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COPYRIGHT 2002 Duke University Press
A modern woman, filled with the modern spirit ... she is no virgin, silly and ignorant of her destiny; she is an experienced but pure woman, in rapid movement like the spirit of the age, with fluttering garments and streaming hair, striding forward.... That is our new divine image: the Modern.
--Eugen Wolff
When Eugen Wolff used these words in 1888 to define die Moderne, he reflected an attitude about women, modernity, and motion that can be traced for several decades throughout Europe and the United States, in art movements and critical discourse, in painting, photography, film, and theater. His description helps to explain the turn-of-the-century popularity of women, such as Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller, who shocked the public with their translucent costumes and bare feet and entranced audiences with their movements. The woman that Wolff represents offers a vision of female spectacle that is inherently ambivalent: "she is no virgin," and yet she is "pure." She carries with her the implicit contradictions involved whenever woman functions as spectacular icon for popular consumption. She remains, on one level, a feminine muse, the inspiration for masculine creativity and national progress, but lacks herself the qualities that define the romantic and modern conceptions of the artistic genius. On another level, though, this New Woman acquired signifiers of action and confidence that seem distinctly different from images of Victorian restraint. She is represented in "rapid movement ... striding forward," as an image that invoked the "spirit of the age," and that associated these gestures with both sexuality and technology. Writers, artists, and scientists proclaimed the New Woman "modern," not only because of the changing signifiers of femininity in art, politics, fashion, and industry, but also as a result of the new and complex ways of seeing her body represented by the technologies of the still and moving cameras.
Between 1890 and 1920, the idea of the modern woman in motion was more fully integrated into works that reflected on advancements in technology. In 1917 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote in the "Manifesto of the Futurist Dance," "We Futurists prefer Loie Fuller and the 'cakewalk' of the Negroes" because of their "utilization of electric light and mechanisms." (1) Both dance styles involve the execution of new movements that, in the case of the cakewalk, demonstrate how African American men and women can dance together as partners (in a parody of stiff-limbed, upper-class whites), or, in Fuller's case, how a woman can dance without a partner at all. But the aristocratic parody of the cakewalk and the expressionistic gestures of Fuller seem to have little else in common other than their employment of electric stage lights and their popularity as a subject for photography and early cinema. In a broader sense, women and African Americans were suddenly in the limelight in ways that resonated with the general public. The visibility of the dancing female body and other bodies of difference (among them Native American rituals, Chinese acrobatics, and Middle Eastern veil dances) reflect a tension in the culture surrounding the body as both a node of attention and transmitter of ideas. The exoticism of race, femininity, and technology were conflated to represent the modern--an explosive meeting point that generated endless fascination and a surge of creative energy from artists and audience alike. (2)
Loie Fuller (1862-1928) is often referred to as the mother of modern dance, but she is perhaps most historically recognized as an icon for art nouveau artists at the turn of the twentieth century. Her frozen body, swathed in yards of body-revealing cloth and bathed in colored electric lights, was imitated in the countless swirling, pastoral designs of posters, photographs, sculptures, lamps, and other art nouveau objets d'art. (3) Fuller's choreography resembles what I would describe as a surrealist's dream of a ghostly hula dance, even though she preceded the surrealists by at least a decade. She was a multitalented performer whose international reputation and career history resembles a much earlier and subtler version of pop diva Madonna's, only without the publicity machine to back her. Surprisingly, considering his other views on women, Marinetti claimed that Fuller represented the "ideal multiplied body" of the futurist dance. She was an incarnation of "metallicity," a vision of motion that was more mechanical than human. (4) Art nouveau writers interested in Fuller focused on the natural world, describing her dance movements in terms of the metamorphosis of a flower, butterfly, or dragonfly. According to art historian Martin Battersby, Fuller "personified what Art nouveau artists felt about Woman as an abstraction--a vague, tantalising, ethereal vision." (5) She transcended national lines as easily as art movements, traveling from the US to Europe, performing "with her troupe of ladies and corps of electrical engineers" dances such as "The Firmament," "The Fire," and "The Great White Lily" along with "her newest scientific creation, Radium Dance." (6) How does Fuller encompass two such seemingly different movements, the first depicting the female body through metaphors of machinery and sharp edges, and the second through abstracted nature and swirling designs? The answer lies in what both movements appropriated from Fuller's figure: the female body transformed through motion and technology, in contexts that challenge the distinctiveness of masculine and feminine codes of bodily display.
