Loïe Fuller (1862-1928)

Portrait of Loïe Fuller, by Frederick Glasier, 1902

Loïe Fuller was an American pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting.

Photo by Isaiah West Taber (1897)

Loïe Fuller began her theatrical career as a professional child actress and later choreographed and performed dances in burlesque (as a skirt dancer), vaudeville, and circus shows. An early free dance practitioner, Fuller developed her own natural movement and improvisation techniques. Fuller combined her choreography with silk costumes illuminated by multi-coloured lighting of her own design.

source:en.wikipedia.org

Loïe Fuller - c. 1898 - La danse blanche - Photo by Taber Prang Art Co.

An 1896 film of the 'Serpentine Dance' by the pioneering film-makers Auguste and Louis Lumière gives a hint of what her performance was like:

VIDEO: Loie Fuller, 'Danse Serpentine' - by the Lumiére Brothers (1897)

Her swirling arm movements and colored lights produced a mesmerizing effect that many of her contemporary artists and filmmakers (including the Lumiére Brothers) attempted to capture and many later artists attempted to reproduce. Her early experience in burlesque, vaudeville, and circus was transformed into stunning visual effects and artistic innovations, resulting in what her French contemporary Arsène Alexandre called "the marvelous dream-creature you see dancing madly in a vision swirling among her dappled veils which change ten thousand times a minute.

As her career progressed, she used increasingly innovative music as well, by composers such as Hector Berlioz, Edvard Grieg, Florent Schmitt, Claude Debussy, and Alexander Scriabin. Poets such as Mallarmé, Georges Rodenbach, and Count Robert de Montesquiou devoted essays and poems to her, while W.B. Yeats included her school of students in his poem "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen".