I. Loïe Fuller's Influence on F. T. Marinetti's Futurist Dance

Dance Chronicle

ISSN: 0147-2526 (Print) 1532-4257 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ldnc20

I. Loïe Fuller's influence on F. T. Marinetti's futurist dance

Ted Merwin

To cite this article: Ted Merwin (1998) I. Loïe Fuller's influence on F. T. Marinetti's futurist dance, Dance Chronicle, 21:1, 73-92, DOI: 10.1080/01472529808569297 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01472529808569297

Published online: 02 Jun 2008.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 132

View related articles

Citing articles: 2 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ldnc20 Loïe Fuller and the Futurists: Two Views I. Loïe Fuller's Influence on F. T. Marinetti's Futurist Dance

Ted Merwin

Like other grandiloquent pronouncements of the founder of Italian Futurism, Filippo Tommasso Marinetti's manifesto "The Futurist Dance," first published July 8, 1917, attempts to invent a new set of rules for the revitalization of an art form. By celebrating artistic icono- clasrri, rejecting the art of the past, and requiring that art both mirror and incite all of mankind's most destructive urges, Marinetti and his followers intended to redefine art as an instrument for the articulation of a demystified and dehumanized aesthetic. Thus, for the Futurists, the production of art became inseparable from theorizing about art; Futurist art took on a philosophical self-consciousness quite apart from its implicit politics. In his "Founding and Manifesto of Futurism," written in 1909, Marinetti had called for the elimination of all art (and all cultural in- stitutions) ever created: "We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every oppor- tunistic or utilitarian cowardice,"1 he had promised. How ironic, then,

73 74 DANCE CHRONICLE that in his manifesto on Futurist dance he should pay an explicit debt to the work of a female American dancer, Loie Fuller, who performed in Paris at the Folies-Bergere in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, both the Symbolist dancer and the Futurist phi- losopher, each of whom were central figures in the aesthetic movements of their time, shared deeper affinities than either perhaps would have been able to acknowledge. To some extent, Marinetti and Fuller were mirror images, reversed, of each other: Fuller used technology to heighten the psychological effects of her art, while Marinetti reinvested technology with the emotive and sensual. For Marinetti, as he set forth in the manifesto on the subject, dance originated in an expression of the "bewilderment and terrors which disturbed mankind in its infancy." But far from incorporating desperate, passionate, and erratic motions, the earliest, "Oriental," dances traced the courses of the stars and displayed "architectural style and mathematical regularity." After then developing an erotic dimen- sion, particularly in South American culture, dance was brought to a new stage by Isadora Duncan, whom Marinetti identifies with Impres- sionist painting, and by Nijinsky, whom Marinetti sees as influenced by Cubism. Thus, in mankind's recent adolescence, as compared with its infancy in paganism and its maturity in Futurism, dance freed itself from music, "replaced" music, and became an expression of multifac- eted geometric form.2 This stage, Marinetti believes, was exemplified by Valentine de Saint-Point, a Symbolist poet and painter who had been taken under Marinetti's wing and asked to write the "Manifesto of Futurist Women," which she presented at the Galerie Giroux in Brussels on June 1,1912, shortly after the opening of a touring exhibition of Futurist paintings by Umberto Boccioni, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and others. Saint- Point is best known, however, for a later work, the "Futurist Manifesto of Lust" of 1913, which equates art and war in that both are "the great manifestations of sensuality," while "lust is their flower."3 Arguing es- sentially that lust is the life-force, Saint-Point believed that it alone had the power to unify and equalize the sexes in a grand synthesis, to pro- mote which she felt to be her life's work. At around this time Saint-Point became interested in dance and developed her theory of Metachoric Dances, which were attempts to translate her poetry into physical movement, in which the intellectual FULLER AND THE FUTURISTS: I 75

