Loie Fuller and Early Cinema @ Filmhouse

One of the surprises of the Dance Base programme this year has been the introduction to the work of Loie Fuller - a surprise because it’s hard to believe I didn’t already know of her. Fuller is one of those historical characters like Muybridge and Tesla whose work has been highly influential (‘before its time’) coupled with an equally fascinating personal history. And she's a woman.

The Dance:Film10 programme has added more detail to the exhibition and performances staged at Dance Base by hosting a lecture by the Fuller re-imaginer, Jody Sperling.

Fuller, it transpires, was the first American that Paris fell in love with – a pre-cursor to the fame of Joséphine Baker that came many years later. Fuller fetched up at the Folies Bergère after a career as a temperance performer and burlesque artist, a declaration of bankruptcy in London, a time popularising the skirt dance in the US, the losing of a copyright court battle to defend her Serpentine dance invention, and a marriage to a bigamist who probably killed her father. Her first gig at the Folies Bergère bizarrely required her to pretend to be a Loie Fuller imitator.  A low point that was thankfully brief.

Once in France, she was soon established as an artistic and scientific wizard. Her techniques of using a completely dark stage (an innovation), dimmed house lights (an innovation), underlighting (an innovation), banks of coloured light projections (an innovation), and image projection onto herself and gauze curtains (an innovation) were studied (reported in Scientific American, for example) and stolen across Europe and America.

She was friends with pretty much anyone who was anyone, from Symbolist poets to the Curies (Fuller burnt her eyebrows off in an explosion while attempting to manufacture luminescent material) to Isadora Duncan (who Fuller ‘discovered’ and who accused Fuller of trying to sneak into her bed when she was her supporting act).

Sperling’s lecture discussed the evidence that can be used to piece together Fuller’s dances, the extent of her huge commercial impact, and the physical demands of actually performing the dances. She showed clips of early film of Fuller imitators and Sperling’s own re-creations. Sperling herself is no slouch on the charisma front, and the audience frequently broke into spontaneous applause when viewing the clips of her own imitations and re-workings.

I’m sure Sperling’s work on Fuller will be a spring-board for interest and projects in a whole range of artistic media, in the way Rebecca Solnit’s biography on Muybridge has produced an industry of Muybridge dramas and songs.

The dances are on YouTube. Go look.