Radiant

Will someone put that light out?” Loïe whispered to a shadow behind the curtain.

With a sputter, the last gaslight was extinguished and it went dark backstage at the Folies Bergère. The five-foot-two American dancer raised her arms to extend the gauzy wings of her gown, gripping the smooth, light rods sewn into the folds of the dress as if her life depended on it. Her body hummed with nervous energy. She had to move.

Pushing her hands back and forth and rotating her wrists, Loïe created gentle undulations in the featherweight silk for a few moments before lowering her arms to maneuver the skirt back into place with a shimmy. She dropped her head, willed her shoulders to relax, and waited. It was impossible to wipe away the bead of sweat that tickled its way across her cheek down to the end of her nose, where it rested for a few moments before free-falling into blackness.

“Faker, Faker, Faker.” The childhood taunt always haunted her at moments like these. She could still picture the faces of the boys who had teased her when she was a child, but they were grown men now. Maybe she was a faker, but fabricating the impossible from the ordinary was her greatest skill. Loïe might not be the most beautiful dancer in Paris, but she was by far the most inventive. Rather than depending on choreography or exposed flesh, she incorporated technology into her art to make it new and modern. Light, color, and nature were her muses, and she called on them to create dances so original that they crossed over into the realm of art. She only required an audience with the vision to appreciate what she’d done.

Loïe desperately hoped that Paris would be that audience. She’d fallen in love with the idea of the city and everything it stood for: art, beauty, modernity. Her own homeland refused to appreciate the importance of her work or credit her for it, and her ideas were being stolen almost as fast as she could manufacture them. Attempts to patent her costumes and choreography in the United States had failed miserably, and there was little comfort in the fact that none of her imitators had been talented enough to copy her special lighting and color effects successfully.

If no one in Paris was moved by her dances or recognized her talent for innovation, this would be just another failed stop on her endless quest for artistic and financial success. Still, she had a feeling that this city was her oyster. It had to be. Parisians appreciated art, or so she’d been told. Paris could make her dreams come true.

Thanks to Thomas Edison’s recent invention of the lightbulb, the famous French capital had been transformed into the City of Light. For the first time, it was possible to walk the narrow streets safely after dark. Packed cafés and bars had become fertile ground for late-night conversations. Best of all, the city was a magnet for modern thinkers and the air was heavy with inspiration, full of ideas waiting to be plucked and formed by artists, writers, and philosophers.

New methods of depicting the world using language, line, and color were being born as fast as they could be jotted down. After years of portraying wealth, power, and religion, artists and writers had moved in a new direction and were now exploring the lives of working people, making them larger than life. Rather than representing royals and mythological figures, painters like Gustave Caillebotte and Camille Pissarro filled their canvases with revolutionary images of peasants scraping floors and gathering grass.

Naturalist writers like Émile Zola and J. K. Huysmans used starkly realistic descriptions to explore the life of the working class and the poverty-stricken. Zola’s work, which occasionally wove myth into human experience and endowed ordinary objects with lifelike qualities, ignited a new school of thought called symbolism, whose disciples embraced dreams, the mythological and the spiritual, believing that truth was revealed in emotional reactions to words and visual experiences.

As an American, Loïe wasn’t under the same constraints as French women, who struggled to pursue interests other than motherhood in a society that valued them primarily as vessels for bearing children. Despite the fact that they were legally and financially dependent on men, many women in Paris were searching for a way to move more independently into the future. They were studying every possible subject at the famous Sorbonne University, and a few paintings by female artists hung in the Parisian salons alongside those of male artists.

A deep, percussive clang indicated that the show was about to begin. As the last gaslight at the front of the stage was extinguished per Loïe’s instructions, the murmur in the theater died down. The audience sat confused.

Stages were rarely if ever darkened, and Loïe had shrouded this one in black cloth, hanging a dark blue backdrop and ordering the orchestra to darken the pit as much as possible. When she’d peeked through the curtain earlier to remind the musicians to cover their music-stand lights, it had been obvious from the wagging heads in the reed section and the muttering cello player that they thought she’d entirely lost her mind. At first, they’d resisted following the orders of a woman, but the theater manager, Édouard Marchand, had told them to listen to Loïe.

A few shrill whistles echoed through the cavernous space and died away. Finally, with a creak of ropes and swish of fabric, the curtain rose, crinkling up layer after layer, like an enormous red Roman blind. Cigar smoke and beer-scented air rushed onstage to envelop Loïe in a stifling embrace. It was impossible for her to see the audience, but she could hear them shifting in their seats and murmuring in the dark.

