Isadora Duncan

Dancer

• Born: May 26, 1877
• Birthplace: San Francisco, California
• Died: September 14, 1927
• Place of death: Nice, France

American choreographer and dancer

Working against the strictures of classical ballet and the artificialities of other forms of dance, Duncan was a major innovator and one of the founders of modern dance. In her personal life, Duncan also endeavored to extend women’s freedoms.

Area of achievement Dance

Early Life

Born in San Francisco, Isadora Duncan was the youngest of four children. Her father, Joseph Charles Duncan, was fifty years old and a divorced father of four other children when he married Mary Isadora “Dora” Gray in 1869. She was twenty. Joseph Duncan was a charming businessman who had achieved considerable financial success. In early October of 1877 at the time of baby Angela Isadora’s christening an illegal banking scheme in which Duncan was involved failed. Joseph Duncan disappeared, leaving bank records in chaos. Finally captured in February of 1878, he was tried four times, the first three resulting in hung juries. At his fourth trial he was acquitted. In the aftermath, Dora divorced Joseph Duncan, who remarried and moved to Los Angeles.

Dora stayed in the Oakland area, supporting the children by eking out a living as a music teacher. In her autobiography, My Life (1927), Isadora Duncan tells of a “good-looking,” well-dressed man who appeared at the door and turned out to be her father. Subsequently, Joseph Duncan did provide a home for his former wife and children, but Isadora’s childhood was largely fatherless.

At an early age, Isadora Duncan revolted against ballet lessons and developed an expressive style of dancing that relied on spontaneity and freedom of movement. This was basically the same approach she was to use in her mature work, freely interpreting the music of the great composers. Duncan’s first public performances, in Chicago and New York, were as a dancer in other people’s shows. In 1897, she traveled to London with Augustin Daly’s theater company, returning to New York later that year. Subsequently, she quit the Daly company, and she and her family set off for England, where she eventually began to achieve recognition. In the British Museum, she and her brother Raymond studied the art of ancient Greece, convincing themselves that Isadora’s use of dance rhythms was based on a classical model.

Duncan’s career began to gather momentum when she was invited to perform at private receptions, thanks in part to the patronage of well-known actress Mrs. Campbell. Dancing barefoot in a tunic, Duncan charmed her audiences, and soon she was performing to great acclaim in theaters and concert halls all over Europe.

Life’s Work

Duncan rose from humble beginnings to international celebrity by being an independent-minded American. Her success in Europe was counterpointed by her defiance of traditional female roles. Her fame as a dancer was perhaps equaled by her notoriety as a woman who defied conventional mores. Duncan wanted to use dance as a form of self-expression to create a new way of living. Because most of her students were women, Duncan’s identification of dance with freedom exerted a profound effect on women’s roles.

To grasp Duncan’s revolutionary attitude, it should be remembered that the world into which she was born was extremely conservative about exposing the human body and about women’s roles. In her clothing, both the tunic-like Greek chitons in which she danced and the classical Greek garb she and her brother Raymond affected as street wear, Duncan shocked and fascinated audiences.

Contemporary accounts of her dancing, usually written by male dance critics, often mention her “scanty” or “flimsy” costumes, her bare legs and feet, and her scandalous behavior. Spectators who came to her performances expecting to be scandalized, however, more often than not went away deeply moved by Duncan’s powerfully expressive dancing. Duncan was openly celebrating the relationship between body and emotions in a way she also acted out in her personal life.

A notorious free spirit, Duncan had children out of wedlock with three different fathers. In My Life, she says that in her romance with stage designer Edward Gordon Craig, she felt an increasing tension between her art and her lover. Tempted to submerge her dancing in the tumultuous romance with Craig, Duncan had her first child with him a daughter, Deirdre and, during her pregnancy, briefly left the stage.

Later, she had a son, Patrick, by Paris Singer, heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune. The wealthy Singer funded some of Duncan’s projects, and even after their relationship was over, he continued to provide her with financial support. While Duncan was involved with Craig and, later, with Singer, both men were married to other women and already had children. This fact contributed to the scandalous air surrounding Duncan’s behavior.

In 1905, Duncan made a controversial visit to Russia, where she danced to great acclaim and came to the attention of Sergei Diaghilev, a critic and impresario who was to bring about an increased interest in ballet all over Europe. Although Duncan’s methods and those of traditional ballet were at odds, she exerted a powerful influence on the development of modern dance as an expressive medium. Between Duncan and the Russian ballet, a new enthusiasm for dance caught fire.

All her life, Duncan was convinced that teaching children to express themselves freely through dance would revolutionize society. She started dance schools in Germany, France, Russia, and the United States. Because Duncan’s method centered on freedom rather than on rigid technical rules, it proved to be difficult to pass on, and none of these schools survived. Only the first school, in Grunewald, Germany, produced students who stayed with Duncan and continued her work in her name.

The essence of Duncan’s style was spontaneity, not form. Her great desire was to express emotion through movement. The word “joy” appears all through her autobiography, but Duncan wanted to express the whole range of human feeling, much as the great composers had done. Although a joyous freedom is the essence of her style, she was also capable of expressing much more.

Unfortunately, midway into her adult life, she experienced a tragedy that her dancing only partly helped to alleviate. In 1913, the car in which her two children and their nurse were riding rolled into the Seine River. All three were drowned. The following year a third child, a son fathered by a man she knew only briefly, died shortly after birth. At the same time, changing public tastes and turmoil in Europe were causing a diminished interest in Duncan’s art.

