Loie Fuller

“ You admire afar off, as in a vision, an airy figure comparable in grace to those dancers whom one sees on Pompeiian wall paintings, moving in their light draperies. Some day you discover once again this apparition in real life, softened in colour and hidden under those thicker robes with which mortals cover themselves, and you perceive that she is a person of good mind and good heart, a soul somewhat inclined to mysticism, to philosophy, [Pg x] to religion, a very deep, a very cheerful and a very noble soul. ”

“ I am certain that she would have accomplished great things if she had not found her career already mapped out for her from the day of her birth in her father’s palace.
Everyone knows that a princess’ life precludes liberty, and contains no possibility of breaking with the conventions for the sake of doing something extraordinary or notable. These chains are so strong that if one contrives to break them, it generally happens under the impulse of despair, as a result of irritation and not for the sake of a purely inspired work. ”

“ Had she not been so well known she would have been taken for an anarchist. At this theatre, Rue des Batignolles, where I once witnessed the direst of melodramas that ever made popular audiences shiver, at this theatre, which has become elegant and sumptuous with its handsome, modernised decorations, at the Théâtre des Arts, she has installed her footlights, her electric lamps, all this visual fairyland which she has invented and perfected, which has made of her a unique personality, an independent creator, a revolutionist in art. ”

“ Every evening the usual audience is lost amid a crowd composed of scholars, painters, sculptors, writers and ambassadors, and at the matinees there is a crowd of women and children. All the chairs and tables of the galleries have been piled up behind the orchestra chairs and all the people, forgetful of their rank and dignity, climb over them like a crowd of urchins. All that for a young girl who does not seem to suspect that she has won success. ”

“ I have motion. That means that all the elements of nature may be expressed.
Let us take a “tranche de vie.” That expresses surprise, deception, contentment, uncertainty, resignation, hope, distress, joy, fatigue, feebleness, and, finally, death. Are not all these sensations, each one in turn, humanity’s lot? And why can not these things be expressed by the dance, guided intelligently, as well as by life itself? ”

“ The native American claims to have the advantage of being a citizen of the world’s freest country. If you were to say to most Americans that there is a great deal of liberty in England, they would think that you were trying to make fun of them, and they would tell you that they did not believe it. They admit, occasionally, that there is a little freedom outside of the United States, but they will add:
“What a pity there isn’t more of it.”
The American believes himself completely emancipated, for freedom is the passion of the whole people. ”

“ I arrived at Vienna with my Japanese company, headed by Sada Yacco. We had with us an artist to whom I had been delighted to be of service. In Paris my close friend, Madame Nevada, the celebrated American singer, had presented her to me, and the dancer had given me a performance as an example of her skill. She danced with remarkable grace, her body barely covered by the flimsiest of Greek costumes, and she bade fair to become somebody. Since then she has arrived. In her I saw the ancient tragic dances revived. ”

“ The eighteenth century dances, the minuet in a whirl of powder; the waltz is only an embrace, the woman cult revived.
“The soul of the dance was destined to be born in this sad and feverish age. Loie Fuller modelled [Pg 265] form out of a dream. Our foolish desires, our dread of mere nothing, these she expressed in her dance of fire. To satisfy our thirst for oblivion she humanised the flowers. Happier than her brothers, the lords of creation, she caused her silent deeds to live and in the darkness, this setting of grandeur, no human defect marred her beauty. ”

“ Because each life expresses one by one all these emotions. One can express even the religious sensations. Can we not again express the sensations that music arouses in us, either a nocturne of [Pg 72] Chopin’s or a sonata of Beethoven’s, a slow movement by Mendelssohn, one of Schumann’s lieder, or even the cadence of lines of poetry?
As a matter of fact, motion has been the starting point of all effort at self-expression, and it is faithful to nature. In experiencing one sensation we cannot express another by motions, even when we can do so in words. ”

“ When I had finished studying my dances, I went in search of a manager. I was acquainted with them all. During my career as singer and actress I had served all of them more or less frequently.
I was, however, hardly prepared for the reception which they gave me. The first one laughed me in the face as he said:
“You a dancer! Well, that’s too good! When I want you for a theatrical part I’ll look you up with pleasure; but as for dancing, good heavens! When I engage a dancer she will have to be a star. ”

“ One manager went so far as to tell me that two years of absence from New York had caused the public completely to forget me, and that, in trying to recall myself to their memory, I should seem to be inflicting ancient history on them. As I had then just passed my twentieth birthday I was extremely irritated by that insinuation, and I thought: “Would it then be necessary for me painfully to build up a reputation and to look old to prove that I was young to-day?”
Unable to restrain my feelings any longer, I told the manager what I thought.
“Hell,” he replied, “it isn’t age that counts. ”

