Fifteen Years of a Dancer's Life: With Some Account of Her Distinguished Friends

Loie Fuller arrived in this world doing what she would spend her life perfecting: performing. Born in a Chicago tavern where her mother went into labor during a Christmas ball, she began reciting poetry as a toddler and never stopped chasing the extraordinary. This memoir, written in 1913 at the height of her powers, follows the American dancer who revolutionized stagecraft by wrapping herself in yards of translucent silk and dancing with electric light, a technique that made her the sensation of the Folies Bergère and a darling of Parisian Art Nouveau. But this is more than a performer's memoir. It's a window onto a vanished world of backstage intrigue, artistic revolution, and the close friendships Fuller cultivated with the era's most electrifying creative minds. Her prose has a dancer's sense of rhythm and a rebel's refusal to be ordinary. Whether recounting her childhood schemes or the politics of European theatre, she brings wit and candor to every page. For anyone fascinated by the birth of modern dance, the magic of Belle Époque Paris, or the art of self-invention, this book is a front-row seat to a life lived in perpetual motion.