Electric Salome : Loie Fuller's performance of modernism
"Loie Fuller was the most famous American in Europe throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rising from a small-time vaudeville career in the States, she attained international celebrity as a dancer, inventor, impresario, and one of the first women filmmakers in the world. Fuller befriended royalty and inspired artists such as Mallarme, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rodin, Sarah Bernhardt, and Isadora Duncan. Today, though, she is remembered mainly as an untutored "pioneer" of modern dance and stage technology, the "electricity fairy" who created a sensation onstage whirling under colored spotlights. But in Rhonda Garelick's Electric Salome, Fuller finally receives her due as a major artist whose work helped lay a foundation for all modernist performance to come. The book demonstrates that Fuller was not a mere entertainer or precursor, but an artist of great psychological, emotional, and sexual expressiveness whose work illuminates the centrality of dance to modernism. Electric Salome places Fuller in the context of classical and modern ballet, Art Nouveau, Orientalism, surrealism, the birth of cinema, American modern dance, and European drama. It offers detailed close readings of texts and performances, situated within broader historical, cultural, and theoretical frameworks. Accessibly written, the book also recounts the human story of how an obscure, uneducated woman from the dustbowl of the American Midwest moved to Paris, became a star, and lived openly for decades as a lesbian"--Publisher description
Print Book, English, ©2007
Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., ©2007
Biographie
xiv, 246 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
9780691017082, 9780691141091, 0691017085, 0691141096
76416489
1. The evolution of Fuller's performance aesthetic
Early years: awareness and unconsciousness
The evolution of a European modernist. 2. Electric Salome: Loie Fuller at the World's Fair 1900
A handsome savage
The world's fair of 1900
Queen of the Fair
Mutable geography and adopted nationality
Salome
Fuller's Japanese costars at the Fair
A Yankee Salome on the Rue de Paris
The new colonial power: The United States at the World's Fair
A vision of America to come. 3. Fuller and the Romantic ballet
Yankees don't do ballet
Romantic ballet: sprites, swans, and windup toys
Fuller: the accidental sylph
Technical developments
Fuller, Hoffmann, and the technologized body
Coppélia and the romantic ballet couple
Ambivalent ballet: Fuller's figurative and literal performance of disavowal
A balletic dream of modernism. 4. Scarring the air: Loie Fuller's bodily modernism
Fuller's invisibility: modernist physicality, sex, and cultural legacy
Fleur du Sang: Fuller's violent and erotic physicality
The erotic Fuller
The scandalous ballets Loie Fuller
Instinct, nature, and versions of interiority
The mechanics of the group
The triumph of La Mer
Martha Graham's Lamentation
Fuller in a new light
The physical analogue of the psychological. 5. Of Veils and onion skins: Fuller and modern European drama
Radical mechanicity
Character and identity
Tristan Tzara's Mouchoir de Nuages
Tzara's Hamlet
Reading the clouds: Shakespeare, Freud and Fuller