Bombyx Mori

Silk caterpillar

Loïe Fuller (1862-1928) was a performance artist before the term was even invented: innovative and impossible to categorise. She made her name with solos in which she turned in circles, draping metres of silk fabric around her body. She fits within the art nouveau movement, but was equally at home dancing at the Folies Bergère. By being the first person to make use of electric light and to position movement outside the body, she was an innovative force in both the dance and theatre worlds. She collaborated with figures such as Auguste Rodin and the Lumière brothers.

In this piece for three dancers, Ola Maciejewska draws her inspiration from Fuller’s Serpentine Dance. She explores the relationship in the arts between human beings and physical matter by creating movement in large pieces of fabric. She plays with the confluence of bodies and objects and the battle that these wage. Bombyx Mori alludes to the silk caterpillar, which has become entirely dependent on human beings for survival. Here, the natural body and the artificial process are inextricably linked: a poignant metaphor for this sculptural interpretation of one of the pioneers of modern dance and performance art.