Loïe Fuller: Research -- A Reflection and Re-practice of Contemporary Perceptions

By Shih Min Chieh

Loïe Fuller: Research is a contemporary dance piece by Polish-born choreographer Ola Maciejewska, created in 2011 as a tribute to modern dance pioneer Loïe Fuller.
Choosing Fuller as a reference point may not come as a surprise—Maciejewska’s work has long explored the early intersections of technology and performance. For instance, in her Dance Concert (2018), presented at the National Taichung Theater in Taiwan, she incorporated the concept of the Theremin, the world’s first synthesizer, to explore the unique resonance between body, technology, and sound. Similarly, in revisiting Fuller—who lived at a time of rapid technological innovation with the advent of electric light and cinema—Maciejewska focuses not on enhancing spectacle or reinforcing traditional narrative dance, but rather on lightening the burden of the physical body. Through the interplay of fabric, movement, and light, Fuller created a new center of gravity for the body—one that generates form through transformation and dissolution.

Fuller’s choreography broke with the grammar of the past, paving the way for modern dance while rethinking the reversibility of artistic creation and its relationship with technology. To understand this, we might turn to Stéphane Mallarmé and Jacques Rancière, both of whom reflected deeply on Fuller’s seminal work Serpentine Dance.
Mallarmé observed:

“Beneath this illusion lies a kind of dullness that immediately disappears from the stage;
 there are no fixed or hidden stage devices to contrast with the clarity of the choreography…
 all such distractions are discarded;
 here ballet rediscovers its purest atmosphere—
 a movement barely perceived before it dissolves,
 enough to awaken the sense of place itself.”

From this, Mallarmé derived three aesthetic notions: image, site, and fiction. In essence, Fuller transcended the limits of the human body—her diaphanous silk not only mimicked bodily form but also concealed it. For Mallarmé, the dance that Fuller created dissolved the distinction between body and medium; both coexisted and interacted to generate new, mutually shaping forms. To borrow a musical metaphor: the body becomes an instrument of material resonance, creating an immaterial field of sensation that is no longer bound to physical resemblance. The body is only a point of origin—while the movement, like music, cannot be fully traced back to it.

More importantly, Loïe Fuller’s Serpentine Dance does not possess the conventional function of narrative.  Borrowing how Arthur Schopenhauer describes the artistic nature of music as  the “thing-in-itself,” – rather than a physical property embodying the world, an imitation/representation of the appearance, or any particular phenomenon –  the silk that envelops the body in Fuller’s serpentine dance is music, for it extends the body to give rise to a form where the body itself disappears within.   The techniques employed thus create a new body, one that serves as the “fixed point” in whirling, reaching beyond itself to generate diverse forms.  Moreover, it is an intangible body, visible only through what is produced from and attached to it, like a hidden melody self-fulling onstage.    Dance is not about symbolism, nor is its purpose to establish storytelling scenarios: “Its figure as an act builds a site, a unique theatre of techniques where ‘fiction’ is born.”  In other words, dance no longer serves as metaphors for narrative purposes.  We can depict “flying” without birds, or “blooming” without flowers.  The figure is its own truth, whether flying or blooming.  Therefore, just as fiction becomes a stage of perceived movement, it immediately disappears – but that short period of time is sufficient to evoke a site.  For Étienne Mallarmé, it fulfills an ideal prototype of simplification, the pure force of nature celebrated in ancient Greece.  However, Jacques Ranciere points out that Mallarmé leaves out Fuller’s use of electric light, which, in his view, does not contradict the force of nature. Thomas Eddison’s electric illumination, after all, is both an artificial force of and from nature.   The technical application of light enables a pure, immaterial play to take place where everything is enveloped by light   , making light as much material as spiritual.  The stage is thus granted a freedom where fiction becomes reality.  

Following Ola Maciejewska’s reflections on Loïe Fuller’s uniqueness, we may summarize several key ideas. The body is no longer the center of the stage but exists in equal relation to other performative media—that is, to material substances themselves. This is also a performance of an elusive body: one that appears only to withdraw, leaving the audience unable to grasp its form, perceiving instead a continual process of emergence and disappearance. For both Ola and Fuller, the body resists any fixed form or interpretation. Sensation itself is deceptive; both artists even make the very act of representation difficult for the audience. Another essential aspect lies in their use of technology—in the most minimal sense of the term. Fuller used light with simplicity and purity, yet achieved an immense artistic effect: one that was at once fictive, generative, spiritual, material, interpretive, and the opposite of all these. Compared to Fuller’s time, when technology was in its infancy, contemporary technological means have far surpassed what could once be imagined. Through her performances, Ola reexamines and deconstructs Fuller’s seemingly simple yet profoundly meaningful works, seeking to reveal new layers of significance for our contemporary era.

Now, we move toward exploring these possibilities. Taking different kinds of observers as an experiment, we distinguish between “artistic observation” and “everyday observation.” Though this distinction is somewhat arbitrary, it may serve as a path toward experiencing what Mallarmé called the aesthetic condition—a way to uncover new modes of perception. When Ola treats the body not as the center of the stage but as an element in an equal relationship with other materials, this recalls the Actor–Network Theory of technological sociology, which suggests that technological objects are not passive tools but active agents.

