Claire Lefèvre

The story behind the title is actually quite funny. Sophie Utikal, who designed the stage, spotted a truck with the phrase “Love is a fire that cannot be extinguished” on the window. But the “V” in “love” looked like an “I,” so it read as “Loïe.” That mix-up between “Loïe” and “love” inspired the title. I’ve even seen the same truck twice in Vienna, and people sometimes send me photos of it – it’s like this odd coincidence that keeps circling back.

For me, the piece is a kind of love story – romantic but complicated. I first learned about her in dance history class, which was one of my main subjects back in school. I remember being intrigued by her because she didn’t fit neatly into categories. She was a dancer, but also a kind of performance artist. What fascinated me was how her work came from the body, but wasn’t about the body – the body activated the space, yet the space itself became the focus.

That idea of decentering the performer has always interested me. In my own work, I often create installation-like settings where the audience experiences something physically, but what I do with my body isn’t the main point. The same goes for this piece – people asked if I’d recreate Loïe’s dances or wear her costumes, but actually, Sophie Utikal’s textiles and Maanila Santos De Moraes’ projections take center stage, and I’m there to weave stories through them.

I rediscovered Loïe years later through an article titled “Loïe Fuller: Lesbian, Electric Fairy of the Belle Époque”. It made me realize how little queer femme representation there was in dance history – especially compared to gay men. Of course, once I started researching more deeply, I realized how complex her legacy is – how much modern dance and modernism are intertwined with cultural appropriation and colonial histories. In school, dance history was often taught in isolation, as if it existed apart from everything else happening in the world. This project has been about unpacking all those connections.

Claire Lefèvre

The dramaturgy of the piece is actually quite romantic — I approached it like a lesbian drama love story, with a honeymoon phase, a breakup, and an aftermath. But it’s not about romanticizing Loïe Fuller herself. It was more like a crash course in “killing your darlings” — learning to let go of admiration without turning her into a villain either.

For me, it’s about moving beyond binaries. Fuller wasn’t the root cause of these issues but a symptom of larger systems of exclusion and appropriation that shaped modern dance. Working with dramaturg Sunanda Mesquita, helped me see that this history isn’t something outside of me — it’s already in my body, in the techniques I learned, in the spaces we perform in, all built on colonial legacies.

By situating Loïe in that context, I could also locate myself within it — not to excuse or condemn her, but to recognize our shared entanglement.

Claire Lefèvre

These are huge questions, and I didn’t work through them alone. Collaborating with people like Sunanda Mesquita, Elizabeth Ward, Mzamo Nondlwana and Eike Wittrock really shaped how I approached Fuller and dance historiography. Each of them brought different perspectives on body memory, resistance, and archival work, which helped me complicate the story.

At first, I focused on exposing the violence and exclusions in dance history, but Sunanda reminded me that this can unintentionally reproduce a binary — where marginalized dancers appear only as victims. They encouraged me to also look for stories of resistance, for those who created, spoke up, and shaped their own spaces.

Of course, this requires a different way of looking at the archive imagining who else was there, what else was happening at the same time – through what Saidiya Hartman calls critical fabulation for example or noticing the “historical best friends” and other close collaborators. For instance, while Fuller was performing in mainstream vaudeville, a whole Black vaudeville scene was thriving alongside it. She also worked for decades together with her partner Gab Sorère who is rarely mentioned in dance history. These overlaps and contradictions make history messy, but also alive.

So re-examining Fuller ultimately changed how I see dance historiography: not as a clean, linear story of progress, but as a layered, complex field full of simultaneous narratives – violence, yes, but also resistance.

Claire Lefèvre

I think telling dance history differently means asking who gets remembered, who carries the burden of loss, and who has the privilege of forgetting. For white people like myself, it also means recognizing that we’re part of this history, not outside of it. It’s not about guilt, but about staying engaged – tracing how colonialism and privilege have shaped the very structures we work within.

From a queer perspective, it’s equally complex. Fuller’s queerness was erased so she could remain in the canon, while many BIPOC dancers were never included at all. Dance history is full of queer bodies, yet queerness itself has often been made invisible. And being queer doesn’t automatically mean being a victim – there are queer villains too.

