ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that women writers and dancers represented their work as improvised in ways that questioned existing aesthetic models and that demanded of the reader or spectator a new way of reading the danseuse. It addresses an unlikely pair of fin-de-siècle artists: Loïe Fuller (1862-1928) and Colette (1873-1954). Through their aesthetic innovations, Colette and Fuller each forge their own interdisciplinary aesthetics. The chapter also argues that Fuller’s technological aesthetics, her unraveling of bodily coherence, and disruption of narrative desire, are the forgotten link in the development of Modernism in dance and have a close relationship to the avant-garde visual arts of the 1920s. As formal qualities in performance and text get loaned from one artist to another, the shifts in representation reveal an ongoing aesthetic debate, indeed one that is highly-gendered, between female and male artists in this period.
