Isadora Duncan was an American dancer and educator. Duncan developed an approach to dance that emphasized naturalistic movement. She was a hit in Europe as a performer to classical music and opened schools that integrated dance with other types of learning. Her teaching and performances helped to free ballet from its conservative restrictions and presaged the development of modern expressive dance.
Background
Isadora Duncan was born as Angela Isadora Duncan on May 26, 1877, in San Francisco, California, the United States, to Joseph Charles Duncan, a banker, mining engineer, and connoisseur of the arts, and Mary Isadora Gray and was the youngest of four siblings. Although Duncan’s birth date is generally believed to have been May 27, 1878, her baptismal certificate, discovered in San Francisco in 1976, records the date of May 26, 1877.
Isadora Duncan grew up in circumstances which encouraged her independent spirit. Soon after her birth, her father lost his job in the bank and was humiliated publicly. Her father abandoned his family when Duncan was an infant, and her mother was forced to support the family by giving music lessons.
Education
At the age of 6, Duncan began to teach movement to little children in her neighborhood; word spread, and by the time she was 10, her classes had become quite large. After a series of ballet lessons at age 9, she declared ballet a school of "affected grace and toe walking." She requested to leave public school so that she, along with older sister Elizabeth, could earn income from teaching. Duncan subsequently received tutelage from poet Ina Coolbrith.
Isadora's genius was appreciated by her family when she was very young, but her revolutionary ideas on dance were not well accepted in America. When Isadora was in her teens, the family moved to Europe, where her genius was recognized.
In 1896, Duncan became part of Augustin Daly's theater company in New York where her unique vision of dance clashed with the popular pantomimes of theater companies, and felt disillusioned. Although she always considered her dance American in spirit, Duncan never met with much success on the stage in her own country. Dunkan's earliest public appearances, in Chicago and New York City, met with little success, and at the age of 21, she left the United States to seek recognition abroad. With her meager savings, she sailed on a cattle boat for England.
She moved to London in 1898, performed in the drawing rooms of the wealthy, and earned enough to rent a dance studio to develop her work and create larger performances for the stage. At the British Museum, her study of the sculptures of ancient Greece confirmed the classical use of those dance movements and gestures that hitherto instinct alone had caused her to practice and upon a revival of which her method was largely founded. Through the patronage of the celebrated actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, she was invited to appear at the private receptions of London’s leading hostesses, where her dancing, distinguished by complete freedom of movement, enraptured those who were familiar only with the conventional forms of the ballet, which was then in a period of decay.
Barefoot and clad in sheaths inspired by Greek imagery and Italian Renaissance paintings, Duncan danced her own choreography in the homes of the financially elite before becoming a major success in Budapest, Hungary, having a sold-out run of shows in 1902. Loie Fuller, a pioneer of both modern dance and theatrical lighting techniques, visited her studio and invited her to tour with her. She toured all over Europe, introducing her innovative dance technique. She embarked on successful tours, becoming a European sensation honored not only by enraptured audiences but by fellow artists who captured her image in painting, sculpture, and poetry.
Duncan's style was controversial for its time, as it defied what she viewed as the constricting conventions of ballet, placing major emphasis on the human female form and free-flowing moves. Duncan's achievements and artistic vision would lead her to be called the "Mother of Modern Dance" - a moniker also shared by a successor of sorts, Martha Graham. In 1905, she opened her first school to teach young women her dance philosophy in Grunewald, Germany. The Isodorables, a group of six young girls instructed by her, would later continue her legacy.
Duncan defied social custom in other ways and was viewed as an early feminist, declaring that she wouldn't marry and thus having two children out of wedlock. Duncan also founded dance schools in the United States, Germany, and Russia, with her dance students dubbed the "Isadorables" by the media. She developed a particular affinity for the latter country and its revolutionary movements, and in the early 1920s received patronage from Vladimir Lenin for her teaching work.
Towards her death, her performing career had dwindled and she became notorious for her financial woes, scandalous love life, and frequent public drunkenness traveling between Paris and the Mediterranean. Encouraged by her friends, she wrote, My Life, her autobiography published posthumously, which was a frank and engrossing account of this remarkable visionary and feminist who took on the world and reinvented dance.
During the last years of her life, Duncan was a somewhat pathetic figure, living precariously in Nice on the French Riviera, where she met with a fatal accident. In 1927, while riding in an open sports car with her friend. As Falchetto and Duncan pulled away in his ride, the dancer draped her expensive scarf stylishly around her neck. The scarf blew in the wind and got caught in the spokes of the car’s rear axle, violently thrusting Duncan from the vehicle, breaking her neck, and killing her instantly. Her ashes were placed next to those of her children in the columbarium at Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris.
Isadora Duncan developed an approach to dance that emphasized naturalistic movement. She was a hit in Europe as a performer to classical music and opened schools that integrated dance with other types of learning. She was among the first to raise interpretive dance to the status of creative art.
Isadora Duncan was a self-styled revolutionary whose influence spread from American to Europe and Russia, creating a sensation everywhere she performed. Her style of dancing eschewed the rigidity of ballet and she championed the notion of free-spiritedness coupled with the high ideals of ancient Greece: beauty, philosophy, and humanity.
