Coming into the Light

Loïe Fuller, groundbreaking artist, dancer and theatrical maverick, is finally getting her due in the feature-length documentary, Obsessed with Light. Opening at New York’s Quad Cinema on December 6, the film, directed by Zeva Oelbaum and Sabine Krayenbühl, is a meditation on light and the enduring passion to create. Indeed, in pulling back the curtain on Fuller, a sui generis performer who revolutionized the visual culture of the early twentieth century, the duo, best known for their 2016 award-winning film, Letters from Baghdad, has, in essence, directed a film about transformation.

Still from Obsessed with Light, a film by Zeva Oelbaum and Sabine Krayenbühl. Photograph courtesy of Film Movement

Born in 1862 in a small town in Illinois, Fuller made her stage debut as a toddler in Chicago, and would go on to perform with Buffalo Bill before becoming a world-famous star of Belle Époque Paris and the embodiment of the Art Nouveau movement. Her rise to fame was linked with the early days of cinema and her Serpentine Dance, a spectacle that combined dance, fabric and movement, soon became a subject for the earliest filmmakers, including Georges Méliès, the Lumière brothers and Thomas Edison.

Fuller, who died in 1928 of breast cancer, and was considered a “mother” of modern dance—her success paving the way for the likes of Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis—also pioneered the shrewd use of electricity for the stage, even building a glass floor so that she could be lit from below, which was a precursor to the lighting effects found in today’s rock and pop extravaganzas.

Creating a dialogue between the past and the present, the documentary explores the astonishing influence Fuller’s work has on contemporary culture, and includes interviews with, among others, dance luminaries Bill T. Jones and Trajal Harrell, director Robert Wilson, artist William Kentridge and lighting guru, Jennifer Tipton, as well as fashion designers such as Iris van Herpen.

Tony-award winning actress Cherry Jones voices Fuller, and through a trove of archival footage and a deep dive into the innovator’s professional and personal life—she was openly gay and unrepentant about her looks, drive or personal limitations—Oelbaum and Krayenbühl have made Fuller, who had been, for the most part, forgotten, come to blazing life.

Fjord Review had a chance to speak with directors Oelbaum and Krayenbühl—the latter also edited the film—about the documentary that had its world premiere in Rome in 2023 and was hailed by the Observer as, “An experience not to be missed.” Topics covered included their research process, why the film isn’t a standard bio-pic and how Loïe Fuller’s merging of art and technology was, no pun intended, light years ahead of her time.

Still from Obsessed with Light, a film by Zeva Oelbaum and Sabine Krayenbühl. Photograph courtesy of Film Movement

What first attracted you to Loïe Fuller’s story?

Sabine Krayenbühl: The genesis comes from a previous project that I worked on as an editor, which was a film about the influence of early cinema on Cubism, and obviously was one of the first color films there ever was, and thought it was really beautiful and mesmerizing. Zeva and I were looking at this, because we're very interested in women that have been forgotten in history. After “Letters from Baghdad,” we were looking for a topic, and this seemed so interesting and unusual, and also would give us an opportunity to go really visual all the way.

Zeva Oelbaum: One of the reasons we decided to work together after meeting in 2008 on another film, is that we both love archival footage and early cinema, and find it incredibly evocative and sensuous. So, Loïe Fuller and the Serpentine Dance footage fit right into that. We started to do research for contemporary relevance, and that really blew our minds because, although most people have never heard of Loïe Fuller, so many in the creative community know of her, and have been inspired and influenced by her.

What was your research process, which began in 2018, and yielded something like 1,800 archival film clips?

ZO: That's right; and 3,000 primary source documents; and 45 Serpentine Dance film clips.

SK: The way we usually work is that we have some go-to archives, and we test them for possibilities, because obviously, when you do a film about a historical figure, especially a figure that has long been dead, it's difficult to think in terms of what will it look like. How are we going to tell the story with archival images? So, we start testing the waters, and we quickly realized there were really not any clips of Loïe performing.

We were hoping [that] over the course of the research we would find something, but we discovered about 45 different clips of the Serpentine Dance, and that was very exciting. Then we branched out and looked for [how we could] expand and how our footage would contextualize her story, which had to do with the time period, with the locations she performed in, and all of that.

