Isadora Duncan

Angela Isadora Duncan (San Francisco, May 27, 1878 - Nice, September 14, 1927) was an American dancer and choreographer, considered by many to be the creator of modern dance.

She exploited the capacity of new technologies, dancing in a cloud of silk illuminated by the new electrical systems of theatrical lighting. Isadora Duncan used the ideals of ancient Greek art to inspire more natural forms of dance. Duncan used the human body as an instrument of emotional expression. Her life and her death made Isadora a mythical figure of dance. The daughter of an unhappy marriage, she grew up sheltered from affection and developed an early penchant for dancing. In her autobiography, titled My Life, she wrote: “I was born on the seashore. My first idea of movement and dance surely came from the rhythm of the waves...». She at eleven years old she dropped out of school to pursue her passion and at seventeen she headed for New York.

Childhood and youth

Isadora Duncan was born in the Californian city of San Francisco, where her parents had arrived as immigrants from Ireland. She is the youngest of the four children of the marriage formed by Joseph and Dora Duncan: Elizabeth (born in 1871) Augustin (1873) and Raymond (1874). Her father, Joseph Charles Duncan, was a Sacramento banker and mining businessman who left the family when Isadora was still very young. The parents' divorce created a difficult situation of economic hardship in the Duncan home, a fact that apparently influenced the family's distancing from the Catholic faith they had professed (Isadora declared herself several times during her life as a "convinced atheist"). »). Her mother, Dora Duncan, was a piano teacher and gave lessons to support the family. In 1884 her mother founded a dance school in Oakland, where at that time she was living with her four children. At this school, Elizabeth soon becomes the head dance teacher. Later Raymond also collaborates teaching there.

At the age of eleven, Isadora Duncan dropped out of school and joined her sister Elizabeth to also work in the dance school with the little ones. Mozart, Schubert and Schumann predominated in the musical lessons, which had an indisputable influence on Isadora's subsequent artistic development.

According to her biographers, Isadora was a solitary and withdrawn girl who used to play on the beach while watching the sea. Her fascination with the movement of the waves would be the germ of her art in later years. The girl Isadora then imagined movements of the hands and feet that accompanied the waves of the San Francisco Bay, and that would be the origin of her peculiar style in her Dance. The influence of the sea and her childhood games are recorded in her Autobiography of Her, published in 1927. When Isadora reached adolescence, her family moved to Chicago, where Duncan studied. classic dance. The family lost everything they owned in a fire and moved again, this time to New York, where Duncan joined playwright Augustin Daly's theater company. In 1898, her father died along with his third wife, Mary, and his twelve-year-old daughter Rosa, in the tragic shipwreck of the SS Mohegan.

At the turn of the century, Isadora convinces her mother and sister to allow the family to emigrate to Europe. The Duncans left in 1900 and settled at first in London and later in Paris.

Expressionism and dance

During her time in London, Isadora Duncan, always restless and self-taught, spends long hours in the British Museum. She is fascinated by the artistic expressions of ancient Greece, from which she takes her forms, which will later be characteristics of her dance, such as tilting her head back like the bacchantes. In her first step through Europe she commented:

"I have come to convince myself that the constant atmosphere of luxury brings us to the neurasthenia"

Isadora Duncan on a beach

It is at this time that Isadora's unique style begins to consolidate. It is a dance far removed from the classical patterns known up to then, incorporating staging and movements that had more to do with a philosophical vision of life perhaps linked to expressionism (an incipient line of artistic thought at that time), and therefore both to a search for the essence of art that can only come from within.

Isadora was fully aware that her style represented a radical break with classical dance, and in this sense she saw herself as a revolutionary forerunner in an artistic context of general revision of ancient values. At the same time that her style was consolidating, Isadora studied ancient dance and literature in depth through museums, particularly the Louvre in Paris, the National Gallery in London and the Rodin Museum.

The themes of Isadora's dances were classical, often related to death or pain, but in opposition to the previously known classical dance themes, which revolved around heroes, goblins, and goblins.

Her staging was also revolutionary, and in a certain minimalist sense: just a few light blue fabrics instead of the spectacular decorations of the productions known up to then and a flowing tunic that revealed the body and glimpsed the bare legs and bare feet, as opposed to the tutu dresses, pointe shoes and pink stockings de rigueur in classical ballet. Isadora herself danced without makeup and with her hair loose, while the usual thing at that time was to make up conscientiously and collect her hair in a bun or bun.

It is understandable that Isadora's style initially shocked the public of the moment, accustomed to the language of classical dance. Isadora had to put up with boos and interruptions of various kinds in her dance sessions for some time, the controversy that broke out during a tour of South America in 1916 being notable in this sense.

