The Aesthetics of Queer Work: Loïe Fuller's Exhausting Life as Performance Art in Stephanie Di Giusto's The Dancer (2016)

Loïe Fuller's mesmerising Serpentine Dance appears to many viewers as a floating, morphing and queer image of voluminous fabric erasing the effort behind the taxing physicality and creating an indeterminate (re)presentation. The queerness and variety of American vaudeville stages, the Folies Bergère and the circus in Paris provided Fuller with a space to experiment and transgress stereotypical gender roles in work. Stéphanie Di Giusto's 2016 biopic The Dancer highlights Fuller's perpetual physicality throughout the cinematic depiction: constant shots of her injured and exhausted body; corporeal exertion while dancing. Engaging with queer discourses and tying the depiction of Fuller into larger discussions of the circus as queer space, this chapter argues that the film depicts Fuller's dance and life as perpetually exhausting work and a struggle for a queer identity; this albeit elusive enterprise reflected her ephemeral dances and the draining variété life.