Isadora Duncan Biography 

Isadora Duncan was born on May 26, 1877 to a prominent San Francisco
family. In October of the same year her father.s bank failed. Shortly afterwards
her parents were divorced and her father remarried. Her mother had to give
piano lessons to support her four children. The two boys found odd jobs,
while young Isadora and her sister Elizabeth taught dancing to neighborhood
children. When not teaching, or in school, Isadora explored the beach and
would later say that her earliest ideas of dance came from watching the
rhythms of the waves. She was also influenced by the ideas of Francois
Delsarte 1811-1871). The French Delsarte believed that .the Natural. is
the most beautiful, and that natural movement is that which is made in
accord with both the structure of the body and the pull of gravity. Among
his American followers were Genevieve Stebbins and Mrs. Richard Hovey who
lectured, danced or declaimed poetry with eloquent gestures, wearing Greek
robes. (It was then the Greek revival period in both European and American
art). Delsarte.s theories and the Greek costumes would have an effect on
Isadora as her own dance evolved. In 1890 at the age of 13 Isadora gave
her first dance recital at the First Unitarian Church in Oakland. (The
family had moved to Oakland after the bank.s failure.) The sisters and
their brothers also taught social dancing: waltzes, polkas and schottisches.
The San Francisco area was already a center of music and theatre. Opera
companies from Europe performed there, as did eminent actors Edwin Booth,
Sarah Bernhardt, Henry Irving and Ellen Terry. The young Duncans were interested
in all the arts. Led by the older brother Augustin (who would become a
well known actor) they toured the California coast with their own version
of plays and entertainment. In 1895 Isadora and her mother traveled to
Chicago where, after a brief dancing engagement, Isadora was hired by New
York producer Augustin Daly for his touring company. From 1895 to the end
of 1897 Isadora took part in Daly.s sometimes as an incidental dancer,
sometimes as a bit player, in New York. Isadora gave recitals at the homes
of society ladies, and she and Elizabeth taught dancing to children while
her mother played the piano. One day in 1899 the building in which the
Duncans were teaching caught fire. They managed to rescue their pupils
but all of the Duncan. belongings were destroyed. Penniless, they decided
to travel to England, and with small gifts and loans from the parents whose
children they saved, they booked passage on a cattle boat. In England Isadora
gave three concerts at the New Gallery, and encouraged by music critic
J. Fuller Maitland, she began dancing to serious music. She also spent
much time in the British Museum with her brother Raymond, studying the
movements of the figures on Greek vases and the friezes from the Parthenon.
She would later study figures in museums, churches and temples in Paris,
Berlin, Florence, Rome and Athens, and what she learned from great art
of motion and expression she would incorporate in her dances. In her speech,
The Dance of the Future, made in Berlin when she was 26, she said that
nature was the source of the dance. Every creature moves according to its
nature - that is, according to its feelings and its physical The Movements
of the savage were natural and beautiful. So too were the movements of
the classical Greeks wearing simple tunics and sandals. But ballet, with
its artificial stops, starts, its holding of poses and its toe dancing,
is the opposite of natural motion. Its movements do not flow successively
from one another. It tries to .create the delusion that gravity does not
exist.. Moreover it harms the body: .Under the tricots are dancing deformed
muscles .. underneath the muscles are deformed bones. She added: .It is
not a question of true art ... it is a question of the development of perfect
mothers and the birth of healthy and beautiful children ... In (my) school
I shall not teach the children to imitate my movements but to make their
own ... O. she is coming, the dancer of the future: ... the highest intelligence
in the freest body!. With this speech she aligned herself with the women.s
movement, while at the same time advocating dance both as a necessary part
of children.s education and a means of living a healthy, free life. She
would found schools in Berlin, in Paris, and after the Russian Revolution,
in Moscow. During the First World War children from her Berlin and Paris
schools, under the tutelage of her sister Elizabeth, would come to the
United States. After Isadora.s death, girls from the Moscow school would
tour the United States, guided by Irma Duncan, one of Isadora.s six original
pupils, until the Russian girls were recalled to the Soviet Union, when
they were replaced on tour by American Duncan pupils. It is through Isadora.s
six original pupils: Anna, Irma, Lisa, Theresa, Margot and Erica (nicknamed
.The Isadorables.) and their European and American colleagues and descendants
that her work has been transmitted. What was Isadora.s choreography like
and what effect has it had on dance? Isadora.s lyrical works were notable
for their lightness, and for the long, flowing undular movement of arms
and body. In her dramatic dances she used movements that were abrupt, violent
(if the motion she wished to express was violent, as in The Dance of the
Amazons), and even contorted. In The Dance of the Furies from Orpheus she
appeared to be lifting boulders, she beat her head against the earth, she
fell to the ground. Martha Graham is sometimes spoken of as the dancer
who .discovered the floor. a claim which can also be made for Mary Wigman.
But the discovery goes back to Isadora, with her insistence on the force
of gravity as part of the dance. Her emphasis on natural, fluid and expressive
movement would have a stimulating effect on such ballet choreographers
as Fokine, Tudor and Ashton, and it would broaden the range of modern dance
which was just then coming into being, with Isadora, Loie Fuller, Ruth
St. Denis and Ted Shawn as its diverse pioneers. Isadora also composed
works on social and political themes, such as The Marseillaise (inspired
by the First World War) and The Marche Slave (about the Russian Revolution).
Later in the Soviet Union she would make dances on the themes of labor
or revolution which would influence Graham, Holm, Weidman, Humphrey, Limon,
Tamiris and Sokolow in the United States and Wigman and Jooss in Germany
in the .30s and .40s; while her stirring use of dancers who moved to the
songs they are singing is eloquently demonstrated today by the Moiseyev
folk ballet. Even her contemporaries, Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, though
very different in their approach to the dance were influenced by her use
of Greek themes and symphonic music. By her example she made dance in many
schools a normal part of the curriculum, seen not simply as exercise but
as a life-enhancing experience. Her own works, which had temporarily dropped
out of sight in the year following her death, are performed in the theatre
again, and are enthusiastically received by audiences and critics alike.
Her economy of means, her lyricism and her expressiveness have been noted
and applauded. Modern Dance has absorbed her teaching, and the ballet has
been permeated by her emphasis on musicality and psychological truth. Before
her, in much of the world, dance was considered simply entertainment. She
gave it the status of art. By Fredrika Blair (Author: Isadora: Portrait
of the Artist as a Woman, published 1986 McGraw-Hill and William Morrow/Quill.)

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