Valentine de Saint-Point in a "poeme danse" of 1913. 76 DANCE CHRONICLE

Valentine de Saint-Point in an allegorical dance from 1917. FULLER AND THE FUTURISTS: I 77 and emotional capacities were combined and integrated. Following the Futurist emphasis on the depersonalization of the performer, her face was always veiled on stage.* Her costumes, designed by Vivian du Mas, featured brightly colored classical-style flowing drapes, Asian gowns, or medieval-type armor and helmet. Bold lighting designs were also a hallmark of her career, which reached its height at a performance at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York on April 3,1917. Saint- Point wrote: [I present] a geometric figure of a certain meaning, an atmosphere, a costume, a veiled face, a voice emanating from an invisible body, precise movements, rigorous attitudes I determine the formal synthesis in a geometric figure, which agrees harmoniously with the idea, and I enclose my dance within the limits of this figure in the same way as music is enclosed in the numbers of counterpoint. There is, therefore, in the Metachoric Dance, a union of consciousness, and a union of all the arts.4 By the time Marinetti wrote his own manifesto on dance, he had become disappointed in his protegee and dissatisfied with her approach to dance. In "The Futurist Dance," he called it "outmoded poetry that wallows in the old Greek and mediaeval feeling; danced ab- stractions which were static, arid, cold and without emotion." In sum, by 1917 he found her art to be "a cold geometry of poses which have nothing in common with the grand dynamic and simultaneous emotions of modern life."5 Modern urban life, for Marinetti, had a kind of energy and excitement that Saint-Point's dances failed to convey. But, as Leslie Satin has suggested in an article on Saint-Point, it is likely that Marinetti was also uncomfortable with the Symbolist roots of Saint-Point's art. For Saint-Point, despite her Futurist leanings, was particularly attentive

* She wrote in "The Superdance—or Metachorie—in Theory and Practice" that "The face, whose expression is naturally always changing, or is artificially wrinkled in a frozen smile, or else varied by the details of a mimicry that is all too easily acquired, is thus in disharmony with the inevitably slower movements of the body. It is as easy to express an idea with one's face which everybody is used to reading, as it is difficult to synthesize an abstract idea in an ensemble of bodily movements. The face, with its multiple details, being by its very nature expressive, should therefore be veiled, revealing only its form, which is a continuation of that part of the body, an outline which is part of a whole, and which, in the total line, has only a collective value." (Originally published in the Parisian periodical Montjoie, January 1914. Translator unknown. Valentine de Saint-Point, clipping file, Dance Collection.) 78 DANCE CHRONICLE to atmosphere and mystery, sought a fusion of the senses, and made complex use of light and shadow.6 Ironically, precisely these elements were characteristics of Fuller's work as well. By contrast, Marinetti called for a dance grounded in highly specific references to machines. "We must imitate with gestures," he urged, "the movements of motors, pay assiduous court to steering-gear, wheels, pistons, prepare the fusion of man and the machine, and thus arrive at the metallization of the futurist dance." Dance must be eman- cipated from music, which Marinetti considered to be "basically nostalgic," but not performed in silence, rather accompanied by noise, which Marinetti called the "language of the new human-mechanical life." Perfect for the purpose, Marinetti declared, was the orchestra of "noise-makers" invented by Luigi Russolo,* who located an "indubita- ble animalism" within the sounds of modern industrial life.* In sum, the Futurist dance would be "Inharmonious—Ungraceful—Asymmet- rical—Dynamic." Aesthetic pleasure, Marinetti believed, was only legitimately derived from reproducing, in the artistic realm, the excitement—the almost sexual thrill—one felt about the advance of technology. Thus, his dances, which he called "Dance of the Aviator," "The Shrapnel Dance," and "The Machine Gun Dance," are glorifications of war but not of death, almost as if people did not actually die in war. (Futurist dance will, he insisted, "bur[y] all outmoded dances, which should never be exhumed.") Yet, by contrast with the founding manifesto's idea of Futurism as both a group activity and an occasion for male bonding, his dances are all solos and all to be danced by women. The dancers imitate the motions and sounds of artillery and explosions, carry placards with orders and directions to create a military context, and wave colored tissue paper and flowers to create atmosphere or imitate the motion of