Turning to the children of others, Duncan tried to found a school in France, but the beginning of World War I brought the project to a halt. Duncan’s tours in South America and Europe during the war drew as much attention to her flamboyant life as to her dancing. After World War I, in 1920, Duncan was invited to found a school in Moscow, a challenge she accepted. Revolutionary herself in thought and deed, Duncan found the idea of revolutionary Russia attractive.

Although all her life Duncan criticized marriage, in 1922 she married Sergei Aleksandrovich Esenin, a poet seventeen years her junior. One practical reason for the marriage was that it enabled Duncan to take Esenin with her on a tour of the United States. In the United States, however, fear of the effects of the Russian Revolution was at a peak. Duncan and Esenin were suspected of being Bolshevik agents, and the dance tour was dogged by controversy.

At her performance at Symphony Hall in Boston, Duncan tried to introduce Esenin, but she was heckled and abused by members of the audience. She retorted in kind, and the performance ended in chaos. In the angry aftermath, Duncan left the United States, vowing never to return. She never did. After they had spent several stormy years together, Esenin, drinking heavily and mentally unstable, separated from Duncan and returned to the Soviet Union, where he committed suicide in 1925. The stage was set for the tragic end of Duncan’s own controversial life.

Duncan’s death is sadly reminiscent of the accident that killed her children. Just as they had not traveled far from home before drowning in the Seine, Duncan herself had traveled only a few yards when her extravagant, trailing shawl became tangled around the axle of a sports car driven by a handsome young Italian with whom Duncan was flirting. The other end of the shawl was around her neck. She was killed instantly.

Significance

In her attitudes toward women’s roles and toward marriage, Duncan was deliberately iconoclastic. In her notions about self-expression and dance, she revolutionized attitudes toward the movements of the human body. Duncan was making something new in dance, expressing her inner life through dance as no one had done before.

Although Duncan failed to sustain the schools she hoped would fulfill her revolutionary vision, she did change the face of dance in several major ways. She is unquestionably one of the founders of contemporary dance. Moreover, her influence on classical ballet resulted in a loosening of form and an addition of lyricism to the work of more traditional choreographers.

Duncan did not simply dance to music; she integrated music and dance into a coherent whole. She battled criticism to make it acceptable to dance to music that was not written for dance, succeeding so well that pieces that were unthinkable as dance vehicles a hundred years ago are now the staples of ballet and modern dance practice rooms.

Six of Duncan’s Grunewald students, sometimes known as the “Isadorables” or the Duncan Dancers, carried on her style. As time passed, however, interest in following Duncan’s methods gradually faded. In the early 1990’s, direct disciples of the Isadorables were making an effort to keep Duncan’s style alive. What Duncan taught, however, was not slavish imitation of her style and techniques but an emotional expressiveness that freed the individual.

Further Reading

Blair, Fredrika. Isadora. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986. A complete biography, this work is accurate, readable, and well documented. Corrects the date of Duncan’s birth based on Duncan’s baptismal record. Of all the many books on Duncan, this is the best place to start. Contains a useful bibliography of relevant sources up to 1986.

Duncan, Isadora. Isadora Speaks. Edited by Franklin Rosemont. San Francisco, Calif.: City Lights Books, 1981. Gathers miscellaneous interviews, statements to the press, speeches, and other items hitherto buried in old periodicals. Includes Duncan’s public statements about Esenin. Supplements My Life and The Art of the Dance.

Kurth, Peter. Isadora: A Sensational Life. Boston: Little, Brown, 2004. Exhaustive seven-hundred-plus-page recounting of the events of Duncan’s life.

Loewenthal, Lillian. The Search for Isadora: The Legend and Legacy of Isadora Duncan. Pennington, N.J.: Princeton Book, 1993. This volume re-creates Duncan’s performances and documents her legacy. Follows the subsequent careers of the “Isadorables.” Contains a helpful chronology.

Macdougall, Allan Ross. Isadora: A Revolutionary in Art and Love. New York: Thomas Nelson, 1960. Until Blair’s book was published, this was the most complete biography of Duncan. Macdougall was Duncan’s secretary and friend. Still worthwhile and readable, this work contains many minor factual inaccuracies and needs to be supplemented with updated information.

McVay, Gordon. Isadora and Esenin. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1980. A well-researched account of Duncan’s relationship with Esenin, handled sympathetically. Blair directs readers to this book as a source of detailed information about Duncan’s years with Esenin.

Roseman, Janet Lynn. Dance Was Her Religion: The Sacred Choreography of Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and Martha Graham. Prescott, Ariz.: Hohm Press, 2004. Roseman finds similarities in the three choreographers’ concepts of dance, with each viewing dance as a form of prayer and a mystical experience.

Seroff, Victor. The Real Isadora. New York: Dial, 1971. Seroff was a young Russian pianist who became Duncan’s friend and lover in Paris after Esenin’s death. Duncan confided in Seroff concerning her relationship with Esenin and revealed her emotional state near the end of her life.

Terry, Walter. Isadora Duncan: Her Life, Her Art, Her Legacy. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1964. A readable summary of the artistic impact of Duncan’s dance theory and technique.