Danse Serpentine - Loie Fuller

She was the first to use electricity to produce light-effects on stage, the book says.  To my very untrained eye, she's not much of a dancer, is she? Was it all just about the novelty of colored lights?

Yeah, normally she's not regarded as a great dancer, but a pionner.
And one of the things that shows she wasn't a great dancer is that she was soon followed by a countless numbers of imitators, like Gabrielle.

how does being followed by imitators imply she was a poor dancer? she wasn't good, ergo people copied her? that doesn't make any sense. she certainly wasn't technically trained in dance, she was a chemist... but that doesn't take away from the uniqueness or difficulty of her style

Well, in the world of art eventually a good technique make difficult that other people copies you. And if she had any great dancing skills it would be hard for anyone to appear and perfectly copy her style. So I conclude that she wasn't a great dancer, and one of the reasons I see for that is that she was easily copied. I didn't said that her dancing was bad, but it obviously don't have a mesmerizing technique.

Again the use of this technique in this video was brilliant because it uses the movement of the dancer (or Profilmic movement) to its advantage by using the dress to opaque and hides the colors of the edges, head and boots, and successfully creates the illusion of color.

The last and hardest place to see the original B and W colors are at her feet. If you hadnt noticed the dancer is wearing boots and every-time they show they are white also the whole time. This one is the trickiest to see for 2 reasons: one the dress literally covers the boots almost the whole way; second the paint used to color the dress often drags into the boots (and you will see in some parts that the top of the boots are the same color as the dress).

The other place where you can see this color effect is actually in her face. Again if you slow the video down or tap the Play and Pause button the whole way, you will see how her face and neck are pale white. This one is a bit catchy and hard to see because the dress is in the way most of the time. This also tells us that the stage had a lot of lighting because there is no shadow on her face every-time she lifts up the dress.

The funny thing about this is, you wouldnt even need to know anything about this clip to tell the difference between color cinema and the old black and white cinema, is simple.If you look closely youll see the black and white colors are shown.The easiest place you can see it is in the edges of the dress.Although the dress goes through a lot of color changes, you can see that the edges are white the whole time.If you slow down the video or tap the play and pause key you can easily see it

I have to say that the technique of painting the images was brilliant at the moment. It actually gives the illusion of color movies at such an early stage of film. We see the dress, the background, the stage and it even looks like they painted her hair. Very good technique.

To an untrained eye, this would look like a Photoshop effect where the scene was filmed with any regular video camera then passed through a filter that would make it look in the old type of film.