The clear, sweet sound of a violin pierced the silence and sent a tingle of anticipation from her scalp to her fingertips. A second chill moved down her spine when the first beam of light appeared from one of the spotlights in the gallery, illuminating her dress like the first ray of dawn. Loïe could see the toes of her shoes now, but she remained as motionless as a statue as the music coaxed more light to the stage, little by little, making her dress glow like morning sun on a mountain peak.

“C’est un ange!” a low voice shouted in French. “It’s an angel.”

“Show us your legs,” someone called out in heavily accented English. The comment was answered with laughter, and more whistles cut through the smoky air.

Loïe had trained herself to take slow, deep breaths while she listened for the chord progression that signaled it was time to bring her first dance to life. In those moments, she allowed her imagination to soar to the first row of the balcony, where she visualized herself onstage as a form draped in white; a dazzling apparition that had materialized in dusty electric beams; a far different creature from the corset-squeezed mannequin the crowd was expecting.

Only a few minutes before, she’d been shouting last-minute instructions to the twelve men on her lighting crew. Getting everything just right. Growing up on the stage had given Loïe an uncanny sense of the magnetic bond between the senses and human emotion. Atmosphere was everything. She absorbed technology like a sponge, noting every new special effect and the potential of each piece of equipment she encountered. She brought it all together in her original lighting system, which was far more technical and involved than anything the electricians at the Folies had ever seen. With electricity and her inventions, she could transform a burlesque club stage into a strikingly modern venue.

Marchand thought she was out of her mind at first, but he’d let her set the lighting using the special configuration she’d designed. In the week before the show, Loïe and her electricians positioned seven electric spotlights around the stage of the Folies: Two were visible on either side of the first gallery, two were hidden toward the back, with a pair in the wings behind the curtain, and the final light was hidden under a glass plate she’d had set into the floor underneath the spot where she would dance.

Once the equipment was in place, she’d taught the electricians to assemble each spotlight lens behind the special rotating disks she’d designed, which could be spun so that the light would shine through one of several holes that ringed them. Each round hole contained glass tinted a different color. Using dried gelatin and special combinations of chemicals she’d mixed and tested herself, Loïe had been able to create rich hues and patterns on the glass that would illuminate her dances.

She’d designed and choreographed her act so that as she danced, she could signal the men to rotate the disks to shine certain colors on her at certain times. The disks could be turned quickly to produce a kaleidoscope effect as the colors rushed and spun through the light onto Loïe’s skirts and robes. Each time she danced, the performance was slightly different. Loïe relied on music and the audience for inspiration, but she left little to chance. Every detail of the performance had been gone over in her mind a hundred times, and she drilled the men over and over until they could manipulate the lights and disks with the exactitude of clockwork in response to her commands.

That evening, as she’d shouted and tapped her way through a series of signals one last time, Loïe had heard the hubbub rising from the crowd assembling in the lobby. There was always a robust audience at the Folies Bergère. The spectators were mostly working-class Parisians, but the upper classes had lately begun to grace the sordid dance halls too. Well-to-do women rarely made an appearance at the club, but famous beauties like Caroline Otero, who kicked and gyrated on the stage, were magnets for the wealthy married men who made a sport of collecting and keeping courtesans.

Writers, critics, and artists also frequented the club, and Loïe hoped that some might be there to see her dance. She knew that the diminutive M. Toulouse-Lautrec was a regular, carousing with dancers and courtesans while drinking himself into oblivion. Barely five feet tall, the artist was the premier poster artist of Paris and the starmaker of Montmartre, as famous for his cruel wit as he was for the stunning lithographs that turned nightclub performers into celebrities. The famous sculptor Auguste Rodin was spotted at the Folies on occasion as well. These men wouldn’t give her a second glance if they passed her on the street, but Loïe hoped she could capture their attention onstage. With a few words or brushstrokes, they could help her stand out from the crowd.

Familiar chords drifting up from the orchestra pit reunited her mind with her body and she was back onstage, squinting in the white spotlight. Inhaling deeply through her nose, she inflated her lungs to expand her chest and opened herself to the music, colors exploding in her mind. The vibrations of low, bluish notes coming from the string bass tingled in her fingertips, and gray beats from the tympani thrummed in time with her thumping heart. Loïe tensed her body in anticipation.

