Louise Irvine

Women have danced like butterflies across centuries and cultures. In the American Southwest, Hopi maidens honored the butterfly spirit to evoke rain and celebrate the harvest. In the mountain forests of central Mexico, millions of monarch butterflies arrive just as Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) is celebrated from October 31 to November 2. Indigenous communities traditionally view these migrating butterflies as the returning souls of their ancestors, and dancers portray monarchs in Day of the Dead festivities.

In Europe, butterfly dancers emerged during the Romantic era of ballet in the early 1800s, driven by a fascination with the supernatural, ethereal spirits, and the natural world. Marie Taglioni, the famous Italian ballerina, wore costumes that featured wire-framed fairy and butterfly wings attached to her tutu to emphasize weightlessness on stage. She choreographed the first feature-length ballet fantastique dedicated to the butterfly specifically for her young protégé, Emma Livry. Le Papillon premiered at the Paris Opera Ballet in 1860 with Farfalla, the butterfly, and the corps de ballet wearing white tulle outfits with delicate wings. It tells the magical story of a wicked fairy who is transformed into a butterfly, then regains human form and finds true love.

The Danish ballerina Adeline Genée achieved stardom for her role in A Dream of Butterflies and Roses, first performed in London in 1911. She was described as “like Dresden china,” and her dancing was like a “butterfly on the wing.” Early photographs of butterfly dancers inspired beautiful cabinet cards, and their costumes grew increasingly fantastic for vaudeville revues and burlesque shows. Sixteen-year-old Phyllis Monkman began her career in the musical play Butterflies at the Apollo London in 1908 with the headline “Just out of the chrysalis stage”.

In the early 1900s, Daisy Makeig-Jones depicted butterfly women for Wedgwood’s Fairyland Lustre collection. With iridescent butterfly wings highlighted in gold, the buxom Edwardian women perch among blossoming trees in an enchanted forest.  These “fairies” are unusual in Daisy’s work, as typically she portrays diminutive fairy folk, including mischievous imps and goblins. 

Butterflies also inspired innovative modern dancers, such as Loie Fuller, the American actress who turned the popular vaudeville scarf dance into a sensational butterfly dance at the Folies Bergere in Paris during the 1890s. In Le Papillon, Loie used yards of lightweight silk attached to long bamboo wands held in her hands, making the fabric billow into organic wing shapes. Bathed in colored electric lights, the swirling cocoon of her costume transformed her body into an abstract flower, flame, and the sweeping flight of a butterfly. A pioneer of theatrical lighting, Loie became known as the “Fairy of Light” and the “Electric Fairy.” She was given her own dance pavilion at the Paris Exposition in 1900, and her sensational dances inspired painters, sculptors and porcelain artists, notably at Sèvres and Royal Doulton.

Loie’s dances also inspired many imitators, including Annabelle Whitfield Moore, who made her debut aged 15 in the “Grotto” at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. She was filmed the following year by W.K.L Dickson at Edison’s studio, and Anabelle Butterfly Dance is recognized as one of the earliest films ever recorded. The frames were meticulously hand-tinted in bright yellows, pinks, and blues to bring her butterfly wings to life on screen, and these graceful kinetic invocations are among the earliest artistic works in film history. Annabelle became one of the first silent movie stars, and her fame was boosted in 1896 when it was revealed that she had been approached to appear naked at a private dinner party at Sherry’s Restaurant in New York. Annabelle remained in the public eye in the Ziegfeld Follies, starring as the Gibson Bathing Girl, and continued to adorn the stage until her marriage in 1912. Watch the Annabelle Butterfly Dance movie below.

A famous French fantasy film from 1901, La Chrysalide et le Papillon d’or features filmmaker and illusionist Georges Méliès as a Hindu enchanter who charms a giant caterpillar with his flute until it transforms into a beautiful butterfly dancer. When he tries to kiss her, he gets his just deserts! Watch La Chrysalide et le Papillon d’or movie below.

Fokine’s Les Papillons, a one-act ballet set during Carnival, was presented in St. Petersburg in 1913 and features Pierrot imagining young women as graceful butterflies. It was later performed by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes in fantastic costumes by Léon Bakst. Flappers and vamps were inspired to metamorphose into butterflies for the masquerade balls of the jazz age. Illustrations of butterfly fashions proliferated in magazines and periodicals, including the cover of Life magazine, which featured F. X. Leyendecker’s iconic flapper and W.T. Benda’s sensual butterfly woman. Art Deco sculptors immortalized designs like these in porcelain, notably Josef Lorenzl at Goldscheider and Leslie Harradine at Royal Doulton.

The Golden Butterfly, a 1926 silent drama starring Lili Damita, tells the story of an ambitious young woman who chooses a glittering career as a dancer rather than settle down with the man she loves, until she has a devastating fall from a massive spider’s web prop during a high-flying routine. Injured and with a shattered career, she finally finds “The Road to Happiness,” as the film was titled in the US. Lili Damita later became a Hollywood movie star and retired after marrying Errol Flynn. The “Golden Butterfly” died in 1994 at the age of 89 in Palm Beach, Florida. Butterflies will be a feature of our Enchanted Garden exhibition, which opens on October 31, and maybe we’ll see some Halloween costumes inspired by the Monarch migration! We are also excited to unveil a spectacular Monarch installation by our very own butterfly whisperer, Kiki Sylvain, who breeds butterflies and creates exquisite butterfly art sold at the WMODA Museum Shop.

Watch the 1894 movie Annabelle Butterfly

Watch the 1901 movie La Chrysalide et le Papillon d’or

Read more about Butterflies at WMODA
Papillons in Porcelain
Butterflies · Emblems of the Soul