Light 11: Loïe Fuller

By Circe -

Welcome to the 2023 Advent Calendar, which this year is just a list of things that light up all pretty. Previous entries are here. If you enjoy this and want to encourage me to bang more things out on a keyboard, consider supporting my Patreon, or sending something off of my Christmas list. If you'd rather support my spoiled pets, their Ratmas list is here. If you want to spend money but not on me, you can direct your donations to Mainely Rat Rescue, who handles rescue and foster operations for rats, mice, gerbils, guinea pigs, and other small mammals in the New England area, or the MSPCA, where my critters got their medical care before I found a good exotics vet, and where I picked up Koda and Yogi. 

Enjoy your trip through the cavalcade of things that go blinky-blink in the dark!

A pretty little rat, dancing in a swirl of skirts a la Loie Fuller.
My own work as an effects artist, costumer, and dancer owes much to a 19th century performer named Loïe Fuller. Born prosaically named Mary Louise Fuller in Illinois, she started her stage career as a toddler and eventually made it all the way to the Folies Bergere, becoming an iconic part of the Art Nouveau movement.

Fuller's specialty was performing "free dance" (now encompassed in the catch-all category of "modern", which covers anything that is "none of the above") with a combination of flowing silk costumes and the new-fangled electric stage lights. Electric stage lights, though they did (and do!) still get very hot, were less hazardous to manipulate during the performances, and she took advantage of this to have stage hands swap out sheets of colored glass while she danced, becoming one of the earliest artists to experiment with the style of active stage lighting you see in shows today.

Her most famous piece was a "Serpentine Dance", a style that borrowed the skirt-flipping seen in some Eastern folk dances and Western burlesque, and instead used the motion of the fabric to reflect the changing colors of light hitting the stage. Fuller performed several variations on the theme; unfortunately, despite the erroneous labels on YouTube, none of them survive on film today, although there are hand-colored examples of some of her imitators, and a few modern reconstructions.

My own work makes use of LED panels, which can be operated remotely. This was an outdoor performance in August 2021, using white silk and a lighting designer whose only instructions were, "You know who Loïe Fuller was? Go nuts."

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