“ The gentleman translated the beadle’s language to me.
“Tell that woman to go away; she is crazy.”
Such was my first visit to Notre Dame and the vexatious experience that my love of colour and light caused.
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. ”

“ If the custom still existed of dancing at funerals, a little reflection will show that the dances would have to suggest and express sadness, despair, grief, agony, resignation and hope. All this can be expressed by motions and hence by the dance. The only question is whether the dancer should express the grief she feels at the loss of a loved one, or if she should reveal to the people who are in mourning resignation and the hope of a future life. ”

“ The flames die into a single flame, which grows to immensity. You might think that human thought were rending itself in the darkness. And we await with anxious hearts the beauty that passes.
“Soul of the flowers, soul of the sky, soul of flame, Loie Fuller has given them to us. Words and phrases avail nothing. She has created the soul of the dance, for until Loie Fuller came the dance was without soul! ”

“ In the boxes were the managers of all the New York theatres and their wives. The house was filled to overflowing. The three bangs announced the rising of the curtain. Silence ensued and the play began, I did not understand a word and no one around me, I fancy, did, either. But everybody awaited [Pg 91] the culminating moment. She appeared, and there was an almost painful silence in the great overcrowded hall. Every one held his breath. She came forward lightly, appearing barely to brush the earth. Then she stopped in the middle of the stage, and surveyed this audience of actors. ”

“ I danced four times, and the different sensations expressed by the audience were most remarkable. They gave me the most vivid impression I have ever experienced. It was something immense, gigantic, prodigious.
That day I had a feeling that the crowd was really the most powerful of monarchs.
There are other monarchs as well as kings and crowds. Certain emotions are kings, too.
At Nice, at the Riviera Palace Hotel, I noticed one day at a table near mine a young man of distinguished appearance whose glance met my own several times successively, almost, one would fancy, in spite of himself. ”

“ Ignoring conventions, following only my own instinct, I am able to translate the sensations we have all felt without suspecting that they could be expressed. We all know that in the powerful emotions of joy, sorrow, horror, or despair, the body expresses the emotion it has received from the mind. The mind serves as a medium and [Pg 71] causes these sensations to be caught up by the body. In fact, the body responds to these sensations to such an extent sometimes that, especially when the shock is violent, life is suspended or even leaves the body altogether. ”

“ A light underwaist, a short jacket and a very simple cape completed my costume.
After seeing this Gab and her mother went home with their seats for next day’s matinee. This matinee impressed Gab to such a degree that on reaching home this child of fourteen wrote the following lines in my honour:
“A luminous and impalpable shadow. Across the dark brown night flits a pallid, palpitating reflection. And while petals fly in the air a supernatural golden flower rises toward the sky. It is not a sister of the terrestrial flowers which shed their dream particles upon our aching souls. ”

“ She is one who is able to grasp the profound significance of things that seem insignificant, and to see the splendour hidden in simple lives. Gleefully she depicts, with keen and brilliant stroke, the humble folk in whom she finds some ennobling and magnifying beauty. Not that she is especially devoted to the lowly, the poor in spirit. On the contrary she enters easily into the lives of artists and scholars. I have heard her say the most delicate, the subtlest things about Curie, Mme. Curie, Auguste Rodin and other geniuses. ”

“ In America when something is left in front of the door it is only as a sign that the object can be thrown away. Mortier never saw his shoes again.
He rang, a negro presented himself. Mortier demanded his shoes. He cried, stormed, threatened. The negro backed up against the wall and unconcernedly whistled a cakewalk.
Speechless with rage, Mortier hurled himself upon the black. The hotel negroes, especially when they are not armed, are ordinarily lacking in courage. Besides, this one had good reasons for believing that his client had gone mad. ”

“ Sight is perhaps the first, the most acute, of our senses. But as we are born with this sense sufficiently well developed to enable us to make good use of it, it is afterward the last that we try to perfect. For we concern ourselves with everything sooner than with beauty. So there is no reason for surprise that the colour sense is the last to be developed.
Yet, notwithstanding, colour so pervades everything that the whole universe is busy producing it, everywhere and in everything. ”

“ So I am not the woman, perhaps my word will be taken for it, who, of all the world, is most appreciative of the value of a name. I might add that the American chorus girl of whom I have been writing came to Paris and that one day her lover left her there. Alone, without friends, without a cent, ill, she sent for me.
Did I help her?
I am afraid I did. When we see a dog in the street dying of hunger, we give him something to eat, and not in order that he may not bite us, not in order that he may be grateful to us; we give him something to eat because he is hungry. ”