SK: We weren’t always sure that [people] actually knew about Loïe Fuller, and in some cases, we just thought also the way that their art, and what they were doing in their creative work, was in some way related to Loïe Fuller. Then, surprisingly, they knew about her, and in some cases, they knew about the Serpentine Dance.

Still from Obsessed with Light, a film by Zeva Oelbaum and Sabine Krayenbühl

William Kentridge is your first interview, and he’s speaking about his project about time, and working with Dada Masilo, who can be seen rehearsing a dance, weaving and bobbing with yards of material à la Loïe.

SK: He was the perfect one who says, “I've been using the Serpentine Dance, and I've seen it, but I have no idea about her, or never inquired about her.” He just loved the Serpentine Dance.

You’ve also got the brilliant, Tony award-winning actress Cherry Jones, who was also on TV’s Succession, voicing Loïe. What was that source material?

ZO: We used all primary source materials, so everything was something that Loïe had either written in her autobiography, or she was quoted in a newspaper article or letters. The tone of Cherry's voice is warm and mature, and we felt that she was the perfect person to inhabit Loïe.

Agreed! But had she heard of Loïe Fuller?

SK: No, she didn't know about her, but [on our Zoom interview], I remembered that she [was] traveling at the time, and she had in her hotel room some flowers. Then she looked up, and one was a lily. Of course, the lily is sort of an iconic [image] of the Serpentine Dance, so she said, “I'm looking at her right now.”

That is so cool! Okay, you both say that Obsessed with Light is not a bio-pic. Why not?

ZO: Because we didn't attempt to thoroughly investigate all aspects of her life. We really focused on the Serpentine Dance, because it has the most resonance today. We did not get into her experimental filmmaking; we didn't get into her childhood. There are so many parts of her that we left out, and we wanted the viewer to leave the theater, not just with an awareness of who she is, but almost more importantly, how so many things [that are] around today, reflect what she did because of her accomplishments.

SK: The film is really an exploration, also, of creativity, and how you are influenced by what you see around you, and how that informs the art that you make. And in some cases, as we showed with the different interviewees, it is very direct, and in other cases it's more intuitive [in ways] that you are exposed to it.

Jody Sperling in Obsessed with Light, a film by Zeva Oelbaum and Sabine Krayenbühl

I love the idea that Jody Sperling is a through-line in the film, creating a dance, “Fractal Memories.”

One of the reasons we had asked Jody Sperling [if we could] follow her over the course of her creating a new piece of work, [is that] we wanted to get a sense of the process, what it takes, how difficult it is, how much strength you need, how you combine all the different elements to create the spectacle and less about okay, “This is a shape that Loïe Fuller created in 1915. And here is the other dance that she did in 1922.” So, it was really the idea of creativity, and what makes creativity come to life.

Okay, so what’s the origin story of the Serpentine Dance and the so-called Nautch dress, worn by Nautch girls who performed that popular Indian court dance?

ZO: According to Loïe, someone gave her yards and yards of beautiful fabric, and she was inspired by Nautch girls dancing, so she began posing in front of mirrors and seeing how the light coming in from the window shined and glimmered off of the silk.

She was in a play at that time, “Quack MD,” playing someone who had been hypnotized. So, she tried this out as a costume, whirling around a little bit, and the audience really responded. And she went beyond that, to push the boundaries of the silk and the swirling around.

SK: But this also was typical Loïe; there isn't really one precise origin story. She changed it a few different times, and at some point, it was an Indian officer that gave it to her, and in another case, she found the fabric. She's very much an inventor, even in terms of her storyline, not just in terms of what she created as work.

She has these different stories, so we were trying to combine all of [them]. It's sort of like how creativity works: You don't sometimes know where you got your idea from.

How do you account for the fact that numerous visual artists—Rodin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso—befriended Loïe? It seems that your investigation led you down a rabbit hole, but in a very good way.

ZO: Yes, well, that’s our process. Creativity is to be led from one thing to the next. [As to] Rodin, we buy one of his biographies, then we see something in a footnote which makes us research that person. We did that over and over again [and] things sort of shake out.

