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DAY IN THE LIFE OF DANCE: Jody Sperling Brings La Loie to The Paul Taylor Season
By Susannna Sloat
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Published on November 1, 2024
Jody Sperling; Photo: Gregory Cary
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In 2014 Paul Taylor announced that he would transform his company’s New York seasons to showcase not only his own dances, but also those of other choreographers, current and past. In 2018 the company went back to the beginnings of modern dance with pieces by Isadora Duncan, interpreted by Sara Mearns. Michael Novak, who Taylor chose that year to be the succeding artistic director, is also interested in dance history. In 2020 he invited Jody Sperling, who makes dances in Loie Fuller’s style, to make a dance for the Taylor Company.
“Michael had this idea of Fuller being instrumental in the founding trajectory of modern dance, ” Sperling said. Novak had seen the 2016 movie La Danseuse, a drama about Fuller (1862-1928), for which Sperling, known as the foremost expert in Fuller’s style, was the creative consultant and choreographer. Fuller, very early on, used spectacular and subtle effects of electric light to enhance the play of motion and fabric in her visionary solo dances, suggesting growing flowers, flames, and whirlwinds.
For the movie’s dance sequences Sperling worked with the actress depicting Fuller, SoKo, for six weeks for many hours each day. When Sperling mounted Fuller style dances on the Taylor company this summer, she had a group of superb modern dancers, adept at learning a large and diverse repertoire quickly. Things went a lot faster.
Jody Sperling Dancing a La Loie at the World Choreography Awards
Novak was interested in an adaptation of the choreography from La Danseuse using the movie’s music of Max Richter’s recomposition of Vivaldi’s "The Four Seasons." For the movie, the dance pieces were short. For Taylor, Sperling has expanded them into a new work of seven minutes, called Vive La Loïe! "The dance is probably the most intense that I’ve ever choreographed in the biggest costume that I’ve ever done with the most fabulous lights.” She also mounted her 2005 solo Clair de Lune to Debussy’s piano piece for the company.
Sperling said it took only about ten rehearsals to get the pieces in shape. To begin, she had all eight women in the company don Fuller-style costumes with sticks to extend the fabric and try Fuller-style movement. Watching the dancers, she selected two women, Jessica Ferretti and Emmy Wildermuth, who had a particular feeling for the style and were tall enough for the extremely voluminous costume.
Ferretti, who will be performing Vive La Loïe!, seemed especially attuned to the style. “From the get go, there was something about the way that Jessica understood the articulation of the costume that I knew that she would be able to handle this new piece. It’s extremely difficult choreography.”
Emmy Wildermuth also had a special feeling for the Fuller idiom. Sperling mounted Clair de Lune on her. It’s a simpler dance and Sperling thinks of it as “quintessentially Loie, the serene, elemental Loie with music so aligned with Fuller’s aesthetic of luminosity and impressionism. You have to have incredible subtlety and power and radiate majesty and beauty and I see it in Emmy.” The two dancers are covers for each other, so they learned both dances.
Loie Fuller was not only a pioneer at using electric light to bring her dances to fruition, she used it in ways both subtle and spectacular. Sperling said, “Fuller had this idea of what she called color harmony. Let’s say the melody is blue. Then the other colors come in like a chord. You might have a little violet or teal or gold that underscores this melodic line of blue.” Fuller would stand on a box with a glass cover with the lights projected from below, using such mixtures to produce complex color effects.
For Vive La Loïe! , Sperling said, “This is an homage to Loie and I wanted to really play up that kind of phantasmagoria of color, which is part of her legacy. We choreographed the lights very specifically to the music to follow the dancer’s emotional trajectory.” She thought of “this enormous silk costume as being a kind of canvas for the color that your’re painting onto it.” To enable lighting from below, Sperling and her longtime lighting designer David Ferri used a box--five feet wide, deep, and high--with a plexiglass cover.
About the lighting rehearsal, Ferretti said, “It felt extremely disorienting. I have this fabric and the light shining from all different directions...I lost the front like five times.”
There are no films of Fuller dancing, though there are hundreds of photographs and artworks that depict her. Though Fuller wore shoes, Sperling kept the dancers barefoot, “I always like to work barefoot because I feel like it continues the legacy of modern dance.” A piece of tape in the center of the box is a marker the dancers can feel and orient themselves with. Her dances are a contemporary homage to Fuller, which allows Sperling to incorporate her very eclectic modern, postmodern dance and somatics training into work that captures Fuller’s artistry and magic.
When Ferretti first donned the Fuller-style apparatus she thought, “I take up eight more feet of space than I’m used to. It’s really challenging, logistically. The fabric wraps around itself and you have to unwrap it. It’s a fun challenge to tackle.”
Now she said, “It feels amazing when you get to move without any fear though I’m up on a five foot box.” Still, “It’s a lot of problem solving in the moment., but I feel like my Taylor background, moving from the back, really getting into my legs, and having that full range of motion is helping me master this new style. Now I can add a lot more emotion and more storytelling. I can now embody the character.”
Ferretti finds Clair de Lune which she is understudying, beautiful, too, like spinning into “a tornado effect,” and then becoming calm and collected, and walking forward where the fabric comes up and looks like angel wings. “I don’t feel human in that piece, whereas in Vive La Loïe! I feel like a person.”
Wildermuth joined the Taylor company in June. Trying on the fabric apparatus, Wildermuth said, “was a little intimidating, but I felt so excited to be experiencing this new style of movement. It gave me this entirely new understanding of the space and how to manipulate it.“
As a newcomer she says, “I’m so incredibly grateful for the opportunity to be able to perform a solo my first season. I’m so honored to be learning the solo alongside Jessica Ferretti. I really look up to her.”
The music of Clair de Lune has long been a meditative part of her pre-show ritual where she visualizes her body filling with light. It helps her get centered. Now dancing to it, she says, “the movement is so beautiful. It feels like I am this ethereal being floating in space and commanding all of this energy around me.”
As Jody Sperling hoped, these two Taylor dancers have taken her Loie Fuller inspired, yet contemporary dances inside of themselves to make something very special, old yet new. It will be inspiring to see them as part of the upcoming Paul Taylor season.
