Loie Fuller was not a great dancer: Although she studied dance as a child she quickly gave up on the lessons because she found them too difficult. But this did not stop her from having an illustrious career as a dancer - because Fuller did have something wondrous to offer her audiences, which was a unique and innovative blend of the artistic and the scientific. Although her dances - in which she was partnered with the magic of early electrical lighting - cannot compare on a technical level with the kinds of special effects that even a straight-to-video movie has today, she is in many ways directly responsible for what we see on both stage and screen. She made it undeniably clear that art and science are not competing goals but rather eager collaborators.
Fuller's personal history is a fascinating one. Born in a salon in Fullersburg, Illinois, in 1862, she worked as an actress as a child - making her debut on a Chicago stage at the age of four - as well as working as a Temperance League singer. For the quarter century after she first set foot on a stage, she performed in a wide range of venues, appearing with stock companies, on vaudeville, in burlesque shows, in Chautauqua-like Shakespearian readings, made it to Broadway, and even performed with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.
She first began to create works in the genre that she would become more famous for - and is still most celebrated for - in 1891 (although the story concerning her first light-and-dance extravaganza may be at least to some extent apocryphal) when she was rehearsing a piece titled "Quack, MD". It was a version of the "skirt dances" that were growing increasingly popular as modern dance began to establish itself as a serious dance form (and as it borrowed from various forms of folk dance). However, while skirt dances - in which dancers did relatively little dancing but instead depended upon manipulating skirts sewn of vast amounts of yardage something along the...