“ When we returned to New York Mortier went to the Holland House, a hotel at which French was spoken, and where things were done in a manner approximating nearer to what he was accustomed to.
America—this America which on the steamer he had assured himself would be perfect—had come to interest him only in places where it had lost its own character. He found it good only in the few spots where it resembled Paris. ”

“ Loie Fuller, who was a soubrette before being the goddess of light, an enchantress of strange visions, has become enamoured of this dramatic Japanese art and has popularised it everywhere, through Sada Yacco and then through Mme. Hanako. I have always observed that Loie Fuller has a very keen intelligence. I am not surprised that Alexandre Dumas said to me: ‘She ought to write out her impressions and her memories.’ I should like to hear from her how she first conceived these radiant dances, of which the public has never grown tired, and which she has just begun again at the Hippodrome. ”

“ There with the sea for a background and with the coloured lights used for signalling as the media of illumination, I tried for the first time a series of new dances, each with a special gown.
The enthusiasm of passengers and crew knew no bounds and I felt that I had taken my first step in the conquest of a new world.
We landed in Germany. My manager came to meet us and took us to Berlin. But, to my [Pg 48] great annoyance, I found that I was not to make my initial appearance for a month, and I could not discover in what city I was to make it. ”

“ It is delightful to see at close hand and in so attractive a guise this little creature, who looks so frightful when, with convulsed eyes, she mimics the death agony. There is a pretty smile on the lips which at the theatre are curled under the pain of hara-kiri. ”

“ Every American thinks, without ever being guilty of profound reflection on the subject, that everybody, whatever his nationality, would have preferred first to see the light of day in the United States. For the United States, if one were to accept the cheerful American belief, is a free country whose parallel does not exist anywhere in the world. ”

“ LIGHT AND THE DANCE SINCE it is generally agreed that I have created something new, something composed of light, colour, music, and the dance, more especially of light and the dance, it seems to me that it would perhaps be appropriate, after having considered my creation from the anecdotal and picturesque standpoint, to explain, in more serious terms, just what my ideas are relative to my art, and how I conceive it both independently and in its relationship to other arts. ”

“ The poor little charwoman, encumbered with a drunken husband and six children, agreed to take care of the paralytic and her home if the other neighbours would be willing to provide the bare necessities of life. She succeeded in overcoming the selfishness of each and every one in the warmth of her kindness. From that time on she never ceased in the rare hours when she was free to look after the paralytic. ”

“ M. Roger Marx has two sons, who, when they saw me for the first time, were respectively four and six years old. The elder took a notion to dance “like Loie Fuller,” using a table cloth for drapery. I gave him a robe modelled after one of mine and, before we knew it, the child was evolving new dances.
The way he expressed joy, grief, ecstasy and despair was admirable. His memory of me, or rather his memory of my dances, remained so vivid and epitomised so precisely the conception he had of beauty and of art that he became a “poet.” ”

“ Shortly after, I left for a long tour in America, and during my absence my domestics received them every Sunday. From their point of view I was merely a sure client.
One day I gave them tickets for a great concert. I was in the hall and observed them.
The woman was overcome at seeing so many fashionable people. As for the man, his features aglow with an unearthly light, his head thrown a little back after the way of the blind, he was in ecstasy, intoxicated with the music. ”

“ Like them the gigantic flower brings no consolation. It grew in a strange region under the moon’s blue rays. Life beats in its transparent stem, and its clear leaves hang loosely in the shade like great tormented arms. Just a dream efflorescence displays itself and meditates. ”

“ Slow music calls for a slow dance, just as fast music requires a fast dance.
In general, music ought to follow the dance. The best musician is he who can permit the dancer to direct the music instead of the music inspiring the dance. All this is proved to us by the natural outcome of the motives which first impelled men to dance. Nowadays these motives are forgotten, and it is no longer considered that there should be a reason for dancing. ”

“ Heartbroken, with my courage oozing, I made my appearance at the Madison Square Theatre and, to my astonishment, to my immense satisfaction, I saw that the theatre had to turn people away. And it was that way as long as my engagement lasted.
As for the other theatre, after three weeks of featuring my imitator, it was obliged to close its doors to rehearse a new opera. ”

“ All at once a gentleman rushed into my dressing-room.
“Well, Mollie, my old girl, why don’t you reply to a comrade’s letter?”
[Pg 268]
But on seeing me in street costume he stopped short and cried:
“Well, but who are you? I thought you were Mollie Fuller!”
Then I understood that he had taken me for one of his old friends.
“I know whom you mean,” I answered, “but I am not Mollie Fuller. Mollie Fuller is very well known in the United States, where she is imitating my dances. We are often mistaken for each other, but you must realise that this isn’t the same person.” ”