Electric Salome: Loie Fuller's Performance of Modernism

Description

Rising from a small-time vaudeville career in the States, Loie Fuller attained international celebrity as a dancer, inventor, and one of the first women filmmakers in the world. This book demonstrates that Fuller was an artist of great psychological, emotional, and sexual expressiveness whose work illuminates the centrality of dance to modernism.

Rhonda K. Garelick is professor in the department of English and at the Hixson-Lied School of Fine and Performing Arts at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is the author of "Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin-de-Siecle" (Princeton).

"Garelick's lucid, engrossing study ... unwraps the contradictions that have kept Fuller as veiled from modern audiences as she was from those at the Folies-Bergere."--Andrea Walker, Times Literary Supplement "A most welcome 'finding' of a dancer never lost, Electric Salome offers a remarkably smart reading of Fuller's contribution to dance history, one that makes clear the importance of that contribution to modernism broadly construed."--Catherine Gunther Kodat, Modernism Modernity "In her mesmerizing dances, swirling huge skirts under colored lights of her own design, Fuller paved the way for new visual effects in theater. [I]n Electric Salome Rhonda Garelick attempts to reposition Fuller as a central player in the multiple histories of ballet, modern dance, theater, visual art and postmodern performance. The best part of Electric Salome is how Garelick puts Fuller's story into a context that we can appreciate."--Matthew Hunter Griffin, Time Out Chicago "Rhonda Garelick's Electric Salome...argues for Fuller's relevance beyond her status as modern dance 'pioneer' and traces the way in which her work was modernist in its own right. Garelick's book spirals out, teasing out connections with Fuller to broader movements of colonialism, as well as Romantic Ballet and Modernist Drama. [Electric Salome offers] significant advances to Loie Fuller scholarship persuasively for the importance of Fuller's legacy."--Judy Sperling, Dance Films Association Review "This indispensable book benefits from Garelick's lucid prose, superb images, and insightful footnotes."--S.R. Irelan, Choice "Electric Salome is suitable for a wide range of readership... Garelick writes theory with the minimum of jargon; the book is academic and sophisticated, but accessible throughout. It contains almost fifty illustrations, including posters, photographs and patent drawings."--Stephen Herbert, Early Popular Visual Culture "One of the best aspects of Rhonda K. Garelick's book is that it enables a virtual re-enactment of Fuller's performance of modernity: in the end, the initial butterfly/illusion shimmers and stays for good in the reader's mind."--Virginie Pouzet-Duzer, Oscholars "Both Ann Cooper Albright's and Rhonda Garelick's books are important contributions to a female artist, whose place on the agenda of French modernism is now less refutable than ever. Both authors have done much to shed further light on the sometimes counter intuitive complexity of this modernism. While both Traces of Light and Electric Salome deserve to be considered in their own right, they open an even more fascinating kaleidoscopic panorama when read in tandem."--Lucia Ruprecht, H-France "This well-illustrated and probing book is an important contribution to the scholarship on Loie Fuller and, with its contemporary resonances, should prove of interest to practitioners and academics in the fields of live-art and site-specific performance as well as dance."--Libby Worth, Modern Drama "Fuller's work demands that its scholars cover a lot of ground, and I was delighted to learn so much from Garelick's study about a widely ignored pioneer of avant-garde and modernist theatre performance and dance."--Mike Sell, Theatre Research International "[T]he book's greatest appeal may lie in its evocation of Fuller's technical inventiveness, her altogether startling genius for making the space of theater new."--Douglas Mao, Common Knowledge