Electric Salome: Loie Fuller's Performance of Modernism - Rilegato

Garelick, Rhonda K.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0691017085 ISBN 13: 9780691017082

Casa editrice: Princeton Univ Pr, 2007

Riassunto

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 Salome places 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.

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Recensione:

"Garelick's lucid, engrossing study . . . unwraps the contradictions that have kept Fuller as veiled from modern audiences as she was from those at the Folies-Bergere."--Andrea Walker, Times Literary Supplement

"A most welcome 'finding' of a dancer never lost, Electric Salome offers a remarkably smart reading of Fuller's contribution to dance history, one that makes clear the importance of that contribution to modernism broadly construed."--Catherine Gunther Kodat, Modernism Modernity

"In her mesmerizing dances, swirling huge skirts under colored lights of her own design, Fuller paved the way for new visual effects in theater. [I]n Electric Salome Rhonda Garelick attempts to reposition Fuller as a central player in the multiple histories of ballet, modern dance, theater, visual art and postmodern performance. The best part of Electric Salome is how Garelick puts Fuller's story into a context that we can appreciate."--Matthew Hunter Griffin, Time Out Chicago

"Rhonda Garelick's Electric Salome...argues for Fuller's relevance beyond her status as modern dance 'pioneer' and traces the way in which her work was modernist in its own right. Garelick's book spirals out, teasing out connections with Fuller to broader movements of colonialism, as well as Romantic Ballet and Modernist Drama. [Electric Salome offers] significant advances to Loie Fuller scholarship [and argues] persuasively for the importance of Fuller's legacy."--Judy Sperling, Dance Films Association Review

"This indispensable book benefits from Garelick's lucid prose, superb images, and insightful footnotes."--S.R. Irelan, Choice

"Electric Salome is suitable for a wide range of readership. . . . Garelick writes theory with the minimum of jargon; the book is academic and sophisticated, but accessible throughout. It contains almost fifty illustrations, including posters, photographs and patent drawings."--Stephen Herbert, Early Popular Visual Culture

"One of the best aspects of Rhonda K. Garelick's book is that it enables a virtual re-enactment of Fuller's performance of modernity: in the end, the initial butterfly/illusion shimmers and stays for good in the reader's mind."--Virginie Pouzet-Duzer, Oscholars

"Both Ann Cooper Albright's and Rhonda Garelick's books are important contributions to a female artist, whose place on the agenda of French modernism is now less refutable than ever. Both authors have done much to shed further light on the sometimes counter intuitive complexity of this modernism. While both Traces of Light and Electric Salome deserve to be considered in their own right, they open an even more fascinating kaleidoscopic panorama when read in tandem."--Lucia Ruprecht, H-France

"This well-illustrated and probing book is an important contribution to the scholarship on Loie Fuller and, with its contemporary resonances, should prove of interest to practitioners and academics in the fields of live-art and site-specific performance as well as dance."--Libby Worth, Modern Drama

"Fuller's work demands that its scholars cover a lot of ground, and I was delighted to learn so much from Garelick's study about a widely ignored pioneer of avant-garde and modernist theatre performance and dance."--Mike Sell, Theatre Research International

Contenuti:

List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1

Chapter One: The Evolution of Fuller's Performance Aesthetic 19
Early Years: Awareness and Unconsciousness 20
The Evolution of a European Modernist 32

Chapter Two: Electric Salome: Loie Fuller at the World's Fair of 1900 63
A Handsome Savage 63
The World's Fair of 1900 68
Queen of the Fair 78
Mutable Geography and Adopted Nationality 86
Salome 90
Fuller's Japanese Costars at the Fair 103
A Yankee Salome on the Rue de Paris 106
The New Colonial Power: The United States at the World's Fair 111
A Vision of America to Come 114

Chapter Three: Fuller and the Romantic Ballet 118
Yankees Don't Do Ballet 118
Romantic Ballet: Sprites, Swans, and Windup Toys 125
Fuller: The Accidental Sylph 130
Technical Developments 134
Fuller, Hoffmann, and the Technologized Body 139
Coppélia and the Romantic Ballet Couple 144
Ambivalent Ballet: Fuller's Figurative and Literal
Performance of Disavowal 150
A Balletic Dream of Modernism 153

Chapter Four: Scarring the Air: Loie Fuller's Bodily Moderism 156
Fuller's Invisibility: Modernist Physicality, Sex, and Cultural Legacy 156
Fleur du Sang: Fuller's Violent and Erotic Physicality 162
The Erotic Fuller 166
The Scandalous Ballets Loie Fuller 171
Instinct, Nature, and Versions of Interiority 176
The Mechanics of the Group 179
The Triumph of La Mer 182
Martha Graham's Lamentation 190
Fuller in a New Light 194
The Physical Analogue of the Psychological 196

Chapter Five: Of Veils and Onion Skins: Fuller and Modern European Drama 200
Radical Mechanicity 200
Character and Identity 203
Tristan Tzara's Mouchoir de Nuages 214
Tzara's Hamlet 218
Reading the Clouds: Shakespeare, Freud, and Fuller 220

Afterword
Thoughts on Contemporary Traces of Fuller 224
Selected Bibliography 231
Index 241

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Princeton Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0691017085
• ISBN 13: 9780691017082
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 246