Partner Loie Fuller,
Marie-Louise Damien
Queer Places:
217 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, 75008 Paris, France
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Gabrielle
Bloch (February 17, 1870[1]
– July 14, 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,
Loie 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.
Gabrielle Bloch was born in Toul, Lorraine, France on February 17, 1870,
and was the privileged daughter of a French banker, Julien Bloch.
Her mother, Laura, wrote the book Au loin, impressions hindoues, which
was published in 1898.
She studied at home, reading Schopenhauer by the age of nine and by sixteen,
she was studying the literature of ancient India.
This may have been the trip recorded by her mother in the travelogue, which
recounted visits to Ceylon, the Himalayas and northern India.
Bloch first saw Loïe Fuller perform at her Paris debut in 1892, when her
mother took her to the performance.
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
and had no patience with people who annoyed her.
By 1898, the two women were living together and the relationship caused
controversy, not only because they were openly lesbian, but because Fuller was
eight years older than Bloch, who routinely dressed as a man.
During World War I, Bloch established a relief service to transport clothing
and food supplies to Belgium and northern France.
She was instrumental in urging Fuller to open a dance school to prevent her
rival Isadora Duncan
from gaining the upper hand with students.
Bloch took the professional name of Gab Sorère around 1920,
and collaborated with Fuller, while working as a promoter of other artists.
Fuller was the performer of the duo and Sorère worked as a stage designer and
invented mechanical props, branching into filmmaking.
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).
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
and is the only one of the films which survived.
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.
During this time, in 1926, Sorère and Fuller accompanied Queen Marie on a tour
of the United States.
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.
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, if they did not.
After Fuller's death, Sorère became the partner of
Marie-Louise Damien
and continued to experiment with
phosphorescent salts to achieve theatrical
lighting effects.
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.
Though the storyline was weak, the film was memorable for the techniques
employed to alter dimension and perspective by using rapid elongation and
foreshortening.
Four years later, in 1938, Sorère produced Ballets et Limières 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,
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.
Sorère continued producing choreographies through the 1950s.
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- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_Sor%C3%A8re