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Published on 5/17/08
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From her vaudeville beginnings to the experimental films she created in later life, dancer-choreographer Loie Fuller was once world-famous. Rodin may have chosen her as a subject for his sculpture, but Fuller has no monument in her hometown of Hinsdale.
In her mesmerizing dances, swirling huge skirts under colored lights of her own design, Fuller paved the way for new visual effects in theater. She is usually referred to as an outlier in modern-dance history (a very small niche indeed), but in Electric Salome: Loie Fuller’s Performance of Modernism, scholar Rhonda Garelick attempts to reposition Fuller as a central player in the multiple histories of ballet, modern dance, theater, visual art and postmodern performance.
Garelick attributes the dancer’s success to her ability to become a “screen” on which audiences (and subsequently historians and critics) could project their desires. While the book effectively uses psychoanalysis as a lens to analyze Fuller’s techniques, this overshadows another, more important aspect of Garelick’s message: the importance of Fuller’s artistic legacy.
Like her dances—in which her body is concealed beneath folds of fabric, leaving only her seemingly floating face visible—Fuller’s contributions are too easily portrayed as disembodied, removed from the rest of art history. While peeking under the fabric is interesting, the best part of Electric Salome is how Garelick puts Fuller’s story into a context that we can appreciate.
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