(A remarkable account of wildly artistic life, finally res...)
1927
Religion
Isadora Duncan was an atheist.
Politics
Duncan was a life-long and devoted communist, and she refused to keep quiet about her controversial sympathies. In accordance with her leftist sympathies, Duncan started living in the Soviet Union when she was just 22 years old, and eventually got full Soviet citizenship. When Duncan left America for good in the early 1920s, the "Red Menace" was at its height. As such, the communist Duncan and her Russian husband Sergei Yesenin were very much not welcome. Reportedly, as she was leaving the country, Duncan said to the waiting journalists, "Good-bye America, I shall never see you again!"
Views
An early feminist, Duncan didn't believe in marriage and she bore two children out of wedlock by two different men. Duncan's version of the woman genius was powerful: she considered herself to be not merely a performer or muse but an artist whose movements came from her soul. Thus she never practiced with mirrors, as do ballet dancers whose mechanical and prescribed movements Duncan rejected. Duncan found her model in the concepts of self-reliance, inner inspiration, and American transcendental romanticism.
She called on women to learn about and take control of their own bodies: to become the sculptors, painters, and architects of themselves. Social commentator and novelist Floyd Dell was correct when he included Duncan in his 1913 book about feminists, and he was also correct when he labeled her feminism an extension of the feminine role itself.
Quotations:
"The artist is the only lover, he alone has the pure vision of beauty, and love is the vision of the soul when it is permitted to gaze upon immortal beauty."
"What one has not experienced one will never understand in print."
Personality
Following the devastating loss of her two children, Duncan was thrown into a state of mental anguish. To recover her health and her sanity, she went to the island of Corfu with her friend, actress Eleonora Duse. While Duncan recovered a bit, nothing was the same after Peter and Deidre’s deaths. As she said, "I know that my real self died with my children."
Near the end of her life, Duncan gave in to absolute decadence. With her dancing career waning, she became infamous all around Paris and the Mediterranean as a bit of a lush. She left unpaid bills after unpaid bills at a series of swanky hotels or else mooched off her dwindling cadre of friends and associates.
Greek art heavily influenced Duncan’s work, and she often danced in her trademark tunic and bare feet to imitate the scenes on Ancient Greek vases. Isadora loved wearing long flowing scarves, both for her stage performances and in her private life. Sadly, they would play a part in her infamous death.
Quotes from others about the person
"Poetry personified. She is not the tenth muse but all nine muses in one." - Laredo Taft
Interests
Greek art
Philosophers & Thinkers
Friedrich Nietzsche
Politicians
Vladimir Lenin
Writers
Walt Whitman, William Shakespeare
Artists
Sandro Botticelli
Music & Bands
François Delsarte, Johannes Brahms, Richard Wagner, Ludwig van Beethoven, Christoph Willibald Gluck, Pyotr Tchaikovsky
Connections
Duncan was unconventional both in her professional as well as private life. She was openly bisexual in a time that barely recognized the identity, and also bore both of her two children, Deirdre and Patrick, out of wedlock to two different fathers. She had a passionate affair with Spanish-American poet, Mercedes de Acosta and was linked to actress Eleonora Duse and writer Natalie Barne.
In 1913, at the height of her fame, her two young children died when their driverless car rolled into the Seine River in Paris. A later baby was stillborn. After her own children died, Duncan adopted six of her international dance students who migrated to the United States and took her last name.
Later, Duncan married poet Sergey Aleksandrovich Yesenin in 1922, favoring a legal union to allow him travel to the United States. However, the couple was ostracized due to anti-Bolshevik paranoia, and Duncan declared that she would not return to America. The marriage wouldn't last, with Yesenin suffering from severe mental health issues and committing suicide in the mid-1920s.
Father:
Joseph Charles Duncan
Mother:
Mary Isadora Gray
Ex-husband:
Sergei Yesenin
Though Duncan had many flings, she only married one man: The young Russian poet Sergei Yesenin. Sadly, their union was doomed to a heartbreaking end. Duncan was almost two decades older than fresh-faced Sergei, and just a year after their 1922 nuptials, they split up. The story only gets worse from there: A couple of years later, the tormented Sergei died by his own hand.
ex-girlfriend:
Mercedes de Acosta
Daughter:
Deirdre Duncan
Deidre and her brother were out for a ride when the car stalled on a hill overlooking the Seine River. The driver forgot to set the parking brake as he stepped out to inspect the car's engine, and the vehicle rolled down the hill and into the dark waters; it, with its precious cargo, quickly sank below the surface. By the time the car could be pulled from the water, Isadora's children and their nanny had drowned.
Son:
Patrick Duncan
Duncan’s son Patrick had been fathered by her lover Paris Singer, heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune. After the death of her children, Duncan wrote movingly of her despair in her autobiography: "If this sorrow had come to me much earlier in life, I might have overcome it; if much later, it would not have been so terrible; but at that moment, in the full power and energy of life, it completely shattered my force and power."
protegée:
Anna Duncan
Anna Duncan, born Anna Denzler, was one of the adopted daughters of Isadora.