In Argentina

Arriving in Buenos Aires for the first time in 1916. She formed the revolution, the Californian dancer was 38 years old at the time and her fame and success had reached, particularly in Europe, extraordinary heights. But the excruciating blow it had dealt her with was the death in 1913 of her children, a seven-year-old and a three-year-old, in a car accident near Paris, altering her life in a definitive way. Isadora's extravagances—including a complete disregard for money, whether she had it or not—became more pronounced, and so did her disinterest in social conventions.

The ship that brought her from Rio de Janeiro docked in Buenos Aires at the beginning of July and Isadora encountered a first difficulty: the curtains and carpets that accompanied her recitals had not arrived and she had to order new ones because the first performance it was scheduled for a few days later. The cost was approximately $4,000 and since she did not have cash to meet this unexpected expense, she arranged to pay on credit. The orchestral scores of her programs were also traveling from France, but it was easy to replace them thanks to the help of the director of the Buenos Aires Conservatory, who lent the scores from the institution's library.

Although she had little money, Isadora stayed at the Plaza Hotel and while preparing for her concerts she began touring the city. Her biographer, the American Frederika Blair, recounts that she visited not only the elegant neighborhoods, "but also La Boca, the center of the city's glittering nightlife (sic)."

Spectators of her first concert, on July 12, received Isadora's dances somewhat coldly. The Buenos Aires public was accustomed to the language of ballet, even in its innovative forms —Vaslav Nijinsky with the Ballets Rusos had performed at the Teatro Colón three years earlier with colossal success— and found Isadora's technique poor and limited. On the eve of the second concert, she went with a group of friends to a nightclub and there, driven by the excitement of the moment, she launched into dancing to the national anthem. The next day the manager of the Coliseum claimed that she had breached her contract with him by giving that unexpected performance and threatened to cancel the next concert. It took all the tact of Dumesnil, the tour's musical director, for the manager to reverse her decision.

However, other difficulties loomed. Isadora wanted to dedicate her third program to Wagner and her musical director, who was French, refused to cooperate. Dumesnil had a license from his country's army and considered that it would cause censorship if he participated in a program with works by a German composer in wartime. But, although they did get another director, the Wagnerian program alienated many of Isadora's admirers, just as pro-Germans had been affected by her interpretation of The Marseillaise from her.

During the concert, some of the audience began to speak loudly. Isadora then stopped dancing and addressed them angrily, saying that she had already been warned that South Americans did not understand anything about art: « Vous n & # 39; êtes que de Négres & # 3. 4; (“They are only blacks”), she rebuked them, using a very derogatory form — négres . This event caused the administrator to cancel the remaining functions. Before leaving for Montevideo, Isadora had to leave her ermine coat and her emerald earrings as a guarantee for the hotel payment, a payment that she could not make. The fur and jewelry had been gifts from her ex-lover Paris Singer, an extraordinarily wealthy man, heir to the Singer sewing-machine empire, and who had financed many of Isadora's artistic ventures.

In Russia

He sympathized with the social and political revolution in the new Soviet Union, so in 1922 he moved to Moscow. His international fame drew attention and welcomed the artistic and cultural effervescence of the new regime. The Russian government's failure to make her follow through on extravagant promises of support for Duncan's work, coupled with the country's Spartan living conditions, sent her back to the West in 1924.

Private life

Isadora Duncan with Serguéi Esenin in 1923.

Isadora Duncan had an intimate life that was as unconventional as the expression of her art, and always lived on the fringes of morality and traditional customs. She married already in maturity with the Russian poet Sergei Esenin, seventeen years her junior. Esenin accompanied her on a trip to Europe, but his violent nature and his addiction to alcohol put an end to the marriage. The following year Esenin returned to Moscow, where he suffered a deep crisis as a result of which he was admitted to a mental institution. He committed suicide shortly after (December 28, 1925), although it has been speculated that he was murdered. Isadora herself chose to be a single mother, and she had two children. Although she did not want to reveal the name of her parents, it is known that they were theatrical designer Gordon Craig and Paris Singer, son of sewing machine magnate Isaac Merritt Singer. Isadora's private life was never exempt from scandals, nor from tragedies. The most gruesome was certainly the death of her two children, Deirdre and Patrick, who drowned in an accident in the Seine River in Paris in 1913, when the car in which they were traveling with her nanny plunged into the water.

