![]() This was not the last of what, with pride, she called her “famous speeches.” When she became a professional, she routinely ended her concerts by coming out in front of the curtain and describing to the audience, at length, how profound her way of dancing was, as opposed to the triviality of other ways-she called ballet “an expression of degeneration, of living death”-and on how, therefore, they should contribute to the expenses of her school. In My Life she recalls that in elementary school she gave an impromptu lecture in front of the class on how there was no Santa Claus, whereupon she was sent home by an angry teacher. Her good friend Max Eastman, editor of The Masses, wrote of the “admirable force of character with which Isadora insisted on being half-baked.”įrom childhood, Duncan saw herself as a liberator, opposed but never vanquished by philistines. She told her students, “You are walking slowly towards the light.” She spoke constantly of her “Idea,” without specifying what it was. To disseminate the revelation she established several schools, where, she said, her purpose was not so much to create dancers as to breed souls. If my Archangel and I had pursued these studies further, I have no doubt that we might have arrived at the spontaneous creation of movements of such spiritual force as to bring a new revelation to mankind. Often a curious psychosis existed in the theater such as I had not known before. Writing about her mid-career collaboration with the pianist Walter Rummel (who was also her lover-she called him her Archangel) she says:Īs sound and gesture flowed up to the Infinite, another answer echoed from above…. ![]() Of the personal qualities that Duncan brought to her art, the most powerful was a species of Platonism, a vision of dance as an exalted and abstract entity that her own creations merely, but nobly, aspired to. One is reminded of Emma Hamilton’s “attitudes.” Here the performers, dressed, like Dalcroze’s students, in Greek tunics, struck poses modeled on ancient sculpture and thereby represented human emotions. More important for Duncan was something that, today, seems more quaint, the Delsarte System of Expression, invented by François Delsarte, a French teacher of acting and singing, in the late nineteenth century and popular in the United States during Duncan’s youth. In fact, Duncan had developed her style by the time she saw any Dalcroze demonstrations. At the end of the nineteenth century, a Swiss music teacher, Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, had developed a system, “rhythmic gymnastics” (widely known as eurhythmics), that, later, would come to seem an antecedent of Duncan’s Greek-nymph look. A few imaginative soloists were at work in the seedbed, notably Loie Fuller and Ruth St. As for modern dance, it didn’t exist yet. This was the case, preeminently, with classical ballet, which, until Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes arrived in Paris in 1909, was scorned by people of taste. This year, it will be republished, with some changes.Īt least during Duncan’s early career, most concert dance, in both the United States and Western Europe, was a frivolous business, given over to the simplest entertainment values: spectacle, good cheer, thighs. It is reported that her first typist could be heard saying, “Miss Duncan, you don’t mean to say this…you simply cannot.” In August or September, she sent the typescript, entitled My Life, to Liveright. ![]() For six months she worked on the book, dictating, as a rule, and usually after a number of drinks. In early 1927 she signed a contract with the Liveright Publishing Corporation, in New York. Partly, no doubt, to improve her financial situation, she decided to do something that she had talked about for years: write her memoirs. She went to parties in order to eat the canapés. Her most recent and thorough biographer, Peter Kurth, quotes Nicolas Nabokov to the effect that, already in the early 1920s, “her baggy face was glistening and red.” Her hair was patchily hennaed her body, heavy now, was draped in tatty shawls. She was barely performing any longer, and years of hard living-above all, heavy drinking-had coarsened her looks. Duncan was living in a rented studio in Nice. ![]() But by 1927, when she was fifty, all that was over. She was also a beauty, leaving behind her a trail of glamorous lovers. ![]() In her youth Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) more or less created what we now call American modern dance, and she soon became famous for it. ![]()
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