Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 1981 - 6

The Fire Dance:
An Introduction

by Kate Davy

The following descriptions and impressions of Lore Fuller's
spectacular La Danse Feu (Fire Dance), gathered from newspaper reviews of 1896, give us a sense not only of how the
original dance looked but also of the tremendous impact it had
on its audience.
Powerful red lights [underlighting] were thrown on Miss Fuller as
she danced above the glass plates in the stage, waving an
enormous scarf, a great flood of fire seemed to envelop her, illuminating her drapery beneath, from the interior of her skirts as
well as exteriorly. She seemed a mass of living fire and her
scarves great tongues of flame.'
The dress worn in this dance is a simple full slip made of plain
white thin material ... no sooner does she rest on the glass
plate then the hem seems to catch fire. Up the flames
creep .... The more she fans the gauze ... the higher the
flames leap and the redder they glow, until finally she snatches a
gauze scarf from her neck .... beats at her draperies until the
scarf too catches the glowing color, and in an instant nothing
but inky blackness is left to tell the tale. 2
Her long garments fluting and circling about her, curved like petals, and shimmer like live things all aflame. They rippled upward
in columns of ruby fire, smoke bordered. Then they flowed down
until one could swear they were streams of molten lava. The
whole house held its breath watching the pliant body whirling
amid rose mists and violet shadows, now fluttering in a gauzy
aureole beneath soft light, yet ever the central figure in the floating shimmer, warm, human and beautiful with life and motion. 3

When plans were being made for the University of Virginia
Drama Department's dance concert, I suggested that a reconstruction of the Fire Dance be included. Although the concert
was under the artistic direction of Nora Shattuck and she
choreographed most of the dances in the program, I agreed to
direct the Fire Dance because the problems it posed were
more ones of research and technology than choreography.
At the time I thought that enough information existed to do
a reasonable reconstruction of the dance. I was wrong. Preliminary research indicated that an accurate reconstruction
was an impossible goal. Hence, we set out to create a dance
based on Lore Fuller's Fire Dance, in an attempt to be as faithful as possible to Fuller's original impulse and intent-in
terms of the effect of the dance-if not her precise movements and materials.
4

Theatre Design & Technology

In proposing the piece I knew that 1) Fuller used Wagner's
Ride of the Walkyries; 2) her costume was made of hundreds
of yards of silk, which she was able to toss several feet above
her head; 3) she danced atop a glass plate over a stage trap;
and 4) the dance was lit from under the stage floor. I also
knew that Fuller had patented some of her costume designs. 4
I did not realize, however, that because Fuller was plagued
by imitators, she was extremely secretive about how her costumes were constructed and how she worked with both colored lights and dyes in her costumes. Furthermore, I discovered that the gossamer-thin silk she used is no longer
available and the fifty yards of silk I purchased were clearly
going to be very heavy to wear, let alone toss fifteen feet into
the air.
As a result, I decided to use a woman who is primarily an
actress rather than a dancer, Laureen Burns, not only because she has very strong arms as well as legs, but also because it was crucial that the performer have no qualms about
moving on stage in an extremely "un-dance-like" way-underneath the billowing fabric there had to be a person virtually
effaced by the costume and willing to heave, squat, grunt, and
gyrate in a more nearly contortionist manner. The dancer's
movements were strictly utilitarian and definitely secondary to
the performance of the costume and lights.
While Fuller conceived, designed, choreographed, and performed her Fire Dance alone, four people collaborated on our
version of the piece. I did the research from which Jean Gonzalez designed and built the costume and Michael Sicotte designed the lighting and built the dance surface. Their descriptions follow this introduction. The scholar/designer /
technician may find the process interesting for in building the
costume, particularly, we found our primary sources to be
lacking, misleading and, in one instance, clearly false.
Unlike traditional theatre and dance production, rehearsals
could not begin for the Fire Dance until the costume, dance
surface and lighting were completed. At our first rehearsal we
were all a bit panicky when, using the aluminum poles inside
the costume, Burns was unable to lift the fabric more than a
couple of feet off the floor. Thus began a schedule of two to
three short rehearsals a day-beginning as early as seven
o'clock in the morning-between which the costume and
lighting was modified or otherwise altered. In this way, the
movement of the dancer, the shape and movement of the fabric, and the color and intensity of the lights were carefully orchestrated moment-to-moment throughout the rehearsal process. We all worked toward the effect we felt Fuller intended
and achieved, based on descriptions of the original piece.
We were tremendously impressed by the ingeniousness,
complexity, and originality of Lore Fuller's work. The dance
concert opened on February 1, 1980 in the University of Virginia's Culbreth Theatre. Within the context of this program of
contemporary dance pieces, the Fire Dance was not billed as
an historical reconstruction. Instead, it was presented as a
tribute to an extraordinary inventor and artist-Lore Fuller.

Notes
1. As Quoted by Sally R. Sommer in her article on Lore Fuller that appeared in the Post-Modern Dance issue (T65) of The Drama Review, (Vol. 19, No. 1) March 1975, pp. 53-67.
2 Ibid.
3. As Quoted by Sally R. Sommer in her unpublished dissertation entitled Lon'! Fuller: From the Theatre of Popular Entertainment to the
Parisian Avant-Garde, June 1979, p. 167.
4. In addition to Sally R. Sommer's work on Fuller, other research involved viewing a couple of short films of Fuller dancing at the Lincoln Center Library. (Film of the Fire Dance, however, does not exist.) I also attended a loan exhibition at the Virginia Museum in
Richmond devoted entirely to Lore Fuller and organized by Margaret Haile Harris. The catalog from that exhibition, entitled Loie Fuller: Magician of Light, was also extremely helpful.D

USITT ISpring, 1981

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 1981