The light fantastic - Fuller, Rosenthal & Tipton: beginning with Loie Fuller in the nineteenth century, dance has pioneered the development of twentieth-century stage lighting - Jean Rosenthal; Jennifer Tipton

The marriage of light and dance was certainly the meeting of two like minds. Both move through time and air and space; both are ephemeral - always changing, never still,

The courtship may have begun when the American dancer Loie Fuller (1 852-1 928) projected red, blue, and yellow painted lights onto her white silk costume a century ago. Only technological limitations prevented a more perfect union, and today computer technology that makes ever more sophisticated lighting equipment possible can unite artistic imagination with the means of expressing it as never before.

The invention of the arc lamp in 1846 brought electric light into the theater for special effects; Thomas Edison's 1879 incandescent light bulb opened up the field of experimentation, in lighting design for theater and dance. There had been forms of stage lighting through the centuries, of course, Jean Rosenthal (1912-69), the first professional stage lighting designer, in her posthumously published book written with Lael Wertenbaker, The Craft and Career of Jean Rosenthal, Pioneer in Lighting for the Modem Stage (1972), describes such devices as torches in ancient Greece, candles in the Renaissance, and gaslight (in the last third of the nineteenth century) for theatrical performances of all kinds.

Without incandescent light, however, Fuller could not even have begun to meld fabric, movement, and light to replicate a lily blooming, a butterfly unfolding its wings, or the rise and fall of flames into the final flicker of a dying ember. Fuller, whom enthusiastic Parisians called "La Loie," was the toast of Paris at the end of the nineteenth century. She appeared at the Folies-Bergere, a hang-out of artists and writers, and made that risque dance hall an acceptable place for middle-class families to frequent.

Her Ballets Lumieres were early light shows, tapping into popular culture as well as high art, as some classical ballet companies are doing today. She took herself seriously as an artist. And she was taken seriously by painters and sculptors for her stylized natural forms. She also inspired such writers as W. B. Yeats and Stephane Mallarme, who described her in 1893 as "at once an artistic intoxication and an industrial achievement." Through considerable trial and error, Fuller had discovered that costumes and lights are as much a part of dance as the movement itself. The hardworking American also had a scientific bent, presiding over her own laboratory and honored by the French scientific community for her contributions to the theory of light. She was a friend of the Curies, who declined to lend her radium - which they had discovered - to sew into a costume for phosphorescent effect, on the grounds that it was too dangerous.

In 1896 Fuller toured the United States with her dances, where both her performances and her methods were well documented by the New York Herald. The first account pointed out that Fuller had patented her design for the skirts she had painted and then manipulated with bamboo rods to create her various organic effects. The writer also describes Fuller's patented scheme for lighting the stage during a dance from points above, below, and all around the dancer:

"An ugly looking dress, with the snakes upon its surface is a quite different garment to the view when it is being waved to and fro ... with ten or fifteen brilliant calcium lights in various colors shining upon it from the flies, wings and from underneath the stage. Then its filmy fabric shines like silver or gold, or waving flood of purple, as it passes under the changing lenses of the calciums, while the embroidered serpents seem to glide over its surface with ever-increasing velocity until the lights are suddenly turned out and the whirling form of the dancer is lost to view. It is not uncommon nowadays to get up a dance requiring five times as many lights. each of which commands the undivided attention of an electrician's assistant. Serpentine dances in these times ... are expensive luxuries. They owe their development to their present stage of perfection to `La Loie' Fuller."

Cost was no object. She sometimes traveled with as many as fifty electricians. each operating a different light. This made her concerts very expensive indeed. Her Fire Dance was cued to signals from her feet that went to an electrician posted underneath the stage, who inserted gelatins of different colors as Fuller responded to the music. Mirrors and lantern projectors. covered with glass slides, were also used to produce the effects she wanted. Stubborn and persistent. she never swerved from her objective - to explore every means of combining color and movement to create what one might call danse et lumiere, setting the stage for the use and design of stage lighting for dance.

By the time Jean Rosenthal entered, or created, the field during the Great Depression, cost was definitely an object, as it is today, and in some instances, necessity became the mother of invention as stage lighting took the place of elaborate scenery. For example, for George Balanchine, Rosenthal replaced the painted backdrops of the Diaghilev era with the famous blue cyclorama that forms the background for a good deal of New York City Ballet's repertoire today.