Until Our Eyes Can No Longer Endure the Dazzling Spectacle -- Loïe Fuller: Research

By pupulin

Frowning, as if straining and entranced at once, Loïe Fuller harnesses several meters of silk to visualize a transformative, whirling rainbow of colors    on stage.  In her   less-than-90 second performance  , every movement extends toward the audience, stirring a thread of speculation.  In return, they offer responses either in tune or biased.  Just when it feels like the answer to the riddle is within reach, Fuller dances again to push the truth away, leaving the audience far behind – hesitated, confused, perhaps even a little astonished, as the question lingers: is it human, fabric, or simply illusion? 

What is the thing that spreads the wings?  What makes the human heart thrilled?  A century has passed when Ola Maciejewska steps into the world of illusion to revisit the bodily experiment of Loïe Fuller, a pioneer in modern dance.  Here, Maciejewska perceptively reestablishes the relationship between fabric, costume, and body.  She brings the materials, often considered background symbols, to the fore and restores the subjectivity of the fabric as co-creator and co-actor rather than mere decoration.  The artistic inquiry leads to the project Loïe Fuller: Research, allowing audience to reexperience the intense dynamics of physical presence in a non-narrative, non-symbolic framework. 

In conventional dance practices, the body is often regarded as the extension of the will, with costume and fabric serving as supporting roles to highlight characterization or style.   In Loïe Fuller: Research, however, the fabric onstage is no more a mere intermediary material but a co-creator who shares the stage with the body.    Such a redeployment echoes Bruno Latou’s “Actor-Network Theory,” which proposes that the non-human can also act and participate in forming a network.   

The fabric thus becomes a sensory installation that responds to the dynamics of the body, or even manages its movement in return.  It can be an actant to manipulate the dancer, who is no longer the agent of force but an interconnected collaborator with the fabric.    The weight, plasticity, and flow of the silk set the visual tone, while further visualizing the delay, resistance and extension of movements.   Under the influence of these forces, the body is gradually “folded” by the fabric, as if becoming an integral part of it – the boundary between distinct entities blurs, revealing a dynamic interplay of mutual overlaps and folds.  

In this sense, Loïe Fuller: Research by Ola Maciejewska avoids formal representation or symbolic homage.  Instead, it returns to the fundamental principles of perceptions, offering a speculative inquiry into how the body is constructed through its interrelationship with materials.   Rather than using the body to interpret, the dancer feels the fabric via the body, allowing the fabric to reshape their own bodily vocabulary, which is no longer a linear expression but an unexpected, unplanned emergence.  Meanwhile, human cognition is liberated from the operation of conjecture, experience and knowledge to rediscover the sensory experience of “how to view” and “what to view.”

If Loïe Fuller’s dance is about creating visual illusion through the layering of techniques, Ola Maciejewska’s version depends on subtraction to minimize the use of techniques and other interference as a way to reapproach the physical entity that gives rise to illusion.  Her choice of the fabric in terms of its material qualities is also intentional – silk or other lightweight fabric not only emphasizes the sense of flow and the tactile feedback of gravity  , but also carries cultural   and gender connotations.  Silk has been associated with femininity and oriental imagery since long ago – a connection Maciejewska does not reject but cleverly employs to reverse its visual spectacle into sensory mechanism.  

In this microscopic work where air, gravity, fabric, and body are closely interlinked, the sense of time stretches as human attention is reset, making the act of “viewing” a sincere invitation from the artist, rather than consumption.  It invites the audience to release the urge to know “what it is,” and instead enter a slow, focused, and open atmosphere – to reinhabit the moment of pure viewing, of pure feeling the weight of the body and the flow of air to reperceive our “presence.”   That, indeed, would be perfect.