Electric Salome: Loie Fuller's Performance of Modernism - Paperback

by Rhonda K. Garelick (Author)

Loie Fuller was the most famous American in Europe throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rising from a small-time vaudeville career in the States, she attained international celebrity as a dancer, inventor, impresario, and one of the first women filmmakers in the world. Fuller befriended royalty and inspired artists such as Mallarmé, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rodin, Sarah Bernhardt, and Isadora Duncan. Today, though, she is remembered mainly as an untutored "pioneer" of modern dance and stage technology, the "electricity fairy" who created a sensation onstage whirling under colored spotlights. But in Rhonda Garelick's Electric Salome, Fuller finally receives her due as a major artist whose work helped lay a foundation for all modernist performance to come. The book demonstrates that Fuller was not a mere entertainer or precursor, but an artist of great psychological, emotional, and sexual expressiveness whose work illuminates the centrality of dance to modernism.

Electric Salome places Fuller in the context of classical and modern ballet, Art Nouveau, Orientalism, surrealism, the birth of cinema, American modern dance, and European drama. It offers detailed close readings of texts and performances, situated within broader historical, cultural, and theoretical frameworks. Accessibly written, the book also recounts the human story of how an obscure, uneducated woman from the dustbowl of the American Midwest moved to Paris, became a star, and lived openly for decades as a lesbian.

Back Jacket

"In Electric Salome, Rhonda Garelick persuasively makes the case that Loie Fuller was central to the transition to modernism in politics, theater, modern dance, and neoclassical ballet. In elegant, often witty, always evocative prose, Garelick shows that Fuller's relative obscurity is the consequence not of her lack of originality, but of a role so strange and so individual that it has resisted the fluid narratives of social and artistic history. This brilliant book will correct those impoverished records."--Andrew Solomon, winner of the National Book Award and author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

"Garelick's extraordinarily astute analysis of Loie Fuller, surely one of the richest performers of her age, draws on insights from postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis, feminism, the history of science, queer studies, as well as the history of modern drama and dance, to unveil a Fuller we have never seen before. Electric Salome is a great read and a wonderfully layered contribution to dance and performance studies."--Peggy Phelan, Stanford University

"Electric Salome represents an important and provocative revision in modernist performance historiography. Garelick demonstrates convincingly Loie Fuller's standing as a liminal figure, refashioning classical ballet within a modernist frame, and as an undervalued influence, technically and aesthetically, on early modern dance and theater. Equally significant is Garelick's compelling analysis of Fuller's engagement with the latest trends in psychology, science, imperialist politics, and the business of art. Visually rich as well as broadly informed, Electric Salome provides new vistas for modernist studies."--J. Ellen Gainor, Cornell University

"Garelick's splendidly detailed rendition of the odd triumphs and legacy of Loie Fuller and her technologized body is as electric as were La Loie's performances: here are lots of hands clapping for this performance also."--Mary Ann Caws, author of The Eye in the Text and The Surrealist Look

Author Biography

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-Siècle (Princeton).