DANCER BEFORE DIAGHILEV
65
expressive. When she says that
"in
the dance, and there ought
to be a word better adapted to the thing, the human body
should, despite conventional limitations, express all the sensa–
tions and emotions that it experiences" she is, presumably, echo–
ing Delsarte, and had she maintained this view she would have
been honored as the founder of Modem Dance, instead of Isa–
dora Duncan. But she moved away from it. The line of the body,
never, as we have seen, the principal exhibit in her performance,
grew less and less important, and in the end hardly counted at
all, witness those dances in which no human figure was percept–
ible to the audience. The story she tells of her stumbling upon a
new
art
of illuminated drapes in motion-and this at the outset
of her career-has the germ at any rate of the truth. In a theo–
retical chapter of her autobiography she has some reflections on
Light and the Dance; she was greatly concerned with the affec–
tive qualities of color and its relation to sounds and moods
(speculations much in vogue at the time ) and was once thrown
out of Notre Dame for waving a handkerchief in front of a sun–
lit window. She maintained the opinion that "motion and not
language
is
truthful," a view not likely to meet much opposition
among the poets of the time, but she did not mean the simple
dancer's motions or even those involuntary gestures organized
into art which are the basis of Modem Dance; she meant the
manipulation of silk and light. With them she could penetrate
the spectator's mind and "awaken his imagination that it may
be prepared to receive the image."
Fuller used
in
her publicity a remark by Pierre Roche that
she was unequalled as an electrician and used her colored lights
on silk with a painter'S
art.
In fact in the earliest days of the–
atrical electricity she seems to have gone a remarkably long way
toward realizing that dream of a
Farbenkunst
which had been
epidemic since the eighteenth century. She was given great
credit for her skill at the time, not only by aesthetes who thought
of the whole thing as a transcendent success for cosmetics, but by
practical theater people. Sarah Bernhardt consulted her. There