Revisiting Fuller made me realize how queerness and complicity can coexist. Her queerness had to be erased for her to be celebrated, yet she also reproduced orientalist and appropriative tropes. Dance history is basically queer history, yet also a deeply whitewashed one – an open closet with a lot of skeletons in it.

This is where identity politics becomes complex– it’s about seeing how oppressive structures are interconnected, not separate. Being queer doesn’t automatically mean sharing the same politics; especially when we project queerness retrospectively across centuries. It’s never that simple.

Claire Lefèvre

Stand-up is what I’ve practiced most recently, so it naturally found its way into the piece. The dancing parts in the piece are rather short – more like a way to test what remains in my body archive after years of training – while the text and humor carry much of the rhythm and structure.

Comedy helps me laugh at myself and at my first naïve approach to the archive. It’s also deeply technical – about rhythm, timing, composition – so it connects to choreography. I think I love stand up, because it's so much about composition. The rhythm of stand-up actually also helps me remember long texts; it’s almost like choreographing with language.

Humor also creates access. Some jokes are niche – dance history jokes, queer jokes – and I can immediately tell who’s in the room by who laughs. Those small moments of recognition, the “I see you, you see me,” feel intimate and affirming. With this piece, I also realized how little people know about dance history. While many can name a few composers when asked about music history, asking someone to name three choreographers often leaves them stumped.

Because the material is often heavy, humor offers a way to breathe. It doesn’t erase the darkness of history, but makes space for different audiences to engage — whether they know dance history or not. It’s about making the work accessible without diluting its complexity, and holding both the laughter and the weight of the stories at once.

Claire Lefèvre

I have this collage in my office, which I call “the Salomes.” It includes a few central figures I bring into the piece, but there are countless others – queer or BIPOC dancers who didn’t make it into the canon because they couldn’t erase their queerness or conform to the expectations that allowed someone like Loïe Fuller to succeed.

Take Aida Walker, for example. She was a vaudeville dancer who noticed the Salome trend – white women performing an Orientalist trope – and re-appropriated it from her own perspective as a Black dancer. She emphasized technical skill over sexuality, became famous on Broadway, and inscribed herself into the canon on her own terms. Kawakami Sadayakko, invited by Fuller to join her on stage, was already an internationally celebrated performer in Japan. In the West, she had to navigate stereotypes to satisfy audiences, while in Japan she was known as an innovative theatrical trailblazer. Maud Allan, a scandalous lesbian Salome, who was accused of being in “the cult of the clitoris”, was largely erased from dance history because her version was considered too slutty. Or take for instance Henry Cyril Paget who who was this super faggot aristocrat who performed in the serpentine dance in a kind of Loïe Fuller drag.

These examples show how dancers navigated, re-appropriated, or resisted dominant trends.

Fuller herself functioned as a projection surface: queers could project queerness onto her, audiences could project fantasies, imperial powers could project empire. Much of her success came from this openness. Later, when I read academic articles, I noticed how scholars often projected their own narratives onto her — focusing separately on her queerness, whiteness, or technological innovations, rarely considering their interconnections. In the piece, I try to do the opposite: to layer these aspects, giving Fuller back her voice, while acknowledging that this is speculative, incomplete, and ongoing.

This process also became about approaching the archive with suspicion. Fuller was a notorious liar, and archives in general are incomplete and unreliable. You can’t assume someone is straight just because they married; appearances are only one layer. In the piece, the stage, costumes, and projections work as layers — a “layer cake“ — through which audiences see a fuller, more complex picture of history. It’s never finished; there’s always more to add.

When teaching queer dance history with Eike Wittrock at ImPulsTanz this year, we emphasized the ongoing, living nature of this archive. Participants shared memories of queer dance, highlighting that history is continuously constructed. It’s not about proving queerness – it’s about allowing for its possibility to be in the room with us. Queer history often exists in what is not written: Fuller never married, never had children, left traces in coded or opaque ways. Recognizing these traces – friendships, subversions of gender, innovations in performance – is as important as documented facts. Questioning normative markers like marriage or career timelines allows us to expand what counts as historical evidence. Naming queerness, even speculatively, is a way to honor those erased from the canonical narrative and to make the archive richer, more layered, and more inclusive.