The Second Coming: Loie Fuller Lives
“God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light.” — Genesis 1:3
“Edison’s here to stay.” — The Bee Gees
“We don’t know what light is. We can’t even see it until it hits something.” Jennifer Tipton
The last of these quotes comes from the New York’s leading theatrical lighting director. And it is the mystery at the heart of a dazzling documentary, “Obsessed with Light.” The film is about an obscure character in the history of dance — Loie Fuller, a “western gal” from Kansas who became a sensation in Paris a hundred years ago. But ultimately it is about the miracle of human creation — what we do with the light God gave us, and the light we make for ourselves.
Fuller created exotic dances that she and her company performed in outsize costumes, with a home-made apparatus that extended their arms into wings. And she lit them with early electric light, through a hand-painted color wheel. The poet William Butler Yeats was mesmerized:
“When Loie Fuller’s Chinese dancers enwound
A shining web. a floating ribbon of cloth,
It seemed that a dragon of air
Had fallen among dancers, had whirled them round
Or hurried them off on its own furious path…”
— — Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen
Yeats’s poem was about a world gone wrong — emerging from the disaster of World War One only to whirl heedlessly into even greater catastrophes. And today, as America hurtles into the second coming of President Trump, Loie lives.
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Her mantle, her floating ribbon of cloth, has been picked up by New York choreographer Jody Sperling and her Time Lapse Dance company. They bring Loie to life in the film, performing new works and lighting them with contemporary technology that Fuller could only dream of. The climax is a dazzling solo by Sperling in which the dancer disappears, until all we see is the flash of light on her whirling robe.
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre…” wrote Yeats in his “Second Coming.” And this is what Sperling and her dancers do, turning themselves into instruments of fabric and light. Time Lapse Dance has taken up the cause of the Earth. They dance as trees, or wind, or covered with plastic bags, as garbage. Sperling calls them “eco-artists,” in residence at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, a nearly 150-year-old organization that stubbornly clings to its dreams of creating a better world. Following in Loie Fuller’s footsteps, they will be touring and teaching in Egypt next month, at the invitation of the US Embassy in Cairo.
Fuller’s apparatus, made of wood, serves to bridge the gap between humanity and nature — doubling the size of human beings, endowing them with godlike presence. In the shadow of the pyramids, Time Lapse Dance will be dancing for civilization to survive its obsessions, for humanity to save its home.
Meanwhile “Obsessed with Light” — a labor of love by directors Sabine Krayenbuhl amd Zeva Oelbaum — has been picked up for distribution in the US and Canada. It is exhaustively researched, elegantly shot in its interviews with Tipton and other artists inspired by Fuller, and most of all brilliantly edited, mixing new material with snippets of Fuller in black and white and color. Loie would be thrilled, and so will anyone who cares about dance, film, light, life and this world.
— Copyright 2025 by Tom Phillips
