Run up to new album begins
Once again, Grace began a reset in the run-up to what she, in an Interview with Papermag, called her "real debut".
She deleted all her Instagram posts (except a few of the latest reels), Changed her profile picture and sent a mail to her mailing list: "Grace Vanderwaal was a CHILDSTAR". Later, she posted a set of photos from the upcoming "Child Star" video with the caption: "The art of giving is in tandem with womanhood. Giving more than you have - secrets, smiles, fake laughs, adolescence, innocence, and just about everything you're made of. I am a performer; my existence is giving: some performance was taught, and some came from a real place of passion. Sometimes, I don't know when I'm performing and when the show is over. I think of this sentence I wrote in my journal a while back - ‘What's a woman without her body? What's a child star without a stage?"
The last picture was not from the video but an illustration from Scientific American from 1895. The history behind the picture is explained in the Phili Dance History Journal: In 1891, Illinois-born actress Loie Fuller … began experimenting with costume design for her “Serpentine Dance,” using hundreds of yards of gauzy silk for her skirts and manipulating them with long bamboo wands. She also created innovative lighting designs, bathing herself with electric lights, brightly coloured with gels and luminescent salts. Art Nouveau glassmakers were known to consult her about colours and dyes. Her stagecraft innovations and effects, using as many as eight lighting technicians, multiple mirrors and projections, were so creative that they were featured in an 1895 issue of Scientific American [The illustration Grace used]. An article in Cosmopolitan Magazine entitled “The Poetry of Skirts” remarked: “The blackness of the night, the brilliancy of noon, the fluttering of the leaves in the forest, the undulation of the grass on the prairie, the yellow waves of a field of wheat, the tossing surf of the rocky coast, the gleam and glister of the frost on the deadened turf, the sweep of the blowing, blustering, billowing snow – all can be portrayed.” Fuller found her most responsive audiences in Paris, who called her “La Loïe”, and she became the first American expatriate dancer.
With this illustration, we assume Grace is saying that the "child star" is an elaborate illusion.
There are also some eerie similarities between Grace and Loie's backgrounds. Loie was born on January 15th, and she was a successful child star whose career vaned until she got her big breakthrough in her mid 20ies.(Wikipedia)