"I would rather go to Europe than to heaven" said the American painter William Merritt Chase. Isadora Duncan, the enigmatic American dancer agreed. "America is the land where they drink lemonade, and how can one dance on lemonade?" Loïe Fuller, the American pioneer of modern dance was to say, "I was born in America but made in France."

For American writers, artists and dancers, Europe may have seemed livelier than heaven and more intoxicating than lemonade, as Europe was writhing and breathing with culture.

Isadora Duncan

It was at the turn of a century that consolidated (at least in Europe and North America) the separation of private and public spheres. To put one's body on display as a spectacle and still claim subjectivity onstage, was a difficult and complex balancing act, most certainly for a female performer. So it was to claim authority of the signature for a women writer. Particularly if the writer had been known as a performer.

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette

Resisting society's domination on women, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Loïe Fuller and Isadora Duncan found unique ways to allure their specific social and economic circumstances . They purposely staged their bodies, producing a written discourse that articulated the artistic vision that inspired their work. Whether it was dance, pantomime, or theatre, these women all started with a corporeal practice, producing a potency that focused on the breathing techniques, the strenuous use of the torso, and the articulation of gestural behaviour that stimulated space in new and important ways. They would then express the cultural potency of that physical work in manifestos that described their purpose in life. Their writings tell of their visionary thoughts and photography glimpses at the stylistic staging of their work.

All three women lived emancipated lives in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century. While they shared a passion for art as an ethical, life-affirming force, these women developed radically different approaches to the stage.

For several years Colette performed in amateur theatricals held in private salons and gardens around Paris.

Loïe Fuller was at her peak at the turn of the century. As well as choreographing for her own troupe of dancers she served as an impresario for two Japanese theatre companies, and briefly for Isadora Duncan.

Isadora Duncan in turn shunned the music-hall stage to dance exclusively in the concert halls, opera houses, and salons of upper-class European society, launching a meritorious career.

Despite Duncan's dis-ingenuity of her rhetorical strategies linking nature to ancient Greece, her heroic manifestos justified both her revealing costume and, to a degree, her radical lifestyle, which included a celebration of free love and motherhood out of wedlock. To quote Colette " As soon as she dances, she dances with her whole being, from her loose hair to her naked and hard ankles. She dances and never mimes."

When Collette took to the stage in her thirties after an early apprenticeship as a ghostwriter for her husband, she was described by her public as "woman of letters who has turned out badly" and ...iIn 1906, acting professionally was virtually synonymous with prostitution - a transgression of another magnitude, and for a middle-class woman - the class treason was almost worse than the imputed moral turpitude".

In January 1907, Loïe Fuller's La tragédie de Salomé was still in its formative stage. Colette donned a transparent veil and a provocative Middle-Eastern looking outfit (complete with breastplates and snake bracelets) to make a serious spectacle of herself by performing a passionately long and intimate kiss with another woman. The venue was the infamous Moulin Rouge in Paris. The occasion was the premier of Rêve de'Egypte, an Orientatalist variation of the Pygmalion theme in which an archaeologist unwraps an ancient mummy to discover a beautiful woman, whom he kisses back to life.

The short pantomime was written but Madame la Marquise de Mornay, otherwise known as Missy, Colette's lover for most of her brief seminal career in music-halls. Missy, spelled backwards "Yssim" which was displayed on publicity posters, also played the role of the archaeologist. The packed house included Missy's ex-husband, the Marquis de Belboeuf, as well as Colette's estranged husband, Henri Bauthier-Villars (known professionally as Willy). Having been revived by the somewhat outrageous kissing scene, Colette's character proceeded to dance an Orientalist divertissement while the audience heckled and booed, throwing binoculars, hats and the occasional boot at the stage. The police were recruited to censor the show, and the title was altered to Songe d'Orient. Colette's mime instructor, George Wague, replaced Missy onstage, but the show only survived another two nights. Nonetheless Colette's fledgling music-hall career was launched by this succés de scandale.

Referred to as the "Scandal of the Moulin Rouge," this legendary incident is usually interpreted as either a supremely public liberatory gesture, or Colette's final throwing off of the patriarchal yoke with which Willy kept her creativity subdued. Or, conversely, as a rather rash moment within her transitional passage (through lesbianism and across the music-hall stage) that carried her from neophyte scribe to mature writer.

These three women, despite their very different aesthetics, are connected by two crucial elements. They all experienced their physical bodies as agents of self-expression in performance and were driven to record their ideas that were to double as aesthetic and social manifestos.

Two Americans who were accredited for nourishing Art Nouveau, were Louis Comfort Tiffany, a glassmaker renowned for his iridescent colours, and Loïe Fuller, a dancer whose works glowed and shimmered with a magic all her own. Fuller was inspirational and artists were mesmerized by her. Such major poets as Stéphane Mallarmé and William Butler Yeats wrote about her.

Loïe Fuller by Henri Toulouse Lautrec

In 1892 she created a sensation at the Folies Bergère. The Parisians adored her and called her "La Loïe." Fuller, in turn, loved Paris and made it her home.

Her dances owed much to evolving stage effects. In her solos, Fuller would stand wrapped in a glowing mass of drapery. She would skillfully manipulate, often with the aid of concealed sticks, esparterie and wires, so that as it rose and fell, cascading like a waterfall about her, while rays of light streamed down upon the fabric. Fuller was no great beauty but on stage she was hypnotic.

She could bewitch an audience with the suspension and movement of fabric. She would have her silks behave like a gymnast, following the spiraling loops. She was always intrigued by the process of seeing her silks rise and fall, again and again, each time with a different format.

Fuller's works can be considered early examples of abstraction. She rarely portrayed specific characters, and although her dances may have derived from strong feelings, they were not confessional outpourings. Despite the frequent comparisons of her dances with fire, flowers, and waves, her works were not studies in physics or botany. Fuller simply used her highly developed imaginary skills to create designs in space.

Through artistry, Fuller may have transcended her own personal limitations as a dancer. "And yet they say she did not dance!" exclaimed the American Dancer in its obituary for Fuller in 1928. Opponents of modern dance have frequently accused modern dancers of not being able to dance. Fuller's success is a reminder that what matters onstage is not necessarily how complicated the sequence is or how difficult the execution. What the liberated Fuller had learnt was the art of charm and seduction.