Angels are associated with the Christmas iconography, but, if you're looking for inspirations relating to these celestial beings that go beyond the usual iconography of angels with feathered wings, check out the image featured in this post of dancer and choreographer Loïe Fuller.
As you may remember from previous posts, Fuller was a pioneer of theatrical lighting techniques and held patents for chemical compounds to create colour gel and use chemical salts for luminescent lighting and garments.
The dancer was known for her iconic "Serpentine Dance" in which she would create different shapes - from flowers to butterflies and flames - by moving in the darkness her fantastically coloured phosphorescent swaths of silk attached to a pair of hand-held wands.
Maybe taken around 1901, the first image featured in this post (from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.) portrays Fuller in an elongated white flowing gown, behind her head and shoulders, a representation of the moon forms an oversized halo.
Her head is indeed the only visible part of her body, completely hidden behind the almost tentacular gown that, flowing fluidly, extends from her body reaching out and spreading around her like tentacles.
In the second image in this post, instead, we can see her forming angel wings thanks to the hand-held wands hidden in her costume.
In more recent years this trick was used by fashion and costume designers to create capes that revealed an image or a slogan: Iris van Herpen's design for Jordan Roth at the 2019 Met Gala looked like a closed theatre curtain.
When Roth raised his arms, though, laser-cut "glitch-bubbles" stretched open into a large spheroid volume of three and a half meters wide and revealed a new layer in between these bubbles, a 360° theatre combining photos of Paris's Palais Garnier, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and the Royal Opera in Stockholm.
"The look explores the relationship between the fine line of performance and illusion and transforms Jordan into a performance himself," van Herpen explains about it on her site.
Van Herpen's design for Roth uses a powerful image, hidden in the folds of the cape, but Fuller's design can be employed also for other applications.
In the 2022 production by Jamie Fletcher of "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" - from John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask's 1998 eponymous stage musical, that was turned into a film in 2001 by John Cameron Mitchell - Divina De Campo's wears a stars-and-stripes cape that opens up to reveal the slogan "Gender is a construct".
A similar expedient was also featured in Mitchell's film with Hedwig opening up an extravagant cape à la Loïe Fuller with the message "Yankee Go Home... With Me!" dedicated to Sergeant Luther Robinson, an American soldier.
Consider the-message-hiding-in-a-Loïe-Fuller-cape trick as a striking concept for making a grand entrance at a New Year's Eve celebration or as a clever means to challenge the conventional angelic look, especially if you're involved in a subversive interpretation of a live nativity scene.
Messages to add? Oh, well, anything you fancy, from social issues and politics to art, cultural taboos, entertainment and technology. Just make it striking and annoying enough to challenge the norm, disrupt the status quo, stir the conversation, spark debate and dance into a year of radical transformation.
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.