Traces
of Light: Absence and Presence in the
Work of Loïe Fuller
by Ann Cooper
Albright
Wesleyan University Press, Middletown,
Connecticut, USA, 2007
229 pp., illus. 32 b/w, 28 col. Trade,
$75, paper, $27.95
ISBN: 0-8195-6843-0; ISBN: 0-8195-6842-2.
Martha Blassnigg
University of Plymouth
martha.blassnigg@gmail.com
Ann Cooper Albright, herself a dancer,
and professor of dance, gender and womens
studies, offers an unusual approach in
this book in that she combines both her
academic expertise and her practice as
dancer in an in depth study of the famous
modern dancer Loïe Fuller. In this
practice-led and theory-oriented study
she not only straddles two often rather
separate strands, that of her own dance
practice as research tool and guide and
the theoretical examination of the subject
area, but also succeeds in interweaving
her experience of re-examining Fullers
dance in practice, the literature review
and original archival research in great
detail on Fullers work, as well
as her own interpretation of the significance
of Fullers intervention. Albrights
exercise of her kinaesthetic imagination
is highlighted through a perspective informed
by her specialism in gender and womens
studies and constitutes one of the main
objectives of this book: to liberate Fuller
from her marginalisation in modern dance
history particularly in the dominant discourse
around technology (lighting) and stage
mise-en-scène with the established
emphasis on the visual spectacle, aesthetics
and techniques. The importance for Albright
lies in a reconstitution of Fullers
innovative novel style of movement and
kinaesthesia, and most importantly to
include a recognition of her womanhood
and highly feminized, performative sexuality
in the often abstracted discussion of
her work.
Albright shifts the focus on Fullers
application of light as technique and
technological sophistication and puts
an emphasis on the spiritual role of light
in Fullers work as a catalyst for
euphoria and drama, source of emotional
tension and spectacular effects such as
ultra-violet light through chemicals applied
to her costumes, and light as dancing
partner. She cites Fullers own notes
and interview passages that give a sense
of her lively and pronounced presence,
one which is so evident in the images
of her dancing, but also one that despite
a strong grounding in physicality and
technological know-how, does not seem
to elude a rather immaterial and poetic
dimension. For example, Fuller described
her discovery of the effects of the fabric
of silk in motion as: Gently, almost
religiously, I set the silk in motion,
and I saw that I had obtained undulations
of a character heretofore unknown. I had
created a new dance (p. 24). In
an interview she replied to the question
of her understanding of light: Light:
it is the deployment of the soul around
a human being, it is a language just as
music is a language. There are living
lights and dead lights. My art derives
from a sense of joy, and here I mean that
it has the capacity to instant oblivion,
soaring it into another world (p.
141).
One significant strand of this otherworldly
approach was thematised at the time through
the invention of the unconscious
and it may be serendipity that Fuller
discovered the audiences response
to her movements in a wide Indian robe
during her performance of the Pygmalion
scene of a theatre piece called Quack
M.D. Fuller describes this moment
when her character was hypnotised by a
doctor and her long robe forced her into
movements with her arms raised like a
winged spirit, a pose which
evoked astonishment and sensational responses
in the audiences (p. 17). In this regard
Albright draws in the literature on the
nervous female body and Fullers
psychological theatrical form of expression
in relation to the 19th century
womanhood in the context of science and
art, and her intercultural personality
as both an American and Parisian. This
sets the ground for Albright to claim
that Fuller constantly negotiated her
heterogeneous subject positions as artist,
scientist, choreographer and dancer, commodity
and muse (p. 110).
