#gab sorère

[yourdailyqueer]

Gabrielle Bloch (deceased)

Gender: Female

Sexuality: Lesbian

DOB: 17 February 1870  

RIP: 14 July 1961

Ethnicity: French

Occupation: Art promoter, set designer, mechanical innovator, choreographer, visual effects artist, producer

[365daysoflesbians]

JANUARY 15: Loïe Fuller (1862 - 1928)

Marie Louise “Loïe” Fuller was born 155 years ago, on the 15th of January 1862 in the Chicago suburb of Fullersberg (now Hinsdale), Illinois.

Loïe Fuller, c. 1900, source

She is considered the most original, innovative pioneers in modern dance and lighting design, paving the way for artists such as Isadora Duncan or Martha Graham. But unlike others, she had no formal training in ballet or any classical dancing. Indeed she started her career as a child comedian and joined several travelling theatre companies, performing burlesque, vaudeville - she even toured with Buffalo Bill!

However she soon developed a passion for dancing, and choreographing her own dances inspired by Greek statues, using long veils and electrical lighting. Her major breakthrough came in 1892 in New York with The Serpentine Dance.

Loïe Fuller featured at the Folies Bergère

And yet, she decided to move to Paris that same year – and remained attached to France thereafter. The Parisian audience discovered her at the Folies Bergère, where she shook up the artistic scene - her performance was received as an embodiment of the Art Nouveau and the symbolist movement by the critics, who dubbed her the “Fairy of Light,” or “Fée Électricité.” Indeed she represented the general feeling of enthusiasm for scientific and technological progress of the Belle Époque.

She also became the muse of symbolists and Art Nouveau artists. Not only did she inspire artists such as Mallarmé, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rodin, Carabin, Harry C. Ellis, I. W. Taber, but she was also admired by scientists Marie and Pierre Curie, Guimard, Flammarion, and the Lumière Brothers... The architect Henri Sauvage built her a theatre-museum at the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition, where she performed and presented Japanese dancer Sada Yacco’s company.

However her success meant that she also had to deal with imitators. This is why later on she filed many patents and copyrights for her techniques and inventions regarding stage lighting, garments and accessories. She even became a member of the French Astronomical Society!

Frederick Glasier, Portrait of Loïe Fuller, 1902

Her style was unique. Indeed she elaborated her own movements and improvisation technique, her own style – a style which she felt was more natural than classical dance, focused on the motions of the arms rather than the feet, and was later named “free dance.” The movements of her body were amplified by huge costumes made of hundreds of yards of silk, which she often animated by holding two long bamboo or aluminium wand-like extensions. The translucent layers of fabric swirled around her in mesmerizing shapes and waves, enhanced by lighting effects from the sides of the stage, and from underneath her, when she danced on a plate of glass - she was always experimenting new ways of creating spectacular, magical effects.

The Serpentine Dance recorded in 1896 by the Lumière Brothers. Flower, mushroom, butterfly, fairy… What do you see?

She didn’t hide her feminist ideas and homosexuality. I won’t get into the topic of how the recent Loïe Fuller biopic obliterated that part of her life – a topic to which we will dedicate a whole article later this year.

Loïe Fuller created her own feminine world, surrounding herself with her students, called the “Fullerets” or Muses. Isadora Duncan wrote about her first encounter with Loïe, and described the older dancer amidst “dozen or so beautiful girls… alternately stroking her hands and kissing her.” Nonetheless, Loïe played an important part in Isadora’s success in Europe by sponsoring her spectacles.

She was briefly married to Colonel William Hayes, but after they separated in 1892, she only had lesbian relationships. She fell in love with her student and collaborator Gabrielle Bloch, also known as Gab Sorère and together they joined Natalie Barney’s salon, a circle of lesbian artists, where they befriended Romaine Brooks, Eileen Gray and Damia. All in all, Fuller and Bloch lived together for 23 years, till Loïe’s death in 1928.

- Lise