When the golden strains of her first musical cue finally reached her ears, she opened her arms and raised them to unfurl her fabric wings. Expanding her body like a butterfly into the dark open space around her, she became a canvas for light and movement. Using her entire torso as a fulcrum, she swung the fabric into motion, creating arcs by drawing giant figure eights with the wands attached to the silk. One arm descended as the other extended up in rhythm with the music to trace sweeping figures in the air.

The simple act of raising her arms repeatedly with the weight of the fabric was exhausting, and to survive the physical demands of her dancing, she’d learned to let gravity do some of the work for her. With each sweep of her arms, Loïe released her upper wand, accelerated into the downswing, and then rode the upswing, like a boat on a wave. As she moved the wands, Loïe twisted from side to side until her skirt writhed in a geometric serpentine swirl that extended from the floor to the space above her head. The delicate fabric was as treacherous as it was beautiful. If she let go of the wands, even for a fraction of a second, it would wind up and tangle.

She beamed as she danced, her face mostly obscured by the silken patterns formed by her motion. No longer a woman, she was a spirit of the atmosphere, radiating pure light and energy that was in turn absorbed and translated by the imagination of the audience. She could almost feel the light reflecting off her skin, her hair, and her dress.

Loïe was concentrating so hard on responding to the rainbow of sound coming from the orchestra as she spun that she was startled by the cries of delight that rang out when one of the colored spotlights flashed on, drenching her in yellow. She almost stumbled, but caught herself and tapped the next signal to the men controlling the lights.

With each passing moment, the cheers grew. Squinting and sweating, Loïe tapped signals and moved her wands in the well-rehearsed patterns. She swirled her robes to form more sinuous shapes, transforming herself into a wave, a flower, a butterfly—the geometry of nature. She was fire and water, earth and air. The audience roared.

When she’d finished her Serpentine Dance, the curtain fell and she changed her costume to perform the Violet Dance in a white robe she’d painted with flowers. The audience hooted and cheered through the Butterfly Dance, followed by the White Dance. Tapping her feet to signal the electricians perched throughout the theater, she blazed yellow, blue, violet, and red. With each successive dance, the enthusiasm of the audience grew, and fueled by their cheers, Loïe danced on with aching arms. Her eyes felt like they’d been held to a flame, but she didn’t care. They loved her and she loved them.

Weary of half-naked cancan dancers and frothy Russian ballerinas, Paris had been primed for Loïe’s radical magic. They’d never seen anything like her, and even the most jaded theatergoer became instantly obsessed. Every soul in the red velvet seats that night experienced Loïe differently, and she was multiplied infinitely by their imaginations.

As the symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé would write upon seeing her dance, “She lost the materiality of her body and became an idea.”

When the curtain fell after the fourth dance, Loïe could barely raise her arms. The cheering was so loud that she could no longer hear the prelude that the orchestra was attempting to conjure over the noise, and Loïe was grateful for the chance to rest. She guessed that she’d been dancing without a break for about forty-five minutes. The electricians manning the spotlights in the wings looked exhausted, but they were smiling down at her from their perches. Marchand ordered the curtain to be raised again and again, but it was no use. Loïe couldn’t hear the orchestra. Finally, after more curtain calls than they could count, she asked Marchand to think of a way she could get them to quiet down for the last dance.

“We don’t need it. Don’t you hear the cheering?”

He ordered that the stagehands open the curtain a final time, which proved to be a mistake. A drunken man climbed onto the stage shouting “La Loïe, La Loïe, La Loïe,” and an enormous crowd followed him, swarming to surround Loïe. Someone grabbed her arm and dragged her through a sea of grasping hands as she attempted to protect her precious dress from trampling feet. She was lifted and carried to her dressing room and the door was slammed behind her to keep out the throngs who had trailed her backstage.

Elated and still somewhat terrified, Loïe collapsed into the shabby velvet couch that leaned against the wall in the small space. She dropped the wands she’d been gripping for dear life and put her hands to her hot cheeks. Her eyes ached, and pain shot from her shoulders up her neck to the base of her skull. The skirt she’d tried to shield was stained with black shoe polish and torn at the hem.

Loïe moved one hand to cover her mouth as her eyes filled with tears. Laughter escaped from the cracks between her fingers. In her life, moments of clarity had been few and far between, but at that instant, in a lowbrow theater perfectly situated under the Parisian sky, Loïe knew that her stars had finally aligned.