ABSTRACT
Let’s begin with traces. Traces of the past. Traces of a dance. Traces of light … and colour and fabric. Traces of a body, animating all these sources of movement. Traces of a life, spent spinning across nations, across centuries, across identities. How do we trace the past? Reconfigure what is lost? Are traces always even visible? Perhaps we should lose the noun, which renders us nostalgic, maybe even mel-
ancholic at the extreme. Replace our ambition to find out what happened with a curiosity about how it came to be that it was happening. Replace traces with tracing – the past with the passion. Tracing the contours of fabric which spiral upward and outward, we spill over beyond any one historical or aesthetic discourse. This act of tracing can help us become aware not only of what’s visible, but also what is, has been, will always be, less clearly visible. Beyond the image into the motion. With a nod to the meanings embedded in historical study, Walter
Benjamin wrote: ‘To dwell means to leave traces’ (Benjamin 1999: 9). Indeed, traces are the material artefacts that constitute the stuff of historical inquiry, the bits and pieces of a life that scholars follow, gather up and survey. The word itself suggests the imprint of a figure who has passed: the footprint, mark or impression of a person or event. These kinds of traces are omnipresent in the case of Loie Fuller. Some traces are more visible than others, some more easily located. But all traces – once noticed – draw us into another reality. Someone passed this way before. Loie Fuller is one of the most interesting and paradoxical figures in early
modern dance. Born in 1862 in Chicago, Fuller began performing in her teens, first as a temperance speaker and later as a member of the Buffalo Bill troupe, touring America on the vaudeville circuit. Her various dramatic roles included cross-dressed ones, such as the lead in the fast-paced melodrama Little Jack Sheppard, but it is as a ‘Serpentine’ or skirt dancer that she became well-known. In the 1890s, Fuller created an extraordinary sensation in Paris with her manipulations of hundreds of yards of silk, swirling high above her and lit dramatically from below. She embodied the fin-de-siècle images of woman as flower, woman as bird, woman as fire, woman as
nature. One of the most famous dancers of her time, Fuller starred as the main act at the Folies Bergère, inspiring a host of contemporary fashions and imitators. Fuller’s serpentine motif is also visible in much of the decorative imagery of Art Nouveau, and she was the subject of works by such renowned artists as Rodin, Toulouse-Lautrec and Mallarmé, among others. Yet, despite the importance of her artistic legacy, Fuller’s theatrical work fits uneasily within the dominant narratives of early modern dance. Most historians don’t see Fuller in light of the development of expressive movement, but rather relegate her to discussions concerning dance and lighting, or dance and technology. I had been thinking about writing a book on Loie Fuller for some time,
but it took me a while to come to terms with how I wanted to respond to the less visible traces of her work (Albright 2007). My project began with a question: why do so many critics and historians dismiss the bodily experience of her dancing in their discussions of Loie Fuller’s theatrical work? The question grew into a dance. The dance, in turn, taught me how to write history from inside the vibrations of its ongoing motion. This essay carries the story of an intellectual approach to the past that not only recognizes the corporeal effects of the historian’s vantage point, but also mobilizes her body within the process of research and writing. It is the story of a dance shared across a century of time and two continents, a dance that takes place at the meeting point of physical empathy and historical difference. I am engaged in writing on Loie Fuller. I use this term ‘engaged’ very
consciously, for I want to highlight both the sense of binding oneself to another person and its etymological meaning as ‘interlocking’, a literal as well as a figurative meshing with someone or something. I have chosen to work on this project in a way that integrates conceptual and somatic knowledges, connecting to my physical as well as my intellectual and analytic facilities. Dancing amidst clouds of fabric in elaborate lighting effects, I try to understand something of Fuller’s experience from the inside out. I also dance with words, moving with my writing to see how ideas resonate in my body. Then too, as I weave my way through archival materials and historical accounts of cultural milieus, I practice staying attentive to what I have learned through that dancing experience. This research process challenges traditional separations between academic scholarship and artistic creation, between criticism and autobiography – in short between dancing and writing. More than just another layer of historical excavation, my dancing creates a strand of physical thinking which weaves back and forth between the presence of historical artefacts (posters, reviews, photos, memoirs and paintings) and the absence of Fuller’s physical motion. This essay is an attempt to articulate the theoretical implications of my
embodied approach to this study – an attempt to understand the very conditions of its possibilities. In what follows, I identify two strategies – two
practices, if you will – that guide my scholarship on Loie Fuller. While one is primarily intellectual and the other is based in physical study, both practices refuse the conventional separation of scholarship and the studio, folding themselves into a mix of dancing and writing that houses a certain physical receptiveness at its core. These strands of embodied study create a textured fabric in which aspects of Fuller’s work are made visible through my body as well as my writing.
