I
A brilliant star of the sensational school of dancing was Loie Fuller, of Chicago. She made her New York début in ‘Jack Sheppard,’ with a salary of seventy-five dollars a week. While rehearsing a new play, she received from an English officer a present of an extremely fine Oriental robe that floated gracefully in the air. This gave her the idea of using it for her dancing. While making some experiments before the mirror, she noticed the effects brought about by the then newly invented electric light. She tried innumerable variations of poses and all were delightful. This was the birth process of the Serpentine Dance. J. E. Crawford Flitch writes of the incident:
‘The invention of the Serpentine Dance coincided with the discovery of electricity as a method of lighting the stage. Until that time gas alone had been used. Loie Fuller immediately saw the possibilities of the new scientific illumination, and with the aid of a few friends she devised a means by which the effect of the vivid sunshine could be obtained through the use of powerful electric lights placed in front of reflectors. Then various experiments with color were tried; for the white light of electricity were substituted different shades of reds, greens, purples, yellows, blues, by the combinations of which innumerable and wonderful rainbow-like effects of color were obtained. Played upon by the multitudinous hues, the diaphanous silk gave an impression of startling originality and beauty. Coming at the time when the artistic lighting of the stage was scarcely studied at all, the riot of color created a sensation. Nothing like it had been seen before. The old-fashioned limelight, the flickering gas-jets, the smoking red and blue flames dear to the Christmas pantomime, paled before this discovery of science which apparently possessed inexhaustible possibilities of a stage illuminant.’
Loie Fuller made a sensation in America, particularly in New York and Chicago. But her success was much greater when she gave spectacular performances to the morbid Berlin, Paris and London audiences. Her début at Folies Bergères was more than a triumph. She became the rage of France. The management of the Folies Bergères engaged her for three years at a salary of one thousand dollars a week. How greatly ‘La Loie,’ as she was called in Paris, impressed the French audiences is best to be seen in what one of the French critics writes of her: ‘We shall not easily forget the Serpentine Dance, undulating and luminous, full of weird grace and originality, a veritable revelation! By means of a novel contrivance, the gauzy iridescent draperies in which Loie Fuller swathes herself were waved about her, now to form huge wings, now to surge in great clouds of gold, blue, or crimson, under the colored rays of the electric light. And in the flood of this dazzling or pallid light the form of the dancer suddenly became incandescent, or moved slowly and spectrally in the diaphanous and ever-changing coloration cast upon it. The spectator never wearied of watching the transformations of these tissues of living light, which showed in successive visions the dreamy dancer, moving languidly in a chaos of figured draperies—in a rainbow of brilliant colors or a sea of vivid flames. And after having roused us to a pitch of enthusiasm by this luminous choreography, she appeared triumphant in the pantomime-ballet Salome, reproducing the gloomy episode of the death of John the Baptist.’
Among the dances that Loie Fuller had in her repertoire, besides the Serpentine Dance, were the Rainbow Dance, the Flower Dance, the Butterfly Dance, the Mirror Dance, and the Fire Dance. It is only natural that all her dances of this kind made necessary a vast paraphernalia of accessories and an army of assistants. The Fire Dance she performed in the centre of a darkened stage before an opening in the floor through which a powerful electric reflector threw up intensely brilliant rays. None of her dances had any classified steps, any poses, gestures of the kind employed by dancers of various other schools and different ages. The function of the limbs and arms was merely to put veils and draperies into motion.