In the performances that made her famous, Fuller wore "500 yards" (as her posters advertised) of silky dress that she suspended from bamboo poles, turning her arms into a pair of enormous wings. She transformed the vaudeville genre of "skirt dancing"--the precursor to Fuller's trademark "Serpentine Dance"--when she added electric stage lights to silhouette her body and mirrors to multiply her image for her audience. Fuller would paint abstract designs on the glass slides that illuminated her, and phosphorous ones onto her costumes. According to dance scholar Sally Sommer; it was not until Adolphe Appia's innovative designs with the futurists in 1896 that any other artist would significantly transform electric lighting and stage design. (7) Fuller's studies in motion and light were an appealing subject for filmmakers such as Edison, who doggedly tried to film her and tier serpentine-dance imitators. Not surprisingly, Fuller chose to experiment with the new medium as well.
In 1906 Fuller produced, directed, and starred in the short film Fire Dance (France, Gaumont), in which red floor lights are directed at her costume through a glass plate to simulate fire traveling upwards to consume her body. (8) In the film version, Fuller could not make use of her special set designs, so she hand-tinted each frame to recreate the illusion of fire. Eventually, as her arms direct the cloth toward the ceiling, her costume envelops her entirely. The piece is unusual by early film standards because the performance involves the disappearance of the female body rather than the more typical vaudeville codes of striptease dancing of the scantily clad "exercising" of physical culture films. The exceptional nature of Fuller's performance reveals the complexity of representations of "women in motion," particularly during the decade around the turn of the last century. Women in motion refers most directly to images of women dancing and otherwise physically expressing themselves (often where the choice of costume accentuates the sense of motion) but, in a larger sense, the term includes the modern woman's placement in and transportation through both public and private spaces.
Motion fascinated the public at the turn of the century as much as overt erotic display. Modernists frequently borrowed the image of a woman striding forward in flowing cloth to signify progress, patriotism, or taste. As Martha Banta has suggested about Fuller and other dancers following the turn of the century, "Female celebrities did not call upon sexuality for effective self-display. Rather they enhanced their popularity by being shapes in motion." (9) Fuller's dancing provides a compelling and anxious spectacle for the modern spectator. The intricacies of her movements subsume (but do not fully erase) the question of her sexuality--the lights directed at her costume revealed the silhouette of her body. For her audience, Fuller's control over her stage and career (as well as her unmarried status--Isadora Duncan, among others, claimed Fuller was a lesbian) (10) suggested that she was a "modern woman." But the images of her electric performances generated the equally modern anxiety of the dissolution of categories. Fuller was difficult to define--part dancer, part inventor, part scandal. This anxiety is not simply the result of the spectacle of her body in motion, but also emanates from Fuller's deliberate "technologizing" of her body and her appropriation of the metaphors and methods of both high art and science. She represents an important transitional point in representations of women in motion. Fuller was never simply the object of a voyeuristic gaze; her performances problematize this gaze by actively calling for it and then directing it toward new meanings about art, science, and the ability of a woman to control the movements of her body.
Fuller's style grew out of vaudeville (and there are many film imitators of her work still classified in the Library of Congress listings as "Vaudeville"), but her performance bears little resemblance to the sexually provocative efforts of most skirt dancers. (11) Her work led directly in the innovations of modern dancers, such as Martha Graham who choreographed with Fuller-like cloth in her famous 1940 piece "Lamentation," and to certain other experiments in avant-garde film. In 1920, a young Rene Clair, listed as Rene Chomette, acted in Fuller's unusual silent film Le lys de la vie [The...
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