Loie Fuller was born in a saloon in Illinois.
Loie began her career as a Child Temperance lecturer. At a young
age she would take a few dance lessons but gave them up because
they were to difficult. Around 1883, she would be acting on Broadway
Stages and by 1889 had already formed her own company of young
women dancers... (Loie Fuller and her Muses). Moving to Paris
and performing her famous Serpentine
dance at the Follies-Bergère in 1892.
She would be known as the 'Butterfly Girl'
and invent the 'Serpentine
Dance' which she Patented and presented it in New York at
the Folies Bergère on February of 1892. Loïe Fullerwas
thirty years old at the time and was more an actress than a dancer.
Her La Danse de Feu dance was not really a dance, but the audience
mistook it as one. She would create many versions of these dances
over time.
Loïe worked in Burlesque
and Vaudeville as a dancer at the time and her Serpentine invention
was due to a "prop. (see Serpentine
dance for more info) These dances were imaginative with lights
and fabrics (scarfs) and made
pioneering
achievements with lighting in films as well as educating artists
who studied her dance for movements through colors.
Fuller had a school and a dance troupe (1908 - the Muses), where
she taught her own movements and improvisational
techniques.
Loie Fuller and her Muses would travel all of
Europe, Paris and America performing. For a period of time she traveled
with the Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and even had a theatre named
after her at the Paris Expo of 1900.