With several references to Gilles Deleuzes
philosophy, such as the concepts of becoming,
the in between or his notion
of the Nietzschean term of the fold,
Albright invigorates the presence of flow
in Fullers work. This seems particularly
useful in her treatment of the ambiguous
relationship between dance and image,
and between figure and body, since it
evokes the very experience of movement,
which, it could be said, lies beyond space
in an intrinsic acknowledgement of the
internalised quality of time. Her references
to Deleuze appear all the more significant
since his approach was greatly influenced
by the philosopher Henri Bergson, who
was contemporary with Fuller and in his
treatment of the issues of time as experience,
movement in space, duration and flow,
seems to have captured some of the core
intellectual concerns of the period (Bergson,
1991, 2001). Perhaps he is the dog that
doesnt bark in this book, notwithstanding
Albrights sophisticated treatment
of an interdisciplinary network of interests
and mutual influences that surrounded
the reception and impacted on Fullers
work seen from out the archival materials
of her momentum.
Most notable seems Albrights acknowledgement
of the discursive gap between her own
body and the historical treatment of Fullers
presence: most especially the relationship
of her own body with history, which provides
an interface for an encounter. This constitutes
an in between that is rarely
given its own voice in a theoretical discourse
except perhaps in new historicist approaches
on whose practice Albright builds her
own method. Her descriptions of her own
physical and emotional experiences while
practising Fullers Serpentine Dance
for example, provide the reader with insights
into a dimension of Fullers work
that she identifies as one of the missing
links that has led to the predominantly
abstracted discourses that surround her
work. The intersection of absence and
presence of both Fullers and Albrights
body in images and descriptions, as it
is also reflected in the title of the
book, constitutes a most unique approach
and reflects an understanding of art as
epistemology that the author was able
to translate from her own practice into
her theoretical discussion. This seems
all the more pertinent when reading Fullers
own comments of her work whose use of
language seems to draw images full of
colour and energy, just as her dancing
is reported to have conveyed.
Albrights approach, as she explicitly
emphasises in her introduction, invites
the reader to take her research as a starting
point for further studies of Fullers
work. As a consequence, one may understand
certain references to it in other interdisciplinary
contexts as much more than obvious metaphors
or analogies: for example in Philippe-Alain
Michauds book Aby Warburg and
The Image in Motion (2004) in relation
to the early Dickson films in Edisons
studio the Black Maria. Michauds
cross-referencing to Fuller through Anabellas
imitation of the Serpentine Dance (one
of the many variations, while Fuller herself
danced for the Lumières) from the
perspective of Warburgs interest
in motion seems especially appropriate,
particularly due to the direct link with
the Pueblo Kachina dance and Serpent Ritual,
which to him revealed a dynamism beyond
the actual representations, a motion in
between the inscription of figures in
space.
Apart from the main locus of this book
in reconstituting the significance of
Fullers work in the body of modern
dance literature, with references especially
to the work of Isadora Duncan, Colette
and Eva Palmer, Albrights approach
additionally has opened a platform to
weave Fullers practice into a wider
interdisciplinary context of philosophical
issues around movement, embodiment and
presence with intrinsic connections
to other art and entertainment forms such
as the emerging cinema. It may not be
an accident that both Fuller and the Cinématographe
share some of their historical traces
of exhibition and popularity with the
Music Hall, the Variété.
Like Fuller, these popular entertainment
forms incorporated both the expression
of a prevailing Zeitgeist
more than in the fascination with movement
perhaps the representability of time as
flux and duration and an emerging
new aesthetic in an art-form that was
intrinsically linked with a bottom-up
response and reception of a workers
class entertainment form. In this sense,
both the human, or as Albright would emphasise,
the woman, and the case of the technology
of the emerging cinema seem to converge
in the physical appearance of an underlying
impulse; it reminds us again of Warburgs
concerns and what Michaud described as
the illuminated performer in the Black
Maria as a body in search of its
own modifications whose contortionistic
performance represented the purest expression.
(2004, p. 57)
Taking up Albrights invitation,
this excursion here is not misplaced,
since the discourse on Fullers work
at the intersection of body, image, and
technology, straddling art and machine,
is well established, as she reminds us.
