Incandescent

"Obsessed with Light" is a new film about the wizard of movement and light Loie Fuller

Film still of “Serpentine Dancer”

Loie Fuller—dancer, choreographer, innovator in theatrical lighting, entertainer, illusionist—is having a moment. I’ve recently seen not one but two dance pieces inspired by her experiments in fabric, movement, and light. In these works the body becomes an ever-changing landscape, bathed in color, somehow, magically, expressing the currents in music. It’s not hard to imagine the effect these billowing waves, set in motion by the dancer, had on Fuller’s first viewers, in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Paris and Berlin and New York. The trick behind the magic is simple and quickly understood, but the effect is nevertheless fascinating, like watching flames or wind blowing over a field of grass. The transformation happens in our imagination. Electric light, then new, was made even more exciting by the use of surrealistic combinations of color. Now there is a documentary, “Obsessed with Light,” directed by Sabine Krayenbühl and Zeva Oelbaum, that gives Fuller her due, as an innovator, not only in dance, but in the technologies of the stage. Fuller’s influence, it turns out, is everywhere. In the puppetry of Basil Twist (creator of an abstract Symphonie Fantastique); the stage illuminations of Jennifer Tipton; the fashion of Iris van Herpern; the pop spectacles of Taylor Swift and Shakira; the choreography of Moses Pendleton and Ruth St. Denis. Most obviously in the work of Jody Sperling, whose Loie-inspired choreography is seen throughout the film Not many artists, even far greater ones, can claim such influence. The film is both informative and a beautiful watch, mainly for its period footage: semi-nude Duncan dancers, acrobats, vaudeville performers, and Fuller in her various guises. “Obsessed with Light” premieres at Quad Cinema on Dec. 6.

Film still from “Obsessed with Light”