Fifteen years of a dancer's life

by Loie Fuller

When I came to Europe I had never been inside an art museum. The life that I led in the United States had given me neither motive nor leisure to become interested in masterpieces, and my knowledge of art was hardly worth mentioning. The first museum whose threshold I crossed was the British Museum. Then I visited the National Gallery. Later I became acquainted with the Louvre and, in due course, with most of the great museums of Europe. The circumstance that has struck me most forcibly in regard to these museums is that the architects have not given adequate attention to considerations of light.

Thanks to this defect I get in most museums an impression of a disagreeable medley. When I look at the objects for some moments the sensation of weariness overcomes me, it becomes impossible to separate the things one from another. I have always wondered if a day will not come when this problem of lighting will be better solved. The question of illumination, of reflection, of rays of light falling upon objects, is so essential that I cannot understand why so little importance has been attached to it. Nowhere have I seen a museum where the lighting was perfect. The panes of glass that let the light through ought to be hidden or veiled just as are the lamps that light theatres, then the objects can be observed without the annoyance of the sparkle of the window.

The efforts of the architect ought to be directed altogether in that direction—to the redistribution of light. There are a thousand ways of distributing it. In order that it may fulfil the desired conditions light ought to be brought directly to pictures and statues instead of getting there by chance.

Colour is disintegrated light. The rays of light, disintegrated by vibrations, touch one object and another, and this disintegration, photographed in the retina, is always chemically the result of changes in matter and in beams of light. Each one of these effects is designated under the name of colour.

Our acquaintance with the production and variations of these effects is precisely at the point where music was when there was no music.

In its earliest stage music was only natural harmony; the noise of the waterfall, the rumbling of the storm, the gentle whisper of the west wind, the murmur of the watercourses, the rattling of rain on dry leaves, all the sounds of still water and of the raging sea, the sleeping of lakes, the tumult of the hurricane, the soughing of the wind, the dreadful roar of the cyclone, the crashing of the thunder, the crackling of branches.

Afterwards the singing birds and then all the animals emitted their various sounds. Harmony was there; man, classifying and arranging the sounds, created music.

We all know what man has been able to get from it since then.

Man, past master of the musical realm, is to-day still in the infancy of art, from the standpoint of control of light.

If I have been the first to employ coloured light, I deserve no special praise for that. I cannot explain the circumstance; I do not know how I do it. I can only reply, like Hippocrates when he was asked what time was: “Ask it of me,” he said; “and I cannot tell you; ask it not and I know it well.”