Who wouldn't be fascinated by the biography of the enterprising American, Loie Fuller? A revolutionary figure with endless resources, a businesswoman, and a futurist who lived at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, Fuller was the first technological and multimedia artist in the history of dance. Born in 1862 in Fullersburg, near Chicago, Loie Fuller achieved tremendous success in Europe; she was particularly well-received in Paris, the city that triumphantly welcomed her in 1892. With the integration of electric light in her performances and her use of a voluminous costume that covered her entire body—contrary to the scantily clad dancers of her time, like La Bella Otero and Josephine Baker—Fuller captivated poets and intellectuals of the late 19th century, from Mallarmé to Rodin to Debussy, with her phantasmagorical performances. These were achieved through the movement of large veils supported by sticks and illuminated with multicolored lights that produced kaleidoscopic effects. Among her most famous works, which made her the dancer of Art Nouveau and floral figurativism, are Serpentine Dance, Fire Dance to Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries, The Butterfly to Grieg’s music, The Ultraviolette Dance, and The Radium Dance inspired by the chemical research on radium by the Curies.
An extraordinary manager of herself, in 1900, she became the star of the Paris Exposition Universelle, designing and having built by architect Henri Sauvage and artist Francis Jourdan a theater resembling her. In the perfect balance of form and content, the theater featured a facade that was the static incarnation of the shapes and colors of the dances she performed inside. But the Fuller volcano did not stop with success or the excitement of lighting discoveries; in the years when cinema was becoming the "new art," she also ventured into this field as a true pioneer. She undertook various cinematic experiments that led her, in 1920 (eight years before her death), to create a film, Le lys de la vie, based on a ballet inspired by a fairy tale written by Queen Marie of Romania for her daughter, centered on the theme of unrequited love.
Brygida Ochaim, a German dancer and scholar, was so fascinated by the figure of Loie Fuller that since the early 1980s, she has almost entirely devoted herself to analyzing the life and eclectic activities of this revolutionary woman. Author of an in-depth study conducted with Gabriele Brandstetter on Fuller and curator of two exhibitions dedicated to her, one at the third Biennale Dance in Lyon and the other in Munich, Ochaim is certainly the most ‘faithful’ soloist to the American pioneer’s spirit. Her reinterpretations of Fuller’s dances constitute a fundamental work for the preservation of the heritage and for dance philology studies. The long and patient research undertaken to rediscover the ancient dynamics of movement, to create costumes made of abundant flowing fabrics, and above all to reproduce the projection and lighting system that made Fuller’s works performances straddling figurative art, installation, and cinema.
For the third time, a guest of the Festival Oriente Occidente (after appearances as a performer in 1994 and as a scholar in 2001), Brygida Ochaim returns with a collection of solos, some faithful to the path left by Fuller, others of her own invention, created in homage to the visionary American dancer, entitled Loie Fuller. Dances of Colors.
