On Sunday, December 21, 2025, at 11 a.m., the Grimaldi Forum Monaco will host a free screening of The Dancer in the Auditorium Camille Blanc, presented in collaboration with the Institut audiovisuel de Monaco. The 2016 French film revisits the improbable ascent of Loïe Fuller, the American-born farm girl whose ingenuity and determination carried her from the rural Midwest to the most celebrated stages of Belle Époque Europe.
Fuller’s transformation was as radical as it was mesmerizing. Concealed beneath sweeping lengths of silk and manipulating her costumes with long wooden rods, she created the Serpentine dance - an illusion of swirling luminosity that reimagined the human form. Her performances captivated Paris, elevating her to emblematic status among artists and innovators of the era. Admirers such as Toulouse-Lautrec, the Lumière Brothers and Auguste Rodin recognized in her a force of modernity, even as the physical toll of her work strained her body and the blazing stage lights threatened her eyesight. Fuller’s relentless pursuit of artistic perfection would ultimately collide with the ambitions of Isadora Duncan, the young prodigy whose arrival signaled a shifting epoch in dance.
Directed by Stéphanie Di Giusto, The Dancer runs 118 minutes and features Soko as Fuller, alongside Gaspard Ulliel, Mélanie Thierry, Lily-Rose Depp and François Damiens. The screenplay, written by Di Giusto and Sarah Thibau with the collaboration of Thomas Bidegain, draws freely from Giovanni Lista’s Loïe Fuller, danseuse de la Belle Époque.
The screening offers Monaco audiences a rare opportunity to revisit a seminal artistic figure whose influence continues to ripple through modern performance and visual culture.
Photo credits: Institut audiovisuel de Monaco