About five years ago, 19th-century lesbian icon Loïe Fuller suddenly went viral — catalyzing (yet another) minor scandal for none other than Taylor Swift. Paying onstage homage to “the pioneer in dance, arts, and design … who fought for artists to own their own work” during her Reputation tour, the pop star was accused of queerbaiting. More plausibly, Swift was lauding the grit of a performer who, like herself, saw her original artistic output as part and parcel of professional autonomy.
Fuller’s effort to protect her oft-copied “Serpentine Dance” in 1892 proved moot — not until 1978 was choreography eligible for copyright — but as the new documentary Obsessed with Light makes lustrously clear, that didn’t deter the Midwestern polymath from taking the world by (lightning) storm. Fuller flouted the boundaries of practically every creative discipline she took on — from light and stage design to dance, choreography, and costume. Directors Sabine Krayenbühl and Zeva Oelbaum provide less an in-depth biography of the trailblazer’s life than a roving chronicle of her impact on the last 100-plus years of creative culture.
Born in Fullersburg, Illinois, to a family of performers, the self-proclaimed “eccentric” child knew early on that she was bound for bigger — and, quite literally, brighter — things. Draping her body in huge swathes of fabric held aloft by hidden poles, her signature dance style was as visually transfixing as it was physically taxing. When her spinning garment reflected the stage lights, it took on a life of its own, beguiling those in New York, Berlin, and Paris.
“Why should I render into the real world what we can only dream of?” Fuller wrote in her diary, excerpts of which are read by actor Cherry Jones, whose earthy timbre captures the dynamo’s no-nonsense attitude. “I had to create a new form of art, ignoring conventions, following only my own instinct.”
Film is an ideal medium on which to behold Fuller’s vision, as the advent of cinema coincided with her rise to fame — performing onstage and, later, in silent films that played with visual special effects. To see original footage of her onstage is to reconsider what makes dance, or any art form, “modern.” Under diaphanous folds of dappled silk, her body transmogrifies into kaleidoscopic petals, a rainbow tornado, or a crane in flight in the blink of an eye. She is feminine in grace and blazing in energy.
“She adapted the dance to her body and not the other way around,” explains Spanish choreographer Maite Marcos. But that didn’t mean Fuller’s figure was never an issue. While she was well aware that her “stocky” build was hardly the dance norm, the number of her contemporaries quoted as calling her “dumpy” is as distressing now as it must have been over a century ago.
But that didn’t stop “La Loïe,” as she was known in France, from becoming a fin de siècle tour de force. Across European capitals, Fuller’s refulgent spectacles prompted a frenzy of glowing reviews, inspiring not only other dancers and choreographers, but artists like Toulouse-Lautrec and Rodin. Throughout the film, a colorful panoply of international creatives cite her enduring influence—on everything from Broadway to high fashion, in addition to contemporary dance choreography.
Starting her own dance troupe of young women, Fuller embarked on several global tours, making — and spending — a fortune in the process. While the film never explicitly names or explores her queerness, her companionship with (in her words) “life friend” Gab Bloch is frequently referenced, mostly in the form of letters sent between them while the troupe was on tour. Tender in tone and openly affectionate, the excerpts read in the film never suggest that the two women found anything unusual to their romantic attraction — perhaps a glimpse of how fully Fuller rejected gendered expectations of her time or truly any era.
Punctuated by recent scenes of Jody Sperling’s Time Lapse Dance company performing Fuller-inspired work, Obsessed with Light heralds “La Loïe” as a singular agent of her own success, a woman as unapologetically brash as she was creatively ingenious. “I believe that life is but short at best,” she declared, “and one’s duty is to let nothing but the bright side to manifest itself.”
Obsessed with Light screens at Quad Cinema (34 West 13th Street, Greenwich Village, Manhattan) December 6–12, followed by a broader theatrical release.