* The noisemakers, or intonarumori, included "ululatori, rombatori, crepitatori, sibilatori, stropiccia- tori, ronzatori, scoppiatori, gorgogliatori, and frusciatori (howlers, roarers, cracklers, whistlers, rubbers, buzzers, exploders, gurglers, and rustlers)." R.W. Flint, introduction to F.T. Marinetti's Selected Writings (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972), p. 23. tRussolo added, "We should amuse ourselves by orchestrating in our minds the noise of metal shutters of store windows, the slamming of doors, the bustle and shuffle of crowds, the multitudi- nous uproar of railroad stations, forges, mills, printing presses, power stations, and underground railways." Nicholas Slonimsky, Music Since 1900, 4th ed. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971), p. 1020. FULLER AND THE FUTURISTS: I 79 flying bullets. "Organized noise" supplies weather conditions like wind, rain, and thunder. Despite Marinetti's seriousness, one can imagine that such dances would be humorous, and that, far from enslaving the human expressive potential, they might offer opportunities for quite exuberant and unin- hibited physical performance. For all Marinetti's desire to subordinate the human being to the machine, the very presence of the dancer leap- ing about on stage (Marinetti repeatedly uses the word "carefree" to suggest her necessary attitude) seems to offer an ironic commentary on the supposed ascendancy of the machine. Nevertheless, as Elizabeth Delsa has pointed out, the manifesto substitutes "vigorous sentimentalism concerning the machine" for the "old emotional sentimentalism to which he [Marinetti] objects in previous phases of the dance."7 Thus, in addition to Marinetti's own conceptual "dance" with artists who began working prior to the birth of Futurism—his swinging between the embrace and rejection of their art—there was something else contradictory at the heart of Marinetti's writing on dance, in that the very celebration of the machine could be accomplished only through a demonstration of human creativity. It may not be too strange, then, that Marinetti should write, in the same manifesto, that the Futurists would take Loie Fuller as their inspiration rather than Valentine de Saint-Point: "We Futurists prefer Lois [sic] Fuller and negro cakewalk (utilization of the electric light and mechanics)," he wrote.* Fuller, born in 1862 near Chicago, was one of many American dancers who made their reputation in late nineteenth-century Europe. According to Sally Sommer and others, she was still a minor actress and burlesque dancer when she got her first break, in 1891, in a road show of a play called Quack M.D. On stage in Holyoke, Massachusetts, she pretended to be hypnotized and to do a dance at the direction of the hypnotist-doctor. Her silk dress created rippling patterns of light, which garnered an enthusiastic response from the audience, and she hence- forth decided to experiment with the effects of light on silk.

* The version of the manifesto in Flint's translation of Marinetti gives the impression that she is male; there her name is misspelled "Louie" (Selected Writings, p. 138). Marinetti's original text reads: "Noi futuristi preferiamo Loie-Füller e il cake-walk dei negri (utilizzazione della luce elletrica e meccanicità)" Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1968), p. 126. It is not clear how Marinetti found "mechanical" elements in the cakewalk. 80 DANCE CHRONICLE

Fuller has only relatively recently been rediscovered by dance historians, despite the fact that she was an early promoter of Isadora Duncan's career.* Incandescent electric lights on the stage were a nov- elty when Fuller made use of them in an act at the Folies-Bergere in 1892; at a time when theatres were just beginning to convert gas lamps to electric fixtures, she was one of the first performers to exploit the potential of electric light/ Fuller's performances began with a darkened stage, something we take for granted today but that was startlingly innovative in her time. Fuller eliminated footlights and instead lit the stage from the front, side, and rear. Revolving colored lenses sprayed the light onto the stage, where it was picked up and diffused by the swirling silk costumes of the dancers.8 Although a review of Valentine de Saint-Point's New York debut also emphasized the "beauty of the light effects [and] the richness and originality of the costumes (especially the glistening armor-casing of war),"9 it was Fuller whose use of light and costume to create stun- ning special effects is considered revolutionary. Although Fuller had many famous dances, in which she imi- tated everything from giant butterflies to stormy skies to exploding vol- canoes, her best-known dance was called simply "Fire Dance." To the music of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries," she danced on a glass plate over a hole in the floor from which red light issued. Also lit from the front by a slide projector, Fuller seemed to disappear into what the London Standard, in 1900, called a "kaleidoscopic vision" in which "the hues of the rainbow came from all sides, and ranged themselves upon the ever moving draperies."10 Sally Sommer describes this effect, immortalized in one of a series of fifty lithographs of Fuller done by Toulouse-Lautrec in 1893, as the disappearance of the dancer in a "vol- canic eruption of color."11 A French reviewer gushed:

