinterpretation of Fuller’s 1908 original, commissioned by the University of Wyoming with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts/American Masterpieces program. Clips of select works are viewable on www.timelapsedance.com (click "video").

Works

• She wrote Fifteen Years of a Dancer's Life (1913) New International Encyclopedia

References