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Electric Salome: Loie Fuller's Performance of Modernism. Rhonda K. Garelick. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Pp. xiv + 246. $35.00 (cloth).
Two years ago a distinguished film scholar, visiting my campus to deliver a lecture on technology, cinema, and the 1900 World's Fair Exposition, characterized Loie Fuller as someone "lost to history." This was news to me, and I suspect to others in the audience, as well. Certainly the fame Fuller enjoyed during her lifetime evaporated long ago, but dancers and dance historians have never lost sight of her. Together with Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Dennis, Fuller is one of the trinity of founding mothers of twentieth-century American dance, innovators working at the same time, and in the same spirit, as those writers, painters, and musicians who created the forms we now call modernist. Fuller is no more lost to dance history than her contemporary (and admirer) Stéphane Mallarmé is lost to literary history, as a review of recent scholarship makes plain: Fuller's life and work lately have become a rich source of material for the investigations into gender, technology, sexuality, ethnicity, and performance that inform the burgeoning discipline of dance studies.
Try to find connections linking this scholarship to contemporary analyses of modernism, though, and we are forced to acknowledge the truth within the claim of Fuller's lostness: modernist studies has been slow to include dance within its scholarly investigations, a slowness that becomes notable when we consider the degree to which film, music, and the visual arts have been incorporated. Fuller may be far from lost to dance history, but most of dance history remains terra incognita for scholars of modernism (the long-canonical Ballets Russes and the recently canonized Josephine Baker being the exceptions that prove the rule)....