* Lincoln Kirstein once wrote that it is "only historically interesting to settle who actually precipi- tated the romantic revolution in theatre dancing, Duncan or Fokine. Both arrived spontaneously; the germs of the idea were in the air. There were the skirt dances of Loïe Fuller, and the ancient tradition of inspiration from remains in the Roman Forum and the Parthenon. But it is still Duncan for our memory" ("The Dance as Theatre," New Theatre, May 1935, p. 20). Adolphe Appia was another innovator in this field, but many of his ideas, conceived initially during his staging of Wagnerian operas in the 1890s, such as the use of diffuse lighting and the use of mobile spotlights, were not put into practice until the second decade of the twentieth century. FULLER AND THE FUTURISTS: I 81

The poster for Fuller's "Fire Dance" at the Folies-Bergere. 82 DANCE CHRONICLE

Miss Fuller, improbable as it might seem, inhabits the flames, the vapors, the apparitions, the phantoms of light, the colored essences of flowers that you have seen on the stages of the world. She is a woman of flesh and bone, but above all of heart and soul ... who inhabits this atmosphere of purified flame and startling brightness.*

Just over five feet tall and stocky, Fuller did not fit the conven- tional image of a dancer. Her aspirations, given her inability to perform traditional ballet (Sommer calls her "plump" as a young woman, later "grossly fat" as well as "myopic" and "often bespectacled")12 clearly led her in another direction. The use of moving lights and billowing costumes to effect an apparent materialization and dematerialization of the dancer's body (her "flesh and bone" is emphasized in the quoted passage from the French reviewer as if it were in danger of being for- gotten) demonstrated a simultaneous attention to, and de-emphasis of, the physical human body. As Guy Ducrey has written in his article "LoTe Fuller ou Le Regne de L'Ambivalence," Fuller displays "Pimage d'une evanescence et de son depassement simultane. Insaisissable et statuaire ... elle est parfaitement ambivalente"13 (a fleeting image and its imme- diate disappearance. Fluid and fixed... it is perfectly ambivalent). This "ambivalence," as argued above, was to inhabit the heart of Italian Futurist ideology as well, as clearly demonstrated in Marinetti's writings on dance. Indeed, for Marinetti technology was both an ex- tension of, and replacement for, the human body, which was most expressive when most mechanical in its movements. In line with roughly contemporary Russian theories of acting as mechanical process, such as Vsevolod Meyerhold's system of biomechanics (developed in the early 1920s) and Konstantin Stanislavsky's idea that acting should be chiefly a product of automatic physical and emotional reflex (elabo- rated and refined throughout his career, which began before World War I), Marinetti invented dances that, in their naive celebration of technology, both highlighted and dismissed the very physicality of the

* "C'est de miss Fuller ... invraisemblable que cela puisse paraître, qui habite dans ces flammes, ces vapeurs, ces apparitions, ces fantômes de lumière, ces essences colorées, de fleurs que vous avez vues sur les scènes du monde. II y a une femme de chair et d'os, d'âme et de cceur surtout ... qui habite cette atmosphère de flamme purifiante et d'éclatante clarté." Loïe Fuller, clipping file, Dance Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Translation mine. FULLER AND THE FUTURISTS: I 83

Lo'ie Fuller in costume for her "Butterfly Dance." 84 DANCE CHRONICLE human body by treating it as a kind of well-oiled machine.14 For exam- ple, his "Dance of the Aviator" directs the dancer to "simulate, by jolts and undulations of the body, the movements of an airplane that is tak- ing off."15 Ironically, according to C. Thomas Ault, critics of Fuller found her so disembodied in performance that they denied that she was a dancer at all. But Ault points out that Fuller herself called her dancers mere "instruments of light."16 This fits well with Sommer's argument that Fuller's performance was notable partly for its "emotional disen- gagement that allowed for the supremacy of image; it was movement uncomplicated by persona."11 Like Saint-Point's hiding of her face when she danced and Marinetti's advocacy of a blank expression on the performer's face,18 Fuller, in Sommer's interpretation, placed special effects above the exhibition of personality. This suggests an important reason for Marinetti's admiration of Fuller: he, too, was intoxicated with "movement uncomplicated bypersona," although in his case itwas the movement of machines. The problem, of course, lies in how one defines "persona," for clearly both Marinetti and Fuller expressed highly idiosyncratic visions of the world through their art. Both were also greatly influenced by the scientific breakthroughs made in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In a recent article that takes a new historicist approach to Fuller's use of electricity, Felicia McCarren compares J.-M. Charcot's late-nineteenth-century attempts to cure hysteria through electric shock treatment with Fuller's dance performances. McCarren sees parallels between hysteric symp- toms and the movements of Fuller's dances. When electricity, like hypnosis, was used to unify a dissociated personality and restore movement to a hysterically paralyzed female patient, McCarren believes, it served a similar function as the dancer's use of spectacle to project an ideal of artistic freedom.* However, as McCarren writes, "while the hysteric's production of meaning on the body can be described as metaphoric, replacing the

* By contrast, according to Günter Berghaus, Valentine de Saint-Point used "brisk and powerful" steps in which "the wild, digressive spirit is permanently confronted with forces of constraint or repression, which makes the dancer look," in Saint-Point's own words, "like 'a rebellious bee that has been caught in a spider's web, or a bird trapped in a bucket of water'" (Berghaus, "Dance and the Futurist Woman," Dance Research, Vol. 11, No. 2, p. 36). FULLER AND THE FUTURISTS: I 85 trauma with a physical sign that silently bears witness to it, the dancer's could be described as metonymic." This is because the dancer "has a greater detachment from her signs... [so that] the dancer theatricalizes 'successfully' what the hysterical patient tries, and fails to say." This is aside from the performative nature of the experiments themselves; as McCarren puts it, "[F]reedom of movement, within Charcot's experiments, largely emulates the mental health it appears to guarantee or represent."19 The free-floating visions conjured up by Fuller have attracted the attention of theorists of semiotics and deconstruction as well, lead- ing the German critic Horst Koegler to go so far as to say that Fuller "instinctively anticipated in her dances developments in art theory that have been only recently defined."20 This may be overstating the case; it might be more accurate to point out that the apparent unmooring of her own body and her own identity that Fuller achieved on stage lends itself well to various contemporary approaches that glorify the free play of signifiers. The idea that Fuller's dances can be read as symbolic workings- through of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century ideas about the nature of physical and mental illness is interesting both in light of Fuller's own personal history and Marinetti's view of Futurism as a cure for a diseased Italian culture. Fuller not only began her career playing a patient in the Quack M.D. skit but was also well known as a hypochondriac; she complained throughout her life of constant physical ailments, to the extent that Isadora Duncan, who called Fuller "that wonderful creature—she became fluid, she became light; she became every color and flame," once wondered if "this luminous vision that we saw before us [bore] any relation to the suffering patient of a few mo- ments before?"21 And Fuller herself, in her autobiography, lamented melodramatically that she "caught a cold at the moment of my birth, which I have never got rid of."22 Marinetti, who believed violence and war to be "the only hy- giene" for a sick and rotting civilization, saw technology as the antidote that would restore Italian culture to health. His "gay incendiaries with charred fingers,"23 would incinerate the libraries and art museums to purge and sterilize all past Italian culture. Similarly, in the 1910 "Mani- festo of the Futurist Painters," Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini deplore the "neurasthenic 86 DANCE CHRONICLE

