DANCER BEFORE DIAGHILEV
59
was never cured. She often repeated this claim, much as Isadora
insisted that her character was predetermined from the womb
("Before I was born my mother was
in
great agony of spirit and
in a tragic situation. She eQuId take no food except iced oysters
and iced champagne.") Throughout her life, Fuller made much
of her congenital ill-health and demanded certain extraordinary
attentions, but Mr. Nicol does not think she was particularly
frail. A talented child, she captivated audiences with her songs
at the age of five, at the age of thirteen with her temperance
lectures, during which she exhibited colored illustrations of the
liver. Later she went on the stage. Her early career was undis–
tinguished, but she gave a hint of things to come by forming her
own company and taking it on a long, but disastrous, tour of
South America. In 1889 she made her first London appearance
in
Caprice,
which opened on the 22nd of October at the Gaiety
and closed almost at once. She went back to New York. At this
time she had played everything from Shakespeare to burlesque
but she had never danced.
In the early days of what is called Modern Dance it seems
to have been a convention that all the best things happened by
accident, like Ruth St. Denis's getting the idea of her oriental
dancing from a cigarette packet. Loie Fuller encouraged the
idea that her art developed from one happy accident to the next.
The first radical bit of luck came when she was acting, at a
small New York theater, a part in which she was hypnotized. To
get the atmosphere right the management arranged for the stage
to be illuminated entirely by green footlights, while the orchestra
played sad music. During this hurriedly mounted piece, Fuller
found herself on stage wearing a gauzy Indian skirt that was
much too long for her. She says in her book that it was a present
from an heroic admirer who later fell in the Khyber Pass; and
she told a French historian that she got it from another girl. Any–
way, she hit upon the idea of gliding hypnotically about the
stage, holding the skirt up. To her surprise there were pleased
exclamations from the house: "It's a butterfly!" "It's an orchid!"