Clothing and body form a relational network within their environment. At first, the viewer perceives the fabric draped on the dancer’s body, imagining its shape and outline. Yet as movement begins, the relationship between body and fabric grows ambiguous and complex. The imagined contours of the body repeatedly fracture; the physical relation between body and fabric gives way to an intuitive illusion. As these elements interact with the surrounding space, vision itself reaches a momentary suspension—as if our gaze and consciousness are separated, led away by the artwork itself. Then, suddenly, the viewer becomes aware of their own act of seeing, returning to the beginning of the hallucinatory loop. Unless one is an exceptionally fervent devotee of art with an extraordinary degree of focus, this strange pause—this sense of disorientation, bewilderment, or perhaps a subtle fatigue—seems almost inevitable.

Next, we turn to psychoanalysis as an alternative approach to further investigate how the dance work unfolds.   Based on Slavoj Žižek’s analysis of particular events in a film, we compare it to the progression of the visual narrative in Ola Maciejewska’s work.   First, costume is simply what the body wears, evoking a sequence of events in the viewers’ imagination: viewers take in the performance with their eyes, but the strange costume quietly summons an intangible inner/outer body.  As the dancer   begins to move, the boundary between the body and costume    becomes increasingly blurred.  We may also borrow Bruno Latou’s Actor-Network Theory: their interlinked relationship breaks the pre-existing continuity of events, activating new perceptivity through new creative connotations.  Simply put, when we look at a person in the street – regardless of their actions, such as crossing the street --, what we are really seeing is a body clothed in garments (unless we begin to pay attention to the outfit, allowing the clothes and body to emerge from themselves and become intangible, and our consequent discussion of the outfit thus gives rise to rich creative imagination).  Then, we see the entanglement between the body and costume, which now become inseparable and indistinctive due to their mutual distortion and interaction, even though we try harder to focus on what is on stage, concentrating on the act of “seeing” as if we can observe our own “seeing.”To see is to have a visual focus, yet something invisible underpins this act of “seeing” beforehand.  For example, when we look at a detail of a painting, we cannot take in the entire image, if not a glimpse from the corner of the eyes.   There is always something intangible and elusive that resides in the gap, from one stage to another, and to some extent trapped within.  The visible thing draws our attention toward itself, and Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan describes this act as “aiming,” the pre-existence of the gaze: we can only see from a specific point, but my presence becomes the target of gazes from all directions.

To give a simple example, when we walk into a different room, we see the walls, but we also see the “invisible” parts of the room and feel gazed at by the room (the gaze coming from around the walls).  Similarly, the body and costume inherently possess their own invisibility, and their interaction leads to a state of mimicry: a mutual overlap between the subject and the surroundings – the body and costume not only see the surroundings, but are also seen by them.   This theory forms the basis on which Jacques Ranciere extends Mallarmé’s analysis of Fuller’s use of lighting.   In this way, when the dancer begins to move and triggers viewers’ phenomenological memory, we may invoke Jonathan Crary’s interpretation of attention, that renders perception as an observer endowed with its own subjectivity;    or recall the assumption of Monsieur Teste, a character created by Paul Valéry:  when we see our act of seeing, another gaze arises within the delayed gap between the eyes and the world, between me and myself, as a reflexive target.  Vision thus becomes a philosophy to see one’s own “seeing,” an “appearance” in the theatrical sense.  

To avoid straying too far, let us return to the sense of suspended attention mentioned earlier. Is it merely the fatigue of concentration? Or is it what Lacan called the stain—that“something more”that exceeds the spectator’s perception and understanding, emerging within the non-physical theatrical space that connects body, fabric, and viewer? Perhaps this is where the strangeness you feel arises: a protrusion of vision, both the natural and the unnatural exist simultaneously..
It resembles that uncanny element in a horror film—something that exists beyond the house framed by the camera, a presence that lurks at the edge of the image. Whether through a distant shot or a sudden close-up, the viewer is jolted out of neutrality—out of the “objective” stance of the passerby described earlier—and thrown into a state where perception swings between lack and excess. Just as attention begins to tire, a strange drive bursts forth between these two poles.
Ola’s performance also makes use of this play of distance. But here, there is no encounter with a killer; there is no death. The gaze remains captive to the dancer’s movement. Thus, the spectator’s gaze is inverted—something now gazes back at the audience. The dance itself becomes subjectified; the viewer shifts from neutral observation to being observed by the form that the body, fabric, and stage have together created. Meaning oscillates between scarcity and excess. The viewer may even abandon aesthetic observation altogether, yet the dance continues.

At this moment, anti-aesthetics finds its opening. What modern art resists is not objective reality, but the illusion of objectivity-subjectified, or subjectivity-objectified—the strange category in which what you see is not what truly appears, it is the illusion that the subject cannot bear. Creative imagination is seduced by ideological interests, while notions of animality and the naturalization of women intervene. The brain’s awareness of perception is suspended (subjectivity dissolves), and perception itself is reactivated—allowing another kind of communication to emerge.

Thus, we pass through the gaze, only to return to vision—to watch the dancer in her peculiar costume, moving through a sequence of strange steps. The boundary between perception and communication once again returns to the liminal zone between the visible and the invisible.
Just as Ola’s work pays homage to Fuller’s dance, this text also explores how Fuller’s legacy can be understood today through Ola’s reinterpretation. However, returning to the foundation of it all and following Fuller’s spirit, Ola strips away the technological media available to her era, choosing instead the most austere means to restage the revolutionary innovation Fuller brought to hers. In this age of technological and informational excess—where sensory overload defines the body’s relation to the world—Ola’s performance relieves the spectator from the mind’s over-interpretation of perception. It reopens the possibility of sensory experimentation for the present.

Loïe Fuller: Research is therefore not only a study of Fuller herself, but also one of the most poignant artistic reflections on these very questions.