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Fuller Essay Sperling
Fuller Essay Sperling
by Jody Sperling
As her stage name, La Loe, suggests, Loe glamorous Queen Marie of Romania, and
Fuller was a singular entity. One of the most the popular astronomer Camille
celebrated performing artists of her era, Flammarion. Anatole France wrote the
Fuller crafted a new genre of performance, introduction to Fullers autobiography, and
one that combined dance, fabric, music, her encounter with Alexandre Dumas
and lighting design. She used these merits a separate chapter in it. Fuller was a
elements to materialize luminous, hypnotic tireless promoter of art (especially Rodins)
spectacles of startling visual impact. Fuller is and, through the cultivation and direction
one of the mothers of modern dance. Her of wealthy collectors, indirectly influenced
unprecedented success as an American the founding of two American Museums,
performer in Europeshe was based in namely the San Francisco Legion of Honor
Paris after 1892paved the way for the Museum and the Maryhill Museum of Art in
likes of Isadora Duncan, Maud Allan, and Goldendale, Washington.
Ruth St. Denis. Many visual artistsJules
Chret, Henri de Toulouse-Latrec, Franois- Early Career
Raoul Larche, Pierre Roche, to name a She was born Mary Louise Fuller on a
fewwere mesmerized by Fullers brilliant severe winters day in Fullersburg, Illinois
performances and depicted her in a (now part of Chicago). Later, she wrote that
multitude of media. Fullers serpentine the harsh weather at the time of her birth
swirls graced innumerable lithographed gave her a cold she could never shake. Her
posters, drawings, paintings, sculptures, father, who held various professions, was
glasswork, jewelry, lamps, textiles, and reputedly an accomplished fiddle player
many other objects. La Loe became the and, for a time, operated a dance academy.
embodiment of Art Nouveau, the abstract Fuller got an early start as a performer. In
ideal of Symbolist artists and poets, and her rather fanciful memoir, Fifteen Years of
was influential in other artistic movements a Dancers Life, Fuller tells how she began
including Cubism and Futurism. Fullers her stage career as a small child with a
influence also extended into the fields of Sunday school recitation of Mary had a
stagecraft technology and cinema. In the Little Lamb(22). As a young woman, she
1890s, electric lighting was new and Fuller went on to become an actress and a singer
exploited its as yet untested potential. playing such roles as The Waif in a
Many of the first motion pictures were of melodrama produced by William Cody (aka
Fullers imitators, or so-called serpentine Buffalo Bill), and travesti (or breeches)
dancers. With her feature The Lily of Life roles as the title characters in the
(1921) and other experiments, Fuller herself burlesques Little Jack Sheppard and
turned to filmmaking as a creative outlet Aladdin, or The Wonderful Lamp. By the
beyond the stage. 1880s, she had achieved modest theatrical
success. Trying her hand as a producer,
Although offstage she presented a rather Fuller travelled to London in 1889 to mount
frumpy, unfashionable appearance, and and star in the play Caprice, which proved
despite the fact that she never learned to to be a critical and financial flop. Broke and
speak French fluently, Fuller nonetheless unemployed, Fuller landed a role as an
moved in elite Parisian cultural circles and understudy at Londons Gaiety Theatre,
made it her business to cultivate important home of the skirt dance.
people. She was close to, among other
notables, the eminent sculptor August This engagement turned out to be critical to
Rodin, physicists Marie and Pierre Curie, the her artistic development. The skirt dance