Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)
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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:57:56am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Sound Technologies of the fin de siècle Session Chair: Wiebke Thormahlen | |
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Incandescent: Women as Light on the late 19th-Century Stage Goldsmiths, University of London (UK) With the introduction of incandescent electric lighting in the 1880s, women began to play brazenly with newly direct forms of stage illumination. Dancers and singers performed with battery-powered lights attached to their bodies and hair. And from the 1890s, Loïe Fuller and her many imitators experimented with bold projections of colored light against silk costumes, most famously in their Fire Dances. The result was an audiovisual phenomenon in which women, in a reversal of prior practice, were directors of light. The illuminated woman had come to bear unsavory connotations in the late 19th century. Tropes included the prostitute alone under a streetlight, or the music hall coryphée, lit from below by hellish gas footlights. Performers in flammable tulle, meanwhile, had suffered horrific accidents from catching on stage lamps. Electric incandescence, however, promised safety and was often personified as a fairy-like, feminine figure. This paper proposes that the light dances of Fuller and others challenged and toyed dramatically with assumptions about women as vulnerable objects of illumination, and about electricity as magic. In their simulations of fire, these women rendered themselves both manipulator and victim, conjurer and flame. While ample research has been carried out on Fuller, few have examined the sonic dimensions of these Fire Dances, and even fewer the wider context of the light-based dances that preceded and followed her. Taking Britain as a case study, I uncover new details about electric light performances of the late 19th century, including the scenarios in which they appeared and the music used. In so doing, I reveal a moment in which audiences revelled in aestheticized, musicalized flame – made possible by artificial light – as a demonstration of human control over nature. | |