Who in the world was Loïe Fuller, and why should we care?
A new film, Obsessed with Light — which will be shown at the Columbia Center for the Arts in Hood River at 6:15 p.m. Saturday, March 1, and in Portland at 4 p.m. Saturday, March 8, (fittingly, on International Women’s Day) at Cinema 21 — provides some answers.
The filmmakers, Sabine Krayenbühl and Zeva Oelbaum, state firmly in the film’s press release that they did not intend to make a conventional biopic, but instead wanted to create “a dialogue between a wildly original performer” of the early twentieth century and a wide range of today’s practitioners of various arts and crafts.
While Fuller, who’s been dead since 1928, couldn’t be filmed in dialogue with the living — who included, among others, lighting designer Jennifer Tipton, dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones, puppeteer Basil Twist, and fashion designer Maria Grazia Chiuri, the first female artistic director at the House of Dior — they all have plenty to say about her influence on their work, primarily as the inventor of lighting design for dance, but also for her highly innovative costume design. Fuller knew well how important those costumes, designed to be part of the choreography, were, and she copyrighted them.
There is no question that Fuller was a “wildly original performer” and designer, and much, much more. Actor, dancer, presenter, teacher, inventor, writer, businesswoman, she not only made art, she collected it, and a large part of her collection is a little over a hundred miles east of Portland in the Columbia Gorge’s Maryhill Museum of Art, which she, along with railroad man Sam Hill and sugar heiress Alma Spreckels, founded in 1917. The museum is a sponsor of the film, and the filmmakers made use of the extensive archival materials that are held there.
Mary Louise Fuller (she changed her name to Loïe when she went to France in 1891) was born in a small town outside Chicago in 1862, the daughter of free thinkers, and died in Paris on New Year’s Day, 1928. She is buried in Pere Lachaise Cemetery, where she has the eternal company of Isadora Duncan, who she takes credit for discovering, and presenting, and Oscar Wilde, whose play Salome she twice made into a dance. In her sixty-six years on the planet she achieved much and influenced many, and lived her life pretty much the way she wanted to, a rarity for women in her day.
Her career as a performer began at age two with a public recitation of Mary Had a Little Lamb. It culminated with her spectacular Sur la Mer immense, which premiered in 1925 at the Palais Royale in Paris. Accompanied by Claude Debussy’s La Mer, students from Fuller’s school were placed on a broad staircase, “where invisible to the audience, they held up yards of cloth, and manipulated it, while projectors threw lights of varying color and intensity upon it,” as Richard Nelson and Marcia Ewing Current wrote in their book Loie Fuller, Goddess of Light. “The effect was fluid drapery, a silken sea that rose and fell, rolled and ran, seethed and foamed.”
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With this piece, and others in her repertory, Fuller toured to the United States. Earlier tours took her all over Europe, to Japan, and in 1915 to Egypt.
A master of artistic transformation — with cloth, lights, a magic lantern, and bamboo rods, she could, and did become a butterfly, a flower, a blazing fire — Fuller began her personal transformation from the American midwestern Louie Fuller to the international star the French called La Loie in the late 19th century. She was part of that first wave of American expatriate artists and scientists, which included Mary Cassatt and Thomas Edison. Not surprisingly, she immediately lost her heart to the City of Light, and was profoundly inspired by it.
She visited the Cathedral of Notre Dame, studied the way the light came through the stained glass windows, and made use of that study in creating her own lights, which were created with hand-held incandescent lamps directed at her dancing figure.
Fuller, who toured widely, at one point traveled with as many as 30 stagehands and electricians; her two brothers, who had studied with Thomas Edison, among them. Her observation of a Paris street statue, lit from below at night, led to her dancing on a glass platform, also lit from below.
Fuller, who like most American women of her generation had limited formal education, was unflaggingly intellectually curious, making friends with both Curies, but particularly Marie, and visiting Edison in his Paris studio. From the Curies she acquired phosphoresence to rub on her costumes; they declined her request for radium.
She had been in Europe for several years, performing the “Serpentine” dance she had developed in the U.S. from a skirt dance she did on the vaudeville circuit, when she opened a theater at the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris, where she of course danced, but also presented a Japanese theatrical troupe.
If Paris inspired La Loie, she also inspired Paris, particularly its visual artists. You can see some of the posters for her shows in the film. As for her dances, Jody Sperling, founder and artistic director of Time Lapse Dance, which both recreates Fuller’s works and uses her techniques to make new works that are focused on environmental issues, is a featured performer in the film.
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Sperling is listed in the credits as Creative Consultant, and in an email interview last week I asked her what that meant. “I had various roles,” she told me. “I was choreographer, a featured subject, and I advised on matters relating to Loïe, history, aesthetics, introductions to other Loie scholars, and I loaned my collection for shooting, etc.”
Sperling, who got her early dance training at the Joffrey Ballet School and at Wesleyan University, where she majored in dance and wrote her undergraduate thesis on choreography for camera, is based in New York, where she is in residence at the Ethical Culture Society. Asked how long she had been re-creating Fuller’s dances, she said, “I had a serendipitous encounter with Loie in 1997. Elizabeth Aldrich was the managing editor for the International Encyclopedia of the Dance and I was the picture editor and one day she put a picture of Loïe Fuller on my desk with a post-it note to see her in her office.
“She had the idea to create a Loïe-style Butterfly Dance for an event she was choreographing in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress. She designed a costume with enormous pink wings and a green skull cap. We co-choreographed the piece which I performed in the rotunda of the library with an 18-piece brass band playing Walkyrie wearing period costumes. The experience was so wonderful — such an expansive sense of space — that I got hooked.
“Subsequently I recreated Loïe’s first dance, the Serpentine, and then I began creating tributes that were re-imaginations, over the years gradually making works that were more experimental in nature, and for the last decade using the idiom to express connection with environmental forces and engage with our changing climate.”
Sperling and her company had just returned from a tour to Egypt, where Fuller had toured in 1915, and I asked her what that was like.
“Incredible!!” she said. “It was very important to me that we recreate that famous picture of Loie in front of the sphinx with the pyramids. In the last 120 years the area where the dancers stood in the photo was excavated, so our picture shows a slightly different vantage point.”
The tour almost didn’t happen; Sperling was packing to leave when the phone rang and it was someone from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, which had invited the company to come and perform for Egyptian children, calling to tell her the funding had been pulled. Sperling went anyway, as I suspect La Loie would have done as well.
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While there is more talking and less dancing than I would have liked in Obsessed by Light, the film is a fascinating look at “La Loie” who had an enormous impact on the artists of her day, and ours.
And if you want to know more, her memoir, Fifteen Years of a Dancer’s Life is an extremely good read.
Obsessed by Light
– Hood River screening: 6:15 p.m. Saturday, March 1, at Columbia Center for the Arts.
– Portland screening: 4 p.m. Saturday, March 8, at Cinema 21, for International Women’s Day.
– Running time: 90 minutes.
– Presented by: Maryhill Museum of Art.
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