Chapter 4 - Making Moves in Reception Studies: Music, Listening and Loie Fuller

Summary

Davinia Caddy examines the role of music and music-listening in the stage shows and reception histories of dancer Loie Fuller. A midwestern American, Fuller found fame across Western Europe and the United States with her dance-and-light effects, theatrical performances that seemed to transform her body into a flower, fire, waves or the sun: to her symbolist observers, into pure metaphor or idea. Music was often incorporated into this abstract mélange, thought to symbolize a sphere of influence or aesthetic condition that text and visuals (dance, set design, props) could only aspire to. With reference to little-known source material, the author offers a revisionist reading of Fuller’s musical initiative and her spectators’ attention to it. Drawing analogies with early modernist visual art and advertising, the chapter suggests new and different ways of envisaging music, and music-listening, in relation to Fuller’s dance shows and the copy-cat craze they inspired.