Gabrielle Bloch (17 February 1870[1][better source needed] – 14 July 1961), known professionally as Gab Sorère, was a French art promoter, set designer, mechanical innovator, filmmaker and choreographer of the Belle Époque. Collaborating with her partner, Loïe Fuller, to explore illusion through luminescence, she produced films and choreographies which moved performance from dancers being lighted to the abstract vision of lights dancing. When Fuller died, Sorère inherited the dance troupe and laboratory of her partner and strove to keep her legacy as a visual effects artist alive. She continued to produce innovative productions utilizing fluorescence and light into the 1950s.
Gab Sorère | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Bloch, circa 1913 | |
| Born | Gabrielle Bloch 17 February 1870 |
| Died | 14 July 1961 (aged 91) Paris, France |
| Other names | Gaby Bloch Gaby Sorère |
| Occupation(s) | Choreographer, visual effects artist and art promoter |
| Years active | 1898–1950s |
| Partner(s) | Loie Fuller (1898–1928; her death) Damia (1928–1961) |
Early life
editGabrielle Bloch was born in Toul, Lorraine, France on February 17, 1870, and was the privileged daughter of a French banker, Julien Bloch (1843–1930).[2] Her mother, Laura (1847–1925), wrote the book Au loin, impressions hindoues, which was published in 1898.[3][4] She studied at home, reading Schopenhauer by the age of nine and by sixteen, she was studying the literature of ancient India.[4] This may have been the trip recorded by her mother in the travelogue, which recounted visits to Ceylon, the Himalayas and northern India.[3] Bloch first saw Loïe Fuller perform at her Paris debut in 1892, when her mother took her to the performance.[5] She was familiar with the women in Natalie Barney and Gertrude Stein's salons, which included Romaine Brooks, Eileen Gray and Marie-Louise Damien, a singer better known as Damia, but like Gray, tended to be serious[6][7] and had no patience with people who annoyed her.[8]
Career
editBy 1898, Sorère was living with Fuller, stirring controversy, for being openly lesbian; Fuller being eight years older than Bloch; and the latter's penchant for routinely dressing as a man.[9] During World War I, Bloch established a relief service to transport clothing and food supplies to Belgium and northern France.[10] She was instrumental in urging Fuller to open a dance school to prevent her rival Isadora Duncan from gaining the upper hand with students.[11] Bloch took the professional name of Gab Sorère around 1920,[9] and collaborated with Fuller, while working as a promoter of other artists.[12][13] Fuller was the performer of the duo and Sorère worked as a stage designer and invented mechanical props, branching into filmmaking.[13] The two women would make three films together, Le Lys de la vie (The Lily of Life, 1921), Visions des rêves (Visions of dreams, 1924) and Les Incertitudes de Coppélius (Uncertainties of Coppelius, 1927).[14] Le Lys de la vie was a silent film, based upon a story written by Queen Marie of Romania, a close friend of the couple[15] and is the only one of the films which survived.[14]
The only surviving reel of her work is a segment from Le Lys de la Vie, and features a show within a show with classically-costumed figures dancing by the sea, a banquet, royal intrigue, and romance with René Clair featured as a prince on horseback.[16][17][18][19][20]
When she was not collaborating with Fuller, Sorère ran the furniture gallery and interior decorating salon owned by Eileen Gray. The gallery, known as Jean Désert, was open from 1922 to 1930.[2] During this time, in 1926, Sorère and Fuller accompanied Queen Marie on a tour of the United States.[21] The following year, Fuller became ill during the filming of Les Incertitudes de Coppélius and production was broken off while Sorère nursed her. The film was based upon E. T. A. Hoffmann's story, The Sandman and featured the dancers of Fuller's troupe. When she became ill with pneumonia, the dancers were sent on tour to Cairo and Sorère, who was directing the film, made plans for its completion after their return. Fuller died in 1928 and Sorère inherited both the business and the laboratory where the two women conducted experiments with lighting and paint.[22] She was protective of Fuller's legacy and was known to sue dancers who misrepresented themselves as having affiliations with Fuller or her dance troupe.[23]
After Fuller's death, Sorère became the partner of Damia[2] and continued to experiment with phosphorescent salts to achieve theatrical lighting effects.[24] The 1934 film La Féerie des Ballets fantastiques de Loïe Fuller, produced by George R. Busby, featured choreography by Sorère, who had reconstructed some of Fuller's dances.[25] Though the storyline was weak, the film was memorable for the techniques employed to alter dimension and perspective by using rapid elongation and foreshortening.[26] Four years later, in 1938, Sorère produced Ballets et Lumières with the Mazda company as a tribute to Fuller, using blacklight and fluorescent paint. Taking well-known Fuller dances, like the Fire Dance and including new choreography of her own, Sorère was able to make the dancers disappear, leaving the audience with only a vision of the movement of light. Though the application of this technology was Sorère's invention, as Fuller had died before exploring blacklight,[27] critical acclaim for the production and innovation of moving dancers from performing in the light to an abstract performance of lights dancing, was given to Fuller.[26] Sorère continued producing choreographies through the 1950s.[28]
References
editCitations
edit- ^ "Gab Sorère". geni.com. 29 November 1877.
