Isadora Duncan
Iconic dancer, trailblazer, passionate champion of the artistic spirit, Isadora Duncan was born in San Francisco, in 1878. Although poverty stricken, her childhood was filled with art, music, dancing, poetry, and Shakespeare, which she was introduced to by her mother. After her parents divorced in 1880, her mother took her and her three other siblings to Oakland, becoming a music teacher and pianist to earn money. Endowed with a rebellious spirit from very early, Isadora dropped out from her school because she felt her individuality was constricted there. As they were very poor, she, along with her sister, Elizabeth, started giving dancing lessons at the young age of 14, teaching the local children dancing forms that were years ahead of their time.
An unusual child from very early, Isadora Duncan was a dreamer, who loved beauty and poetry, and had a natural sense of rhythm. The early divorce of her parents, and the strife it entailed, shaped her ideas about the institution of marriage, and in fact, she decided that she would never marry when she was just 12 years of age.
Isadora Duncan's Dancing Legacy
When Isadora Duncan was a teenager, she went to Chicago and then to New York, accompanied by a few of her family members. Here, she worked and performed in a number of productions like Midsummer Night's Dream, Pygmalion, and a few vaudeville shows, without much success. Her ideas about dancing were too radical for those times.
Dressed in flowing Grecian tunics and scarves that clung to her form, and dancing barefoot, with her hair loosened, she devised a unique style of dancing that included a lot of improvisation, going against the stiff styles of her time. Her inspiration came from the classics, particularly Greek mythology, along with folk dances, natural forces, and nature itself. She laid stress on the human form, emotion, and creative inventiveness, rejecting the traditional steps of ballet. Terming classical ballet, which was full of rigid rules about formation and posture, as unnatural and therefore ugly, she infused a new athleticism into her dancing by including leaping, jumping, running, tossing, skipping.
It was only after she arrived in London that audiences began accepting her dancing style. She gave performances in the private salons of the women of high society, and her popularity gradually started growing, and she began giving performances in European stages.
Practically single-handedly, Isadora Duncan broke the conventional mores of dancing, imbibing into it a new vitality, by using her body to generate force in all the movements she created. And, although filled with simplicity, her dancing had the depths of the deepest oceans in them. Isadora Duncan, in fact, is recognized as the pioneering spirit of a form of dancing that later was given the name of Modern Dance.
Isadora Duncan's Schools
All through her career, she had a vision of educating young children, particularly girls, according to her ideas, providing them a grounding of culture, art, spirituality, and movement, along with conventional academic studies. She founded three schools, the first in Germany, at Grunewald, which spawned a famous group of students known as 'the Isadorables', who later gave performances with Isadora and also independently. The second school was situated outside Paris, in a chateau, which did not last long. And, the third was built in Moscow soon after the Russian Revolution.
The financial requirements of running her schools entailed Isadora spending time on touring and performing, which meant that she had to leave the charge of her students and schools to her sister, Elizabeth.
Tragedies in Isadora Duncan's Life
Always flouting conventional mores, both in her professional life as well as her personal life, Isadora Duncan had two children, two of her lovers, the first a girl named Deidre with Gordon Craig and the second a boy called Patrick with Paris Singer. However, terrible tragedy struck when both the children were drowned along with their governess in 1913.
Isadora found the years that followed extremely difficult, stopping her beloved dancing for a while. However, with time, she found renewed strength to continue with her artistic life, her dancing, and to her schools and her students.
The final tragedy occurred in 1927, when she was killed in a car accident, when the scarf that she habitually wore got entangled in the open spokes of the wheels, strangling and killing her on the spot. She was just 50 years of age. But, Isadora Duncan's spirit continues to live on in the lasting legacy she has left behind in dance, and in cultural and societal norms.