Ferdinand von Reznicek's depiction of Fuller's "Serpentine Dance," 1906. cultivation of hermaphroditic archaism that they rave about in Flor- ence."24 The Futurists' attempts to extirpate all past culture required metaphors of terminal illness and disease to explain why they called for such drastic remedies. While Fuller transcended the physical limita- tions of her body by putting it on technologically enhanced display, Marinetti projected physical illness onto the world, and proposed technology as the remedy. FULLER AND THE FUTURISTS: I 87

Giovanni Lista has argued that Fuller's work "constituted a ver- itable prefiguration of the scenographic work of the Futurists," and even anticipated the cinema with the illusion of movement created by the use of special lenses.25 Sommer, in a television program on which she appeared with Michael Kirby, asserted that Fuller "did what the Futurists later theorized [about]," meaning presumably her use of technology. Kirby disagreed, insisting that Fuller was exactly the "op- posite" of a Futurist, in that she represented the Symbolist aesthetic, and he implied that in any case Marinetti was less interested in visual pleasure than she was.26 It was the nineteenth-century poet Stephane Mallarme who was perhaps the first to link the Symbolist and technical aspects of Fuller's art in writing of a performance he witnessed at the Folies- Bergere in February 1893:

Her performance, sui generis, is at once an artistic intoxication and an industrial achievement. In that terrible bath of materials swoons the radiant, cold dancer, illustrating countless themes of gyration. From her proceeds an expanding web—giant butterflies and petals, unfoldings—everything of a pure and elemental order. She blends with the rapidly changing colors, which vary their limelit phantas- magoria of twilight and grotto, their rapid emotional changes—de- light, mourning, anger; and to set these off, prismatic, either violent or dilute as they are, there must be the dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.27

