This study introduces modernist dancer, inventor, filmmaker and international celebrity Loie Fuller: friend to high-culture mavens and avant-gardists alike; inspiration to Mallarmé, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rodin, Bernhardt and Duncan; inventor of devices for the creation and lighting of stage movement; choreographer of 128 dances; and, by her death in 1925, a ‘wildly famous woman’ (p. 8). Yet, especially for those in the wider field of theatre history, Fuller has somewhat slipped from memory. Garelick blames this on ‘the uncategorizable nature of her art itself’ (p. 8). But Fuller also does not ‘fit’ in other ways. Fuller was an out lesbian while managing to avoid homophobic violence. Her dances produced a remarkably performative body projected onto billows of silk and intricate choreographies of secondary dancers to become magnificent flowers and sinuous, labial curves. And they engaged key questions of aesthetic modernity such as ‘the dialogue between dance and dramatic theater, the changing role of psychological character in modernism, politics and ethnic identity, and sexuality’ (p. 9).

That list of issues reflects both Fuller's aesthetic and Garelick's voracious method. I have mixed feelings about the latter, which is never explicitly justified. It enables a full consideration of Fuller's ‘critical relationships’ with modernity (p. 16), including the colonialist spectacle of the 1900 World's Fair, Romantic ballet, the modernized and modernist body and twentieth-century European drama, where she played the roles of ‘inspiring proponent of mechanics’ (p. 200), colour and lighting designer, and pioneer of identity exploration. But Garelick's hyperactive new historical method produces a sort of ‘complexity fatigue.’ She covers so many topics so dexterously that I am surprised not to find the Chinese Cultural Revolution and lawn fertilizer in the index. Indeed, Fuller comes to appear in this book rather as she did to her contemporaries – as, in Garelick's words, ‘a projection screen’ (p. 15) on which to cast obsessions. But of course Fuller's work demands that its scholars cover a lot of ground, and I was delighted to learn so much from Garelick's study about a widely ignored pioneer of avant-garde and modernist theatre performance and dance.