I think the reason Loïe appealed to visual artists was because her spectacle—her performance—was so incredibly visual, and also because of her interest in incorporating the cutting-edge technology of the day, with the light, the gels on the lights, and the use of electricity. That was something that no one had ever seen before. It was mesmerizing.

Another relationship that Loïe cultivated was with Marie Curie, so that she could make her costumes glow.

ZO: The thing that was sort of wonderful about her relationship with Marie Curie is that when she heard about the discovery of radium, Loïe Fuller reached out to the Curies, because she had this fantastic idea of using radium to make her costumes glow in the dark. It's a cool idea, so she wrote a letter to them, and they responded that that was not something that was possible. They were not going to give her radium for her costume.

And then she responded to that letter by saying, “Well, the least you can do is let me perform for you.” So, Marie Curie's daughter, Irène Curie, describes how Loïe Fuller and her electrical people sort of descended on their home one night and transformed it into a performance space. And that began the relationship with Loïe and Marie Curie, which seemed like it was very special.

Still from Obsessed with Light, a film by Zeva Oelbaum and Sabine Krayenbühl. Photograph courtesy of Film Movement

What about Loïe’s influence on pop stars today, Taylor Swift, for example?

ZO: In an homage to Loïe, Taylor Swift had a few sentences on her Jumbotron, with her dancers dressed in the Fuller costume. It was a song about copyright and owning your own work, [because] Loïe was one of the first women to understand the value of her inventions, and she protected copyrights. She tried to sue people who infringed on her ideas.

SK: [That’s why] her story couldn't be more relevant. I think it’s inspiring that a woman is taking on the new inventions of the day and working with them and integrating them into a totally different field. It's what we see around us more and more, and especially, [that] it's exploding even now with AI. There are so many more ways that this is going to go, so Loïe really created a sort of roadmap for people.

Indeed! Let’s talk about Loïe as one of the era’s first body-positivity artists. She wasn’t thin or beautiful, and was panned for her performances of “Salome.” According to Fuller biographer Margaret Haile Harris, critics felt free to trash her ample figure, writing that she had “the grace of an English boxer and the physique of Oscar Wilde.” How was she able to persist in her art, and what about her sexuality, as she was living with Gabrielle Bloch, the daughter of wealthy French bankers?

ZO: She did get some very brutal reviews, and, of course, that made her pause. [But] she put one foot in front of the other and kept going. She didn’t pay much attention to her detractors. We also really love the fact that she was open about her sexuality and her life partner.

In terms of her body, one of our interviewees made an incredibly great point in that she made the dance fit to her body, instead of making her body fit to the dance. That is one of the aspects of the story that we find very inspiring, and that has contemporary relevance. She was a very confident person. She just was absolutely who she was, and wasn't going to change for anyone. Maria Grazia Chiuri, the creative director of Dior said, “Beauty is internal, not external.”

Why, then, has it taken so long for Loïe to get this kind of recognition?

SK: What she was creating was not easily definable. She appears in dance history, but she's not really a cornerstone yet, because what she did you would call that performance art today, and that term did not exist back then. So, it's partly because of the fact that she wasn't definable. She's not a dancer, but she does dance, and she's part of the beginnings of modern dance, but it makes it harder for her to fit in.

And then the other thing is it's just this one dance, the Serpentine Dance. It's sort of this iconic image that survived as a piece of film. And even though she was finding all her imitators, ultimately, the imitators are the ones that sort of carried her visual tradition through the centuries.

Ah, but because of your film, all of that, hopefully, is about to change.

ZO: The fact that she was born during the Civil War, it’s absolutely mind-exploding to think about how she then went on to be the belle of the Belle Époque, and then this iconic performer. It's really quite stunning when you think about it.

Victoria Looseleaf

Victoria Looseleaf is an award-winning, Los Angeles-based international arts journalist who covers music and dance festivals around the world. Among the many publications she has contributed to are the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Dance Magazine and KCET’s Artbound. In addition, she taught dance history at USC and Santa Monica College. Looseleaf’s novella-in-verse, Isn't It Rich? is available from Amazon, and and her latest book, Russ & Iggy’s Art Alphabet with illustrations by JT Steiny, was recently published by Red Sky Presents. Looseleaf can be reached through X, Facebook, Instagram and Linked In, as well as at her online arts magazine ArtNowLA.

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