Mallarme seems to be saying that the "artifice" was a necessary part of Fuller's art, so that the technological accomplishment is what made possible the art in its intense and variegated psychological richness. But as Michel Georges-Michel, quoted by Lista, puts it, her success was most significantly in that she "faisait flamber vivant le reve de Claude Monet. Delivrant la danse du carcan des tutus et des gestes academiques elle la mariait a la science"28 (made the dream of Claude Monet a living flame. Liberating dance from the yoke of tutus and academic gestures, she married it to science). In the late nineteenth century in France, Impressionism, a movement rooted in the percep- tual, dominated the visual arts but its social context was chiefly one of industrialization: the effort to obtain and consolidate physical con- trol over nature in order to bend it to human needs. Fuller's use of 88 DANCE CHRONICLE technology to heighten emotional experience was thus a brilliant synthesis of the inner and outer worlds being mined and explored by both artists and scientists at the time, for, like Marinetti, who called in his manifesto on dance for the "fusion of man with the machine,"29 her art sprang from the wedding or welding of subjectivity to science. Fuller also understood that technology required large numbers of human beings to implement and direct it. Since there were no switch- boards, it took ten minutes and many hands just to darken an auditorium. Her "Fire Dance" alone required fourteen electricians. As she wrote of a first rehearsal for another dance, "a skilled electrician has to go ahead to cut the floor properly and to lay the wires. When this is done I can go to work. Sometimes I use ten lamps, sometimes sixteen, again twenty, and I have used as many as thirty-four, and it takes a skilled electrician to run each of them."30 Fuller was intensely proud of the success of her experiments, which did lead, if only unintentionally, in a direction that Marinetti likely would have approved. As Jules Claretie, director of the Comedie Franchise, wrote in he Temps on November 5,1907, "LoTe Fuller has made studies in a special laboratory of all the effects of light that trans- form the stage.... She has actually been turned out by her landlord because of an explosion in her apparatus. Had she not been so well known she would have been taken for an anarchist."31 But in contrast to Marinetti, who espoused violence when it served his political purposes, Fuller had no cultural or political agenda; her passion was her art.32 Marinetti's manifesto on dance was not his only word on the subject. In a "Futurist letter circulated among cosmopolitan women friends who give tango-teas and Parsifalize themselves," dated January 11, 1914, he urged, "Down with the tango and its rhythmic swoons," and asked if it is "so much fun to arch desperately over each other, trying to pop each other like two corked bottles, and never succeed- ing?"33 But his own dances seem never to have been performed and his skills as a lecturer seem to have been exhausted by the interwar period; in 1940, according to the New York Times, a Roman audience at a speech of his, enervated and disgruntled by the privations of war and its aftermath, somehow "audibly signified before the lecture was over that enough was enough."34 By contrast, Fuller was as celebrated at her death in 1928 as she had been throughout her life. Although Lista and others argue that FULLER AND THE FUTURISTS: I 89 much of her work was inspired, perhaps unconsciously, by the Impres- sionist painters, she is partly credited with popularizing the style of decoration on lamps, furnishings, glassware, pottery, and fabrics known as Art Nouveau, which favors butterfly shapes, flowing and serpentine designs, and vivid colors. Indeed, her dances at the Paris Universal Ex- position in 1900, and her presentation there of Japanese performers, clearly influenced not only painters, architects, and designers but also the young Ruth St. Denis, who was in attendance. One of Fuller's last performances, according to Gilson MacCormack, was a "gorgeous evo- cation of the sea" set to the music of Claude Debussy, enacted on the "huge monumental staircase" built in the Grand Palais in Paris for the Exposition of Decorative Arts in 1925, in which the dancers moved beneath a covering of shimmering silk.35 Well into the 1920s, then, Fuller was creating highly abstract performances (the sea had been a favorite subject and setting for Sym- bolist artists and playwrights for many years) that stirred and impressed viewers. If Marinetti's art and thought were entirely dedicated to sum- moning up visions of the future (a philosophy that would, in its turn, become curiously passe), Fuller found success late in life in revivifying a nineteenth-century aesthetic movement. Locating the origin of Fu- turist dance to some extent in its Symbolist predecessor raises questions about the very notion of periodization in the history of dance,* and makes one wonder if the two artistic movements of Italian Futurism and European Symbolism, so different on their surface, might have even deeper, undiscovered connections.

Notes 1. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, "The Founding and Manifesto of Fu- turism," in Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio (New York: Viking, 1973), p. 22.

* As Thomas Postlewait has put it, in writing theatre history the "continuous flow of time is organized into heuristic categories, episodes of our creation. As such, periods are interpretative ideas of order that regulate meaning" ("The Criteria for Periodization in Theatre History," Theatre Journal, October 1988, p. 299). Focusing, paradoxically, on ruptures and disjunctions in history in order to create "stable" historical periods can thus blind us to continuities that are frequently transhistorical. 90 DANCE CHRONICLE

2. Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, "The Futurist Dance," trans. Elizabeth Delsa, Dance Observer, October 1935, pp. 75-6. 3. Valentine de Saint-Point, "Futurist Manifesto of Lust," in Futurist Manifestos, p. 71. 4. From Montjoie, quoted in Günter Berghaus, "Dance and the Fu- turist Woman: The Work of Valentine de Saint-Point," Dance Re- search, Vol. 11, No. 2, Autumn 1993, p. 35. Saint-Point's aspirations remind one of Richard Wagner's concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total and integrated work of art. 5. Marinetti, "Futurist Dance," p. 75. This version of the manifesto also refers to Saint-Point as if she were male. 6. Leslie Satin, "Valentine de Saint-Point," Dance Research Journal, Vol. 22, No. 1, Spring 1990, pp. 1-12. 7. Elizabeth Delsa, translator's note to Marinetti's "Futurist Dance," p. 76. 8. Sally Sommer, "Loïe Fuller," The Drama Review, Vol. 19, No. 1, March 1975, pp. 62-3. 9. Pitts Sanborn in the Commercial Advertiser, April 4, 1917. Valentine de Saint-Point, clipping file, Dance Collection, New York Public Li- brary for the Performing Arts (hereafter cited as Dance Collection). 10. Quoted in Gay Morris, "La Loïe," Dance Magazine, August 1977, p. 40. 11. "Visual urge: Scenic innovations," Eye on Dance, Public Broadcast- ing System, 1987. Videotape, Dance Collection. 12. Sommer, p. 53. 13. Guy Ducrey, "Écrire la danse au tournant du siècle: Loïe Fuller ou Le règne de l'ambivalence," in La Danse Art du XXe Siècle (Lausanne: Payot, 1990), p. 111. 14. Mechanical theories of acting from the eighteenth century onward are treated expertly in Joseph Roach, The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993). 15. Marinetti, "Futurist Dance," p. 75. 16. C. Thomas Ault, "La Loie Fuller: Pioneer in Dance Lighting and Effects," Dance Teacher Now, May-June 1983, p. 16. 17. Sommer, p. 57. 18. Michael Kirby, Futurist Performance (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1971), p. 32. FULLER AND THE FUTURISTS: I 91

