Obsessed with Light

 

Loie Fuller 

                                                                    
                                    

"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 strikes something."   Jennifer Tipton 

The last of these quotes comes from the New York's leading theatrical lighting director.  And it represents the mystery at the heart of a dazzling new 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 we hurtle into the second coming of  President Trump, Loie lives.  

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 finale is a dazzling solo by Sperling in which the dancer disappears and all we see is light playing on her whirling robe. 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre, wrote Yeats in his "Second Coming."  Turning is what Sperling and her dancers do, turning themselves into instruments of fabric and light, a light that is not overcome by the darkness.  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, Sperling and her troupe 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 reach 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, and held over at the New Plaza Cinema in New York.  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, life, light, and this world.   

-- Copyright 2025 by Tom Phillips
 

Junk Dances 2020

"Plastic Harvest" 
Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance 
The Center at West Park, New York
Streamed Live December 15, 2020

By Tom Phillips 
-- Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips 

Anika Hunter in "Plastic Harvest" 

In the early 1960s, choreographer Murray Louis took a ride up the escalator at Macy’s, the world’s largest store.

 ''I looked at rooms and rooms .. waves of coats and shirts,'' he told the New York Times. ''I thought, 'Who buys this?' And suddenly I had an image of excess as a theme.''  Shortly after, Louis attended a country auction where he bought a bundle of old umbrellas. He opened them up: ''They were all completely eaten away. It was wonderful.”  He had one thought: “It all turns to junk.”  

Out of this, in 1964 Louis and Phyllis Lamhut made a wonderful duet, set in an alley that steadily filled up with the detritus of a shopping spree – heaps and piles of paper bags, filled with goods destined to decay and disintegrate.  They called it “Junk Dances.”  Fast forward to 2020, and choreographer Jody Sperling is on the Down escalator, contemplating the end times of our long national shopping spree.  She calls it "Plastic Harvest." 

---

Today a tsunami of accumulated junk is filling up the whole earth.  And instead of paper bags full of ephemeral objects, we have mountains of plastic bags, filled with plastic products that will not decay or go away.  In 1964 our consumer products all turned to junk.  Today they start out as junk, and turn to toxic waste.      

“Plastic Harvest” is a Covid-era virtual work in progress, a video featuring four dancers in costumes fashioned from plastic bags.  Anika Hunter opens in a tub, taking a bubble bath in a sea of crackling plastic.  As she periodically disappeared under the surface, I thought of the warnings on some bags – danger of suffocation.  Hunter begins and ends her bath reading a book – “So You Want to Talk about Race.”  It’s a crisis, for sure, but not the one that’s immediately surrounding her.  Like the American consumer she appears unconcerned, even as she slips under the waves. 

Maki Kitahara follows in a wide-sleeved kimono made of bags tied and hanging from her outstretched arms as if from a clothesline.  This too is a disappearing act, through a trick of Sperling’s camera that shoots her in a split-screen mirror image.  Turning toward the center she disappears, turning outward she splits into two.  An identity crisis – is it a person, two persons, plastic, or nothing at all? 

Andrea Pugliese-Trager

The grand finale is a whirling balletic folk dance in swirling tutus and puffed plastic sleeves, intercut between Frances Barker on a suburban street and Andrea Pugliese-Trager in New York.  Both wind up crossing an intersection – Pugliese-Trager through a construction zone, Barker past a Stop sign into a weed-strewn vacant lot.  

Obviously, more questions than answers in this work-in-progress, but that’s as it should be.  The camera work is sharp and the split-screens stunning.  It’s all kept driving by Matthew Burtner’s repetitive score, which sounds like the infernal combustion of some satanic micro-mill.   

Besides the dancers, the most striking visual was the unheeded sign that said STOP.   Hey, it's not too late… 

-- Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips                                 

Junk Dances, 1964

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