Loie Fuller: French Dancer Gave Colorful Performances

Loie Fuller lived from 1862 to 1928, and she became famous in the 1890s for her extraordinary dances in Paris. She developed the Serpentine Dance and the Fire Dance, among others. What were these dances? They were new dance performances. Light and color streamed through Loie Fuller's silk-folded costume to create a new type of performance. It was a new type of dance which incorporated the new Art Nouveau spirit of the age ; the new free spirit of the age. In archive reports that you can find on the Web, you can understand that Loie Fuller's performances were unique and her performances incorporated new manners of stage lighting as well as machinery. There was one report about a performance at the Standard Theatre, New York, 1892, and there is mention of the dancer's ability to duplicate herself. There is no mention how but maybe you can assume it is not to do with magic but rather color, light and even dress. Loie Fuller's dance performances were 'natural dance performances' and the costume was important because the silk-draped costumes somehow naturalized her dance performance even more.

It was said that what Loie Fuller did was to teach light to dance. What danced too was the light streaming through her silk dresses. Yes these silk dresses were folds of fabric through which light danced. Loie Fuller developed some patents too for stage lighting and Loie Fuller's world merges the world of light to the world of dress and then of dance. She is important for the development of choreography and dance. Her evocative dancing was linked to her evocative dress and her performances aimed to merge choreography and costume. What she brought to the fore too was color and light. There is a picture of Loie Fuller by Toulouse Lautrec, and you can imagine that the colors in this picture were the colors that shone in her dance.

She was born in Chicago, USA in 1862 and she died in Paris, France in 1928. She danced in the Folies Bergeres from the 1890s. She was painted by Toulouse Lautrec and she represented at the beginning the spirit of the Parisian Dance Clubs but then she was at the center of the new Natural Dance movement . Her 'spirit' too was important to Art Nouveau and to the whole Belle Epoque at the turn of the century. She was fin-de-siecle, original, and decadent.

There are posters of the time which captures the spirit and dance of Loie Fuller. Note her dynamism and energy. She turns backward, arching her back . Even in this poster you can get an impression of the dynamism and energy of Loie Fuller. She has been described as a burlesque performer but if this is correct, then you can see from a poster such as this that the world of burlesque is a wide world than the glamorous and vaudeville world usually associated with it; For Loie Fuller's world is exotic and with the spirit of Art Nouveau and Fin-de-Siecle. it is not just about the risque and lewd but the dynamic and energetic. However if she is not then burlesque, then you can say that with her dancing and energy, she brought a new strange spirit to the burlesque world.

Two of her dances were famous. There was the Serpentine Dance and the Fire Dance. So what then is the Serpentine Dance? From images and descriptions, can imagine then the nature of her swirling Serpentine Dance. It is dazzling, blinding and deceptive. It is swirling and colorful, too . The duplication is part of the swirling effect. Dance is about movement and position and you may get a hint of the nature of movement and position from this quote. Of course. Loie Fuller was a proponent of free and natural dance. Body Movement and body position were important as she aimed to create new space through her dance. Space didn't inhibit her. Rather, she created new space. There were new unorthodox body movements but where proportion and rhythm were obviously still important.

Sources:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9A02E7D9163EEF33A25757C0A96F9C94629ED7CF
http://www.allposters.com/-sp/La-Loie-Fuller-Posters_i396469_.htm
http://www.bullworks.net/ffg/loie/loie.html