19. Felicia McCarren, "The 'Symptomatic Art' Circa 1900: Hysteria, Hypnosis, Electricity, Dance," Critical Inquiry, Summer 1995, p. 772. 20. Horst Koegler, [book review] Gabriele Brandstetter and Brygida Maria Ochaim, Loïe Fuller: Tanz, Licht-Spiegel, Art Nouveau (Frei- burg: Rambach, 1989), Ballett International, June 7, 1990. 21. Isadora Duncan, My Life (New York: Liveright, 1955), pp. 97, 95. 22. Loie Fuller, Fifteen Years of a Dancer's Life, With Some Account of Her Distinguished Friends (Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1913), p. 17. Margaret Harris discloses that when box-office receipts dipped, Fuller was not above announcing that she had a serious illness in order to drum up public sympathy—and business. See Harris, Loïe Fuller, Magician of Light, exhibition catalogue (Rich- mond: The Virginia Museum, 1979), p. 15. 23. Marinetti, "Founding and Manifesto of Futurism," in Futurist Manifestos, p. 23. 24. "Manifesto of the Futurist Painters," in Futurist Manifestos, p. 25. 25. Giovanni Lista, La Scene Futuriste (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1989), p. 292. 26. "Visual urge." 27. Stéphane Mallarmé, Crayonné au théâtre, in Oeuvres complètes, quoted in Frank Kermode, "Loïe Fuller: And the Dance Before Diaghilev," Theatre Arts, September 1962, p. 11. Presumably translated by Kermode, as other published translations differ significantly. 28. Lista, p. 294. 29. Marinetti, "Futurist Dance," p. 75. 30. Quoted in Clare de Morinni, "Loïe Fuller: The Fairy of Light," Dance Index, March 1942, p. 44. 31. Quoted by Fuller herself in Fifteen Years, pp. 285-6. According to C. Thomas Ault, the episode cost her part of her hair, which never grew back, but led to the development of phosphorescent salts, which she used with great success in dying costumes (Ault, p. 15.). 32. Hilton Kramer points out that the "art actually produced by the Futurist painters and sculptors was a good deal more benign than the doctrines invoked to explain it, but the production of art was only a part of the Futurist program." Kramer, "A Revolutionary of 92 DANCE CHRONICLE

the Right," review of Marinetti's Selected Writings, New York Times, November 16, 1972. 33. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, "Down With the Tango and Parsifal," Selected Writings, pp. 69-70. 34. "Signor Marinetti's Audience," New York Times, December 5, 1940. Marinetti's New York Times obituary also mentions this speech, saying that on December 2, 1940, "Dr. Marinetti delivered a lecture on the esthetics of war in Rome before a fashionable audience of 1,000 persons, mostly women, telling them that war and love are the two greatest inspirations of the human race" (New York Times, December 4, 1944). 35. Gilson MacCormack, "Loie Fuller," Dancing Times, February 1928, p. 686.