ABSTRACT
For the Symbolist generation of the 1890s, the American-born dancer/choreographer Loïe Fuller (1862–1928) modeled a way of “sacrificing the anecdote to the arabesque.” Fuller’s live performance of form, color, and contour in continual flux inspired visual artists to experiment with the arabesque’s abstracting properties. But are Fuller’s whiplash curves arabesques, properly speaking? In dance, “arabesque” refers to a balletic position or step in which the dancer’s weight is supported by the standing leg, while the working leg extends back in space. This chapter finds surprising commonalities between the arabesques in ballet and in Fuller’s dance, both of which were conceived as an ephemeral, ornamental line of motion. Tracing their shared ancestry back to eighteenth-century design sources, it follows the arabesque’s migration between the visual and the performing arts across the nineteenth century. The examples discussed show that the incorporation of arabesque line into dance also brought with it a dynamic of cultural appropriation. Its association with the exotic and otherworldly made the arabesque the ideal vehicle to embody European fantasies of otherness, enabling artists, choreographers, and dancers to reinvent, control, and displace the non-European cultures it was said to represent.
