Electric Salome

by Garelick, Rhonda K.

• ISBN13: 9780691141091
• ISBN10: 0691141096
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-01-12
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

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 Mallarmé, 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'sElectric 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 Salomeplaces 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.

Author Biography

Rhonda K. Garelick is professor in the department of English and at the Hixson-Lied School of Fine and Performing Arts at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xiii
Introduction	p. 1
The Evolution of Fuller's Performance Aesthetic	p. 19
Early Years: Awareness and Unconsciousness	p. 20
The Evolution of a European Modernist	p. 32
Electric Salome: Loie Fuller at the World's Fair of 1900	p. 63
A Handsome Savage	p. 63
The World's Fair of 1900	p. 68
Queen of the Fair	p. 78
Mutable Geography and Adopted Nationality	p. 86
Salome	p. 90
Fuller's Japanese Costars at the Fair	p. 103
A Yankee Salome on the Rue de Paris	p. 106
The New Colonial Power: The United States at the World's Fair	p. 111
A Vision of America to Come	p. 114
Fuller and the Romantic Ballet	p. 118
Yankees Don't Do Ballet	p. 118
Romantic Ballet: Sprites, Swans, and Windup Toys	p. 125
Fuller: The Accidental Sylph	p. 130
Technical Developments	p. 134
Fuller, Hoffmann, and the Technologized Body	p. 139
Coppelia and the Romantic Ballet Couple	p. 144
Ambivalent Ballet: Fuller's Figurative and Literal Performance of Disavowal	p. 150
A Balletic Dream of Modernism	p. 153
Scarring the Air: Loie Fuller's Bodily Moderism	p. 156
Fuller's Invisibility: Modernist Physicality, Sex, and Cultural Legacy	p. 156
Fleur du Sang: Fuller's Violent and Erotic Physicality	p. 162
The Erotic Fuller	p. 166
The Scandalous Ballets Loie Fuller	p. 171
Instinct, Nature, and Versions of Interiority	p. 176
The Mechanics of the Group	p. 179
The Triumph of La Mer	p. 182
Martha Graham's Lamentation	p. 190
Fuller in a New Light	p. 194
The Physical Analogue of the Psychological	p. 196
Of Veils and Onion Skins: Fuller and Modern European Drama	p. 200
Radical Mechanicity	p. 200
Character and Identity	p. 203
Tristan Tzara's Mouchoir de Nuages	p. 214
Tzara's Hamlet	p. 218
Reading the Clouds: Shakespeare, Freud, and Fuller	p. 220
Afterword: Thoughts on Contemporary Traces of Fuller	p. 224
Selected Bibliography	p. 231
Index	p. 241
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