She discusses this in respect of Fullers
use of machines to connect with
and energize her physical expressivity,
as an interconnectedness between experience
and mediation. Albright focuses particularly
on Fullers cinematographic vision
in her later career and her forays into
film (p. 181f) and emphasises the significance
of her innovative application of light
and motion for experiments in avant-garde
film making and film and video experiments
in contemporary dance. At the foreground
stands a treatment of dancing techniques
as technologies of mediation and epistemologies
in a Heideggerian sense of being-in-the-world
or presence; which Albright describes
through her own dancing research into
Fullers choreographies as a physicality
and palpability of the mechanics (lighting
techniques, stage set-ups, etc.) that
produced a highly sensate body.
(p. 190) In a piece called Dancing
with Light for example Albright dances
on glass with coloured light projections
from underneath and describes her experience
of Fullers conception of the physical
expressivity of colour as follows:
the visual sensation of looking down (
)
was truly bizarre. I lost all sense of
weight and gravity and felt as if I were
floating in space. (
) I was struck
by how the ambers and red tones felt as
if they were reaching up to surround me,
as if the light were swallowing me up.
The kinaesthetic impact on me has a direct
parallel, for this was exactly how many
critics described similar movements of
Fullers "Fire Dance". In contrast,
the cool blues and greens drew me to them,
down under the floor
(p. 190)
What the cinema and Fullers novel
dance innovations seem to have in common
is closely related to the intellectual
context of the time in search for methods
to inscribe movement and time. This could
also be related to Etienne-Jules Mareys
graphing methods, in particular his study
of the movement of an insects wing
(1895, p. 243) which seems to provide
a direct link to Fullers application
of the figure eight in her Serpentine
Dance movements (p. 30). Albright, however,
extends Fullers concerns with the
issue of inscription as evident in her
experimentation with projection techniques
as well as what Mallarmé called
her corporeal writing in her
autograph book entitled The Ghosts
of My Friends (p. 41-46), to a discussion
of absence and presence of the body through
an emphasis on the significance of the
audiences participation in the process
of creation and perception. Albright identifies
the implication of the viewers body
in the process of seeing in order to replace
visual traces with the act of tracing
(p. 204), which in Fullers case
has produced a changing engagement with
the mode of perception, as was her intention.
It reiterates what lies at the core of
what Auguste Rodin must have recognised
in the way he thanked Fuller in a program
inscription for opening the pathway
for an art of the future. (p. 193)
In a true convergence of science, art
and technology, Albright has succeeded
in this fascinating piece of practise-
and theory-led writing to bring Loïe
Fuller to life as a pioneering woman who
is too often neglected in the numerous
accounts of interdisciplinary research
at the turn of the century beyond the
discipline of dance. Traces of Light
also stands as exemplary of a series of
recent new historicist approaches in demonstrating
that by proceeding from a conscious present
to revisit history through a profound
and sophisticated engagement with the
past, produces experiences and insights
of new knowledge that touch the present
through an actualisation of past traces,
almost in a Bergsonian sense.
One can only congratulate Albright for
this achievement, which also seems to
indicate that the discipline of dance
along with a critical engagement with
its theory has a lot to offer to interdisciplinary
research, in particular through bridging
the acknowledged lack of methodologies.
To conclude in the spirit of Fuller it
could be suggested that modern approaches
in the light of post-modernism may, to
use Rodins words, open pathways
for art-science collaborations of the
future.
Cited works:
All stand-alone page numbers refer
to Traces of Light.
Bergson, Henri. [1896] 1991. Matter
and Memory, trans. N.M Paul and W.S.
Palmer. New York: Zone Books. [French
original: Matière et Mémoire,
1896]. [1889] 2001. Time and Free Will.
An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness,
trans. F.L. Pogson. Mineola, New York:
Dover Publications. [French original:
Essai Sur les Données Immédiates
de la Conscience, 1889].
Marey, Étienne-Jules. [1894] 1895.
Movement. The Results and Possibilities
of Photography. Trans. Eric Pritchard.
London: William Heinemann. [French original:
Le Movement].
Michaud, Philippe-Alain. 2004. Aby
Warburg and the Image in Motion. Trans.
Sophie Hawkes. Cambridge, Massachusetts:
The MIT Press.