Mallarmé called her a dance innovator, Rodin was one of her most passionate admirers, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec immortalized her in his lithographs, and for the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1900, architects Henri Sauvage and Marcel Lemarié even dedicated a theater to her. Who is she? Naturally, Loïe Fuller, the dancer symbol of Art Nouveau, inventor on stage of image and light illusions that have gone down in history.
Her debut that crowned her as the new queen of the Parisian stage took place at the Folies Bergères on November 5, 1892, with four titles still famous today: "La Serpentine," "Le Papillon," "La Danse Blanche," and "Le Lys." But her love for the stage had begun many years earlier. Born in Fullerburg, Illinois in 1862, the American Fuller was already performing with the Chicago Stock Company at the age of four, delivering Shakespeare lectures by memory at thirteen, and embarking on a tour with Buffalo Bill's circus at twenty-one, before delving into vaudeville and theater of all kinds. In 1890, during a tour in London, she was offered the role of a young hypnotized widow in a traveling show titled "Quack M.D." in the United States. Loïe Fuller dressed in an extremely wide silk dress, devising a lighting system with luminous prisms: this became her fortune. As the audience saw her swirling on stage with arms outstretched, they began to exclaim, "a butterfly," "an orchid"...
The intuitive Fuller immediately realized the potential she held: she decided to dedicate herself to dance and experiment through light and costume plays in the realm of scenic metamorphosis.
In '92, she set out to conquer Paris. A visit to Notre-Dame inspired increasingly intense experiments. Stained glass windows suggested to her the use of glass slides in theater. She revolutionized the concept that light should come only from above, developing a lighting system that projected light from beneath the stage and from the sides. Through dance, Fuller didn't tell stories but rather revealed herself as a creator of visual illusions beyond time and space, which countless artists in the 20th century would draw inspiration from. How can one not feel the avant-garde spirit in certain light and costume plays of Alwin Nikolais' 1950s theater, despite the great difference in style and sign? Just think of Fuller's idea of extending arms with sticks to expand the possibilities of limb movement and to invent a new and unpredictable theatrical body. Brygida Ochaim, a dancer from Munich, has long dedicated her research to this great heroine of the stage, proposing "Danse les couleurs" in Rovereto, following in Fuller's footsteps. "I am fascinated by this woman," says Ochaim, "who, before anyone else, understood the relationship between dance, cinema, and plastic arts." Indeed, Fuller's invention of the famous mirror system used in her shows coincided with the early days of cinema. Fuller herself made three films around the 1920s: the first, of which Brygida Ochaim has managed to recover a part, dates back to 1919/1920 and is titled "Le Lys de la Vie," in which René Clair even worked. The other two are "Visions de Rêves" and "Coppélius et l'Homme au Sable": both from 1927. Fuller was unable to complete filming the second one, as she passed away in Paris on January 1, 1928.
Assisted in visual aspects by the American Judith Barry, Brygida Ochaim pays homage to Loïe Fuller's creativity by dancing a moving fantasy inspired by the artist's images. The famous wooden sticks that extended arms are replaced by plexiglass bars, and the luminous beams are recreated using lasers, but the spirit remains that of Loïe: if Fuller had access to lasers, there is no doubt she would have used them. Ochaim's performance will be interspersed with screenings of excerpts from early 20th-century films collected under the title "La féerie des Ballets fantastiques de Loïe Fuller."
