Irene Franklin (1876-1941)
Born in New York into a vaudeville family, Irene Franklin toured from a very early age becoming a star by the age of 16. She was variously a song-writer, impressionist and comedienne in vaudeville, a Broadway performer and Hollywood film actress. Starting in 1911 she made a number of recordings. She met Burt Green whilst performing at Tony Astor's in New York; the pair married and became a successful singer/pianist duo on Broadway as well as writing songs together. When Green died, she then teamed up with pianist Jerry Jarnegin who she also married. Of ragtime interest is Red Head Rag (1910), co-composed with Green and which was her signature tune. She died in New York.
List of Irene Franklin's works.
Born Marie Louise Fuller in the Chicago suburb of Fullersburg, now Hinsdale, Illinois, Fuller began her theatrical career as a professional child actress and later choreographed and performed dances in burlesque (as a skirt dancer), vaudeville, and circus shows. An early free dance practitioner, Fuller developed her own natural movement and improvisation techniques. Fuller combined her choreography with silk costumes illuminated by multi-coloured lighting of her own design.
Portrait of Loïe Fuller, by Frederick Glasier, 1902.Although Fuller became famous in America through works such as Serpentine Dance (1891), she felt that she was not taken seriously by the public who still thought of her as an actress. Her warm reception in Paris during a European tour persuaded Fuller to remain in France and continue her work. A regular performer at the Folies Bergère with works such as Fire Dance, Fuller became the embodiment of the Art Nouveau movement. An 1896 film of the Serpentine Dance by the pioneering film-makers Auguste and Louis Lumière gives a hint of what her performance was like. (The unknown dancer in the film is often mistakenly identified as Fuller herself.)
Loïe Fuller at the Folies Bergère, poster by PAL (Jean de Paléologue).Fuller's pioneering work attracted the attention, respect, and friendship of many French artists and scientists, including Jules Chéret, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, François-Raoul Larche, Henri-Pierre Roché, Auguste Rodin, Franz von Stuck, Maurice Denis, Thomas Theodor Heine, Koloman Moser, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Marie Curie. Fuller held many patents related to stage lighting including chemical compounds for creating color gel and the use of chemical salts for luminescent lighting and garments (stage costumes US Patent 518347). Fuller was also a member of the French Astronomical Society.
Loie Fuller's original stage name was "Louie".In modern French "L'ouie" is the word for a sense of hearing. When Fuller reached Paris she gained a nickname which was a pun on "Louie"/"L'ouie". She was renamed "Loïe" - this nickname is a corruption of the early or Medieval French "L'oïe", a precursor to "L'ouie", which means "receptiveness" or "understanding".
Vue Lumière No 765 - Serpentine Dance, 1896Fuller is responsible for the European tours of the early modern dancers (she was the first American modern dancer to perform in Europe), introducing Isadora Duncan to Parisian audiences and developing the acceptance of modern dance as a serious art form. Her 'Chinese dancers' were the subject of the second section of W.B. Yeats' poem 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen'.
After the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900, Fuller toured Europe with Sada Yacco and company, acting as manager and press agent for the Japanese performers.[1]
Fuller formed a close friendship with Queen Marie of Romania; their extensive correspondence has been published. Fuller, through a connection at the U.S. embassy in Paris played a role in arranging a U.S. loan for Romania during World War I. Later, during the period when the future Carol II of Romania was alienated from the Romanian royal family and living in Paris with his mistress Magda Lupescu, she befriended them; they were unaware of her connection to Carol's mother Marie. Fuller initially advocated to Marie on behalf of the couple, but later schemed unsuccessfully with Marie to separate Carol from Lupescu.[2] With Queen Marie and American businessman Samuel Hill, Fuller helped found the Maryhill Museum of Art in rural Washington State, which has permanent exhibits about her career.
Fuller occasionally returned to America to stage performances by her students, the "Fullerets" or Muses, but spent the end of her life in Paris where she died of pneumonia on January, 2 aged 65. Cremated, her ashes are interred in the columbarium at Cimetière du Père Lachaise in Paris.
She once was the most famous dancer in the world, though some who saw her perform wondered whether what she did was really dancing, and she herself had her doubts. What brought her fame was her way of manipulating voluminous folds of silk while having beams of colored light play upon them. She may or may not have been a true mistress of terpsichore, but she certainly taught the light to dance.
In fact, this woman did much, much more than that. She broke the mold of traditional choreography and prepared the way for the development of modern dance. She helped to launch other pioneers, among them Isadora Duncan. A "magician of light," she made important contributions to stage lighting and lesser ones to cinema techniques. She became the personification of Art Nouveau, the inspiration for artists who, idealizing her, portrayed her more often than any other woman of her time. She, in turn, promoted the work of her artist friends and was responsible for the founding of two art museums. An inspiration for poets as well as artists, she served as a symbol of the symbolist movement.