58
FRANK KERMODE
"geometric shadows" were cast, and a Cubist .and Dadaist
dancer, Nina Payne, whose dancing to jazz music greatly pleased
the fastidious Levinson. The Cubism, he said, must have some–
thing to do with a strange cylindrical
couvrechef
she wore. There
were also vaguely Vorticist dancers in Mme. Strindberg's Cave
of the Golden Calf in London just before the first war; we know
that cut-outs and shadows were used (see F. M. Ford's novel,
The Marsden Case)
but the memoirs
Df
the period are hazy
abDut what went on, and Miss Margaret Morris, who certainly
knows, will not say. Isadora Duncan was a "symbolist" dancer;
but it is sometimes forgotten that she derived much that was ad–
mirable in her dancing from Loie Fuller, and this brings me
tOo
the most important of all these names, to the woman who seemed
to be doing almost single-handed what Diaghilev was later to
achieve only with the help of great painters, musicians, and
dancers.
Many living people must have seen Loie Fuller, but there is
no book about her, except her own autobiography, and no
powerful tradition, as there is for Isadora Duncan. The standard
reference books are scanty and inaccurate, and so should I have
been, had I not had the good luck to encounter Mr.
E.
J.
Nicol,
a nephew of Elizabeth Nolan, who nDt only backed Fuller but
carried out the famous experiments in textiles and dyes which
were associated with the dancer's vogue. Mr. Nicol also belonged
to Fuller's company as a child, and knows all about a great many
matters which were kept secret, mostly of a technical sort. For
all correct comments on such techniques in what .follows Mr.
Nicol is responsible, and for none that is incorrect. The rest of
the material comes from diaries, newspapers, theater programs,
publicity hand-outs, and the like; and, of course, the
autob~o
graphy,
Fifteen Years of a Dancer's Life
(1908, English version
1913).
Loie Fuller was born in Illinois in 1862, under trying cir–
cumstances: She claimed to have caught a cold at birth which