It is rumored that Isadora Duncan was bisexual, and had relationships with some well-known women of her time, such as the poet Mercedes de Acosta or the writer Natalie Barney. This had a house for their costume parties where many relevant characters of the time passed, such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Ezra Pound, Djuna Barnes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mina Loy, Doris Wilde, Jean Cocteau, Peggy Guggenheim, Sylvia Beach, Scott Fitzgerald and Rainer Maria Rilke. Many other unconfirmed romances with other women were attributed to him, such as actress Eleonora Duse or Lina Poletti, although some who knew her doubt these attributions.. Victor Seroff, Isadora's last romantic partner, comments in "The Real Isadora", the biography he wrote about her, that these statements are blatant lies, stating that before his death he was joined by a retinue of homosexuals flatterers who sought her out for her maternal personality to comfort them in their love affairs and that she, always willing to help, supported them and accepted that they accompany her wherever she went, as long as she was willing to pay the bills and which she did with pleasure for his generous personality. As for the lesbian entourage who joined her as well, in the years before her death, Seroff says that Isadora never agreed with the French view that lesbianism was an "amusant," that he felt a certain revulsion towards it; natural reaction of any heterosexual woman." However, Seroff comments that after her death these acquaintances of hers allowed themselves to publish stories totally fabricated by "their particular brand of imagination of hers." Seroff rejects the assertions of Mercedes De Acosta (poet and lesbian) that he helped her write her autobiography and that Isadora would never have submitted to such circumstances as described by the Latin American in her autobiography. Isadora herself describes in "My Life" her when she meets Loie Fuller and watches as her entourage of pretty girls caressed her hands and gave her kisses. In my extreme simplicity I remembered that my mother, despite the great love she felt for us, almost never caressed us, and I was truly astonished by such displays of affection, new to me.& # 34; And when she was on tour with Loie she came to the conclusion before parting ways with the tour & # 34;... what did I have to do in that company of beautiful, although insane, ladies? & # 34; These comments are not in line with someone who participates in such activities. Mary Desti, her best friend and who was with her for the last two years of her life, never comments on lesbian relationships, nor does Irma Duncan, her most loyal student who accompanied her and lived with her. her in Russia. Towards the end of her life, Isadora's career had begun to decline. These were times of serious financial problems and various sentimental scandals for her, accompanied by some episodes of public drunkenness. All of this kept her away from her friends and her public, and finally from her own art. Isadora lived those final years between Paris and the Mediterranean coast, leaving considerable debts in hotels or spending short periods in rented apartments. Some of her friends tried to convince her to write her autobiography, hoping to alleviate a bit of her already worrisome financial situation. One of these friends was the writer Sewell Stokes, who met Isadora in her last years, when she was already practically alone and broke. Stokes later wrote a book about the dancer: Isadora, an intimate portrait. Isadora Duncan's autobiography was finally published in 1927.

Death

The tragic circumstances surrounding the death of Isadora Duncan have contributed greatly to the consolidation of the myth, and are shrouded in a certain mystery that history has not been able to fully dispel.

Isadora Duncan died in a car accident in Nice (France) on the night of September 14, 1927, at the age of fifty. She was strangled to death by the long scarf she was wearing around her neck, when it became entangled in the tire of the car in which she was traveling. This accident gave rise to Gertrude Stein's scathing comment: "Impairment can be dangerous." Duncan was riding in the passenger seat of an Amilcar car owned by a young Italian mechanic, Benoît Falchetto, whom she had wryly nicknamed "Bugatti" (the make of the car is up for debate, but the general opinion is that it was a Bugatti). a French Amilcar GS model from 1924. The legend later transformed the brand and turned it into a Bugatti, much more expensive and luxurious). Before getting into the vehicle, Isadora uttered some words allegedly remembered by her friend Maria Desti and some of her colleagues: « Adieu, mes amis. Je vais à la gloire!" ("Goodbye, my friends, I'm going to glory!"). However, according to the diaries of the American novelist Glenway Westcott, who was in Nice at the time and visited Duncan's body in the mortuary (his diaries are in the collection of the Beineke Library at Yale University), Desti he admitted to lying about the dancer's last words, confessing to Westcott that they had been: "Je vais à l'amour" ("I'm going to love"). Apparently, Desti considered these inappropriate words as a last historical testimony from her illustrious friend, since they indicated that Isadora and Benoît were leaving for one of her romantic encounters. Whatever his words, as Falchetto started the car, Duncan's dainty scarf (a hand-painted stole, a gift from his friend Desti, long enough to wrap around his neck and waist and billow outside the car), it became entangled between the spoked rim and the rear axle of the car causing Isadora's death by strangulation.

In the obituary published in the New York Times newspaper on September 15, 1927, the following could be read:

The car was at full speed when the strong silk stela that blinded her neck began to roll around the wheel, dragging Mrs. Duncan with a terrible force, which caused her to get fired on a side of the vehicle and rushed over the cobblestone. Thus it was dragged several tens of meters before the driver, alerted by the screams, managed to stop the car. Medical aid was obtained, but it was found that Isadora Duncan had already died for strangulation, and it happened almost instantly.

Isadora Duncan was cremated, and her ashes were placed in the columbarium of the Père-Lachaise cemetery (in Paris).

In the Pantheon of San Fernando, in Mexico City, there is a niche paying homage to his name.

Repertoire

Her performances were an original recreation of the dances of classical Greece. According to José Subirá: "Everyone who had seen her dance always remembered with emotion her choreographic versions, whose repertoire included Redemption by César Franck, Poem of Ecstasy by Scriabin, Chopin's Funeral March, Schubert's Death of Adonis and Wagner's Death of Isolde.