1877 - 1927

Isadora Duncan

Origins

• born in 1877 in San Francisco, the youngest of four children

• abandoned by her father when he swindled a bank

• grew up in a childhood filled with imagination and art

• was introduced to classical music, as well as Shakespeare, poetry, literature and art by her mother

• spent many hours playing and dancing upon the beach, and even taught dance classes to younger children as a way to earn a little extra money for the struggling family

at fifteen

at three

Teenage Years

• traveled to Chicago and New York with some of her family members

• performed in various productions such as Mme. Pygmalion, Midsummer's Night Dream or vaudeville shows with limited success

• gave dancing classes to the rich in New York and Newport

A fairy in A Midsummer’s Night Dream

Europe (1899)

• began to find acceptance for her dancing once she moves to London

• performed in private "salons" for ladies of social standing and their guests in London and Paris

• first became a sensation in Budapest, Hungary

• began to perform on great stages throughout Europe

In London, Isadora would spend hoursat the British Museum amongst the Ancient Greek art collections

Educator

• had a driving vision for the education of young children, grounding their learning in art, culture, movement and spirituality as well as traditional academic lessons

• began her first school in Grunewald, Germany in 1904, selecting children from the poorer classes and providing completely for all their physical and materials need from her own pocket.

Isadora with her students

Dance Philosophy

"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. For hours I would stand quite still, my two hands folded between my breast, covering the solar plexus… I was seeking and finally discovered the central spring of all movement, the crater of motor power, the unity from which all diversions of movement are born, the mirror of vision for the creation of dance."

Isadora DuncanMy Life, 1928

Dance Philosophy

“Imagine then a dancer who, after long study, prayer and inspiration, has attained such a degree of understanding that his body is simply the luminous manifestation of his soul; whose body dances in accordance with a music heard inwardly, in an expression of something out of another, profounder world. This is the truly creative dancer; natural but not imitative, speaking in movement out of himself and out of something greater than all selves."

Isadora DuncanThe Philosopher's Stone of Dancing, 1920

Tumultuous Life

• fell for the love of her life, the theatrical designer Gordon Craig, by whom she had Deidre

Gordon Craig

• lived with Paris Singer, the sewing machine heir, who bankrolled her school in Bellevue and fathered her son Patrick

Paris Singer and Isadora

Isadora with her children Deidre and Patrick

• her two children drowned with their Scottish governess in 1913 when the car they were being driven in swerved into the River Seine

Her children’s funeral in Paris

• married the Russian poet Sergei Esinen who was 17 years younger than her in 1922

• divorced Sergei soon after

Isadora and Sergei Esinen on tour

Death

• Isadora dies in 1927, strangled by a scarf when it gets tangled up in the spokes of a Buggatti sports car.

Dance Techniques

• developed her principle of using motions familiar to all races and all cultures, such as walking, running, skipping, jumping, kneeling, reclining and rising

Dance Techniques

• employed a theory of continuous movement that mounted, that spread, and that ended in a promise of rebirth inspired by the Greek ideal

Legacy

• Isadora restored dance to a high place among the arts.

• Breaking with convention, Isadora traced the art of dance back to its roots as a sacred art.

• To the free and natural movements inspired by the classical Greek arts, she incorporated folk and social dancing as well as American athleticism which included skipping, running, jumping, leaping, tossing.

• With free-flowing costumes, bare feet and loose hair, Duncan restored dancing to a new vitality using the solar plexus and the torso as the generating force for all movements to follow.

• Isadora is credited with inventing what later came to be known as Modern Dance.

The Isadorabels