Welcome to the Crowdsourcing Mornings segment! Every weekday morning, Geek Alabama talks about and features one crowdsourcing project from crowdsourcing sites such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and others. The hope with Crowdsourcing Mornings is to feature and help a project be successful and reach its fundraising goal. Please enjoy today’s featured project!
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How could one woman inspire 19th century luminaries including Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Auguste Rodin, as well as contemporary artists like Taylor Swift, Alexander McQueen and Bill T. Jones, and still remain largely unknown?
Obsessed with Light is a documentary film about the wildly original performer and inventor Loïe Fuller, the American creator of modern dance. Fuller pioneered the creative use of electric lighting for the stage, even building a glass floor so that she could be lit from below. She was a driven perfectionist who was unapologetic about her ambition and appearance and open about her sexuality.
Astonishingly, anyone who has been to a rock concert or theater performance has seen a modern version of the lighting and stage designs that Fuller patented over 100 years ago.
Loïe Fuller (1862–1928), revolutionized the visual culture of the early 20th century. Born in the Midwest during the Civil War, she was originally a vaudeville performer (including with Buffalo Bill) who invented a completely new kind of spectacle combining dance, light, fabric and movement in a way that had never been seen before.
With a costume made of hundreds of yards of silk fabric, she propelled herself into swirling, multi-colored abstractions and became an overnight sensation in Paris after her debut at the Folies Bergère in 1892.
Not only a celebrated performer, Fuller was also an impresario and entrepreneur. She launched Isadora Duncan’s career, promoted Rodin’s sculpture in the U.S., consulted with Marie Curie and Thomas Edison to make her costumes glow and collaborated on creative projects with her life partner of several decades, Gabrielle Bloch. Her work inspired the most important artists, performers and thinkers of her day and her influence continues today.
Obsessed with Light is a film about transformation. It’s about a woman described by contemporaries as “odd and badly dressed,” who transformed herself into the “Fairy of Light” onstage. It is about a visionary who disrupted the prevailing notions of dance and the imagined limits of the human body.
Not a conventional biopic, our film reveals Fuller’s influence on our current cultural landscape through interviews with numerous international luminaries such as American theater director Robert Wilson, South African artist William Kentridge, Maria Grazia Chiuri, creative director of Dior, American choreographer and dancer Bill T.Jones and Maite Marcos, choreographer for global pop superstar Shakira.
Creating a dialogue between the past and the present, we interweave the contemporary interviews with rare, hand-tinted archival footage by pioneers such as Georges Méliès and Alice Guy-Blaché. In addition, we made a thrilling discovery of audio tapes of interviews with members of Fuller’s original dance troupe. More than 50 years old, we have restored these fragile tapes and included sections in the film.
Our extensive research over four years took us around the world to museums, libraries, other cultural institutions and private collections. We scoured more than 100 international archives including the Jerome Robbins Dance Division at the New York Public Library, the Musée Rodin Paris, the Maryhill Museum in Washington State and the Cleveland Museum of Art – each a valuable source of material that enriched our story.
As of December 16th, this project has raised $37,000 of their $25,000 goal. This project has 4 days left to raise as much as it can. For a pledge of $25, you will get a link to the film. For a pledge of $50, you will get recipes and link to the film. To learn more and to pledge money, go to: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/betweentheriversprod/loie-fuller-obsessed-with-light?
