By Natalie Lemle
Fifty million people
flocked to the Exposition Universelle in 1900, crowding into massive temporary
pavilions constructed throughout Paris to marvel at such cutting-edge
innovations as the escalator, talking pictures, and the diesel engine.
Among these spectacles was
Loïe Fuller, an American dancer from Illinois and the only female entertainer
to have her own pavilion. “I have only one vibrant image from the Exposition
Universelle…Mme Loïe Fuller,” French writer Jean Cocteau recalled. “Let us all
hail this dancer who created the phantom of an era.”
The Exposition Universelle
of 1900 marked the height of Art Nouveau and its flowing, feminine subjects
inspired by nature. Fuller herself personified the movement, with performances
that incorporated swirling yards of silk attached to bamboo wands sewn into her
sleeves. Colored lights were projected onto the flowing fabric, and as she
twirled, she seemed to metamorphose into elements from the natural world: a
flower, a butterfly, a tongue of flame.
Portrait of Loïe Fuller.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
These displays were works
of art unto themselves, and by the turn of the century, Fuller had directly
inspired many of the great artists of her time. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
featured her in a number of prints; Auguste Rodin commissioned a series of
photographs of the dancer with plans to sculpt her; and the Lumière brothers
released a film about her in 1897. “Miss Fuller’s impression upon the world will
not have been a transient one,” wrote Architectural Record in March 1903. “She
has contributed towards the creation of a new style; she has come upon the
scene at the right moment.”
Today, however, very little
remains to recall Fuller’s memory—with the exception of the art that she
inspired. “I can ask someone about Loïe Fuller and they won’t know who she is,
but I can show them a poster of her from the 1890s and it’s familiar,” says Ann
Cooper Albright, author of the 2007 book Traces of Light: Absence and Presence
in the Work of Loie Fuller and professor and chair of Oberlin College’s
department of dance.
Born Marie Louise Fuller in
1862 in what is now Hinsdale, Illinois, Fuller first pursued acting as a
teenager in Chicago. Eventually, she moved to New York City and found initial
success with the Serpentine Dance, an act she developed from her role as a
skirt dancer. In these initial performances, she appeared to be hypnotized, as
if under the influence of a snake charmer, while she waved a gauze robe onto
which colored lights were projected……………
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