- ^ a b c Corinne 2012, p. 434.
- ^ a b Lapeyre 2010.
- ^ a b Fuller 1913, p. 255.
- ^ Fuller 1913, p. 256.
- ^ Corinne 2012, p. 435.
- ^ Fuller 1913, p. 250.
- ^ Fuller 1913, p. 252.
- ^ a b Coleman 2007, p. 173.
- ^ The Sebastopol Times 1917, p. 8.
- ^ Garelick 2009, p. 175.
- ^ Townsend 2017, p. 151.
- ^ a b Ruprecht 2008, p. 232.
- ^ a b Garelick 2009, p. 56.
- ^ Garelick 2009, pp. 57–58.
- ^ ""La Loïe" as Pre-Cinematic Performance – Descriptive Continuity of Movement – Senses of Cinema". 26 July 2004.
- ^ "True Republican 8 January 1921 — Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections".
- ^ Coleman, Bud (2002). "The Electric Fairy: The Woman Behind the Apparition of Loie Fuller". In Marra, Kim; Schanke, Robert (eds.). Staging Desire: Queer Readings of American Theater History. University of Michigan Press. pp. 311–337. ISBN 978-0-472-90416-7.
- ^ Christout, Marie-Françoise; Palfy, Barbara (1996). "The Dancing Muse of the Belle Époque". Dance Chronicle. 19 (2): 213–216. doi:10.1080/01472529608569242. JSTOR 1567904.
- ^ Camille Saint-Saëns and La Loïe Fuller at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition
- ^ The Daily News 1926, p. 105.
- ^ The Evening News 1928, p. 4.
- ^ The Manchester Guardian 1929, p. 12.
- ^ Garelick 2009, p. 40.
- ^ de la Croix 2012, p. 54.
- ^ a b Albright 2016, p. 722.
- ^ Albright 2016, p. 721.
- ^ Loewel 2012.
Bibliography
edit- Albright, Ann Cooper (2016). "Resurrecting the Future: Body, Image, and Technology in the Work of Loïe Fuller". In Rosenberg, Douglas (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. pp. 715–730. ISBN 978-0-19-998160-1.
- Coleman, Bud (2007). "Fuller, Loie". In Harbin, Billy J.; Marra, Kim; Schanke, Robert A. (eds.). The Gay & Lesbian Theatrical Legacy: A Biographical Dictionary of Major Figures in American Stage History in the Pre-Stonewall Era. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. pp. 171–175. ISBN 978-0-472-06858-6.
- Corinne, Tee A. (2012). "Gray, Eileen (1878-1976)". In Summers, Claude (ed.). The Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts. San Francisco, California: Cleis Press Inc. pp. 433–435. ISBN 978-1-57344-874-1.
- de la Croix, St. Sukie (2012). Chicago Whispers: A History of LGBT Chicago before Stonewall. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 978-0-299-28693-4.
- Fuller, Loïe (1913). Fifteen Years of a Dancer's Life: With some account of her distinguished friends. London, England: Herbert Jenkins Limited. OCLC 5128465.
- Garelick, Rhonda K. (2009) [2007]. Electric Salome: Loie Fuller's Performance of Modernism. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-1-4008-3277-4. Project MUSE book 49051.
- Lapeyre, Françoise (2010). "Anna Bloch". Le Roman des voyageuses. Neubrandenburg, Germany. Archived from the original on 17 June 2018. Retrieved 17 June 2018.
- Loewel, Vanessa (15 January 2012). "Eine Wegbereiterin des modernen Tanzes" [A pioneer of modern dance] (in German). Cologne, Germany: Deutschlandradio. Archived from the original on 17 June 2018. Retrieved 17 June 2018.
- Ruprecht, Lucia (June 2008). "Review" (PDF). H-France Review. 8. Charleston, Illinois: Society for French Historical Studies: 322–325. ISSN 1553-9172. Archived from the original (PDF) on 3 July 2010. Retrieved 17 June 2018.
- Townsend, Julie (2017). The Choreography of Modernism in France: La Danseuse 1830-1930. Abingdon-on-Thames, England: Modern Humanities Research Association; Routledge. ISBN 978-1-351-19421-1.
- "Imprisoned Dancer Released". London, England: The Manchester Guardian. 19 September 1929. p. 12. Retrieved 17 June 2018 – via Newspapers.com.
- "Loie Fuller Sails; Denies Rift Talk". New York, New York: The Daily News. 20 November 1926. p. 105. Retrieved 17 June 2018 – via Newspapers.com.
- "Loie Fuller's Work in Life Will Be Carried on by Intimate Friend". Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania: The Evening News. 28 January 1928. p. 4. Retrieved 17 June 2018 – via Newspapers.com.
- "Waynflete Goes to France with Loie Fuller". Sebastopol, California: The Sebastopol Times. 26 October 1917. p. 8. Retrieved 17 June 2018 – via Newspapers.com.
