ANGELA ISADORA DUNCAN, THE MOTHER OF DANCE

Isadora Duncan

Today, The Grandma has taken a walk along Montjuïc, the famous Jewish mountain, in Barcelona. It is a wonderful and amazing place where you can find as things as you wish -museums, gardens, Olympic installations, restaurants, cable cars...

The Grandma has visited El Mercat de les Flors, a place of reference in scenic arts, especially dance and theatre.

While The Grandma has been visiting this interesting cultural equipment, she has been thinking about Isadora Duncan, the American French dancer who changed this world more than a century ago and died on a day like today in 1927.

Before visiting Montjuïc, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Ms. Excel course.

19. Sharing Documents (II) (Spanish Version)

Angela Isadora Duncan (May 26, 1877 or May 27, 1878-September 14, 1927) was an American and French dancer who performed to acclaim throughout Europe. Born in California, she lived in Western Europe and the Soviet Union from the age of 22 until her death at age 50, when her scarf became entangled in the wheels and axle of the car in which she was riding.

Isadora Duncan was born in San Francisco, the youngest of the four children of Joseph Charles Duncan (1819–1898), a banker, mining engineer and connoisseur of the arts, and Mary Isadora Gray (1849–1922). Her brothers were Augustin Duncan and Raymond Duncan; her sister, Elizabeth Duncan, was also a dancer. Soon after Isadora's birth, her father was exposed in illegal bank dealings, and the family became extremely poor.

Her parents divorced when she was an infant, and her mother moved with her family to Oakland, California, where she worked as a seamstress and piano teacher. From ages six to ten, Isadora attended school, but she dropped out, finding it constricting. As her family was very poor, she and her three siblings earned money by teaching dance to local children.

Isadora Duncan

In 1896, Duncan became part of Augustin Daly's theater company in New York, but she soon became disillusioned with the form and craved a different environment with less of a hierarchy. Her father, along with his third wife and their daughter, died in 1898 when the British passenger steamer SS Mohegan ran aground off the coast of Cornwall.

Duncan began her dancing career at a very early age by giving lessons in her home to neighbourhood children, and this continued through her teenage years. Her novel approach to dance was evident in these early classes, in which she followed her fantasy and improvised, teaching any pretty thing that came into her head. A desire to travel brought her to Chicago, where she auditioned for many theater companies, finally finding a place in Augustin Daly's company. This took her to New York City where her unique vision of dance clashed with the popular pantomimes of theater companies. In New York, Duncan took some classes with Marie Bonfanti but was quickly disappointed in ballet routine.

Feeling unhappy and unappreciated in America, Duncan moved to London in 1898. She performed in the drawing rooms of the wealthy, taking inspiration from the Greek vases and bas-reliefs in the British Museum. The earnings from these engagements enabled her to rent a studio, allowing her to develop her work and create larger performances for the stage. From London, she traveled to Paris, where she was inspired by the Louvre and the Exposition Universelle of 1900.

More information: Isadora's Legacy

In 1902, Loie Fuller invited Duncan to tour with her. This took Duncan all over Europe as she created new works using her innovative technique, which emphasized natural movement in contrast to the rigidity of tradition ballet.

She spent most of the rest of her life touring Europe and the Americas in this fashion. Despite mixed reaction from critics, Duncan became quite popular for her distinctive style and inspired many visual artists, such as Antoine Bourdelle, Auguste Rodin, Arnold Rönnebeck, and Abraham Walkowitz, to create works based on her.

Duncan disliked the commercial aspects of public performance, such as touring and contracts, because she felt they distracted her from her real mission, namely the creation of beauty and the education of the young. To achieve her mission, she opened schools to teach young women her philosophy of dance. 

Isadora Duncan

The first was established in 1904 in Berlin-Grunewald, Germany. This institution was the birthplace of the Isadorables (Anna, Maria-Theresa, Irma, Liesel, Gretel, and Erika), Duncan's protégées who would continue her legacy. Duncan legally adopted all six girls in 1919, and they took her last name. After about a decade in Berlin, Duncan established a school in Paris that was shortly closed because of the outbreak of World War I.

In 1914, Duncan moved to the United States and transferred her school there. A townhouse on Gramercy Park was provided for its use, and its studio was nearby, on the northeast corner of 23rd Street and Fourth Avenue, now Park Avenue South.

Duncan had been due to leave the United States in 1915 aboard the RMS Lusitania on its ill-fated voyage, but historians believe her financial situation at the time drove her to choose a more modest crossing. In 1921, Duncan's leftist sympathies took her to the Soviet Union, where she founded a school in Moscow. However, the Soviet government's failure to follow through on promises to support her work caused her to return to the West and leave the school to her protégée Irma.

In 1924, Duncan composed a dance routine called Varshavianka to the tune of the Polish revolutionary song known in English as Whirlwinds of Danger.

Breaking with convention, Duncan imagined she had traced dance to its roots as a sacred art. She developed from this notion a style of free and natural movements inspired by the classical Greek arts, folk dances, social dances, nature and natural forces as well as an approach to the new American athleticism which included skipping, running, jumping, leaping and tossing.

More information: The Vintage News

Duncan's philosophy of dance moved away from rigid ballet technique and towards what she perceived as natural movement. To restore dance to a high art form instead of merely entertainment, she strove to connect emotions and movement: I spent long days and nights in the studio seeking that dance which might be the divine expression of the human spirit through the medium of the body's movement. She believed dance was meant to encircle all that life had to offer -joy and sadness.

Duncan took inspiration from ancient Greece and combined it with an American love of freedom. Her movement was feminine and arose from the deepest feelings in her body. This is exemplified in her revolutionary costume of a white Greek tunic and bare feet.

Isadora Duncan

In both professional and private life, Duncan flouted traditional mores and morality. She was bisexual and an atheist, and alluded to her communism during her last United States tour, in 1922–23: she waved a red scarf and bared her breast on stage in Boston, proclaiming, This is red! So am I!

Duncan bore two children, both out of wedlock. The first, Deirdre Beatrice, by theatre designer Gordon Craig, and the second, Patrick Augustus, by Paris Singer, one of the many sons of sewing machine magnate Isaac Singer. Both children drowned in the care of their nanny in 1913 when their runaway car went into the Seine.

In 1921, after the end of the Russian Revolution, Duncan moved to Moscow where she met the acclaimed poet Sergei Yesenin, who was 18 years her junior. On May 2, 1922, they married, and Yesenin accompanied her on a tour of Europe and the United States. However, the marriage was brief, and in May 1923 he left Duncan and returned to Moscow. Two years later, on December 28, 1925, Yesenin was found dead in his room in the Hotel Angleterre in St Petersburg in an apparent suicide.

More information: The Vintage News

On the night of September 14, 1927, in Nice, France, Duncan was a passenger in an Amilcar CGSS automobile owned by Benoît Falchetto, a French-Italian mechanic. She wore a long, flowing, hand-painted silk scarf, created by the Russian-born artist Roman Chatov, a gift from her friend Mary Desti, the mother of American film director Preston Sturges. Desti, who saw Duncan off, had asked her to wear a cape in the open-air vehicle because of the cold weather, but she would only agree to wear the scarf. As they departed, she reportedly said to Desti and some companions, Adieu, mes amis. Je vais à la gloire!; but according to the American novelist Glenway Wescott, Desti later told him that Duncan's actual parting words were, Je vais à l'amour. Desti considered this embarrassing, as it suggested that she and Falchetto were going to her hotel for a tryst.

Her silk scarf, draped around her neck, became entangled around the open-spoked wheels and rear axle, pulling her from the open car and breaking her neck. Desti said she called out to warn Duncan about the scarf almost immediately after the car left. Desti brought Duncan to the hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

Duncan was cremated, and her ashes were placed next to those of her children in the columbarium at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. On the headstone of her grave is inscribed École du Ballet de l'Opéra de Paris.

Duncan is known as The Mother of Dance. While her schools in Europe did not last long, Duncan's work had impact in the art and her style is still danced based upon the instruction of Maria-Theresa Duncan, Anna Duncan, and Irma Duncan, three of her six adopted daughters.

More information: BBC

The dancer's body is simply 

the luminous manifestation of the soul.

Isadora Duncan