During the 1920s, ballet was all acrobatics and gymnastics, and there was no grace to the dance. Then, Isadora Duncan appeared. She refused to follow the rules but instead styled her dance after the ancient Greeks, using her whole body to dance passionately and with grace.
Isadora was born in San Francisco, California, in 1878, the youngest of four children. Her father left the family shortly after her birth and their mother struggled to raise the small brood. Although difficult, Isadora’s life was filled with art, poetry, and music. She was dancing as soon as she could walk. To earn a little extra money for the struggling family, she even began teaching at the young age of 5, when she gathered all the little girls in the neighborhood and taught them to sway their arms to express the movement of the ocean waves.
Isadora also read constantly. In her reading she discovered ancient Greece, and she was inspired by its art. She was impressed by how natural it was, and the way it wasn’t restrained by any rules appealed to her. It became her dream to imitate this in dance.
From an early age, Isadora had a rebellious spirit. She dropped out from her school because she felt her individuality was constricted there. When her mother took her to classes by a famous ballet teacher, she asked the teacher why she had to stand on her toes. When he replied “Because it is beautiful”, she retorted that it was ugly and against human nature and after the third lesson she left his class, never to return.
Later in her teens, Isadora decided she wanted to move east and become a dancer, so her family packed everything up and moved to Chicago with barely enough money for the trip. She got a few jobs dancing, and she was praised by a few for her interesting style, but most people wanted nothing to do with it. It wasn’t the “right” way to dance. Chicago wasn’t working for her.
To show the world her dance, Isadora moved once again, this time to New York. New York was more of a success for her. She found fame for a short time in the city, but was quickly forgotten. After all, her ideas about dancing were too radical for those times.
She then traveled to London with her family on a cattle-boat in search of artistic fulfillment. Money was scarce and they faced starvation, but Isadora would endure any hardship for her dance, which she characterized as life itself. Dressed in flowing Grecian-inspired tunics and scarves, Isadora danced barefoot at garden parties and other small social gatherings for ladies of social standing and their guests. Gradually her popularity grew, and London became the first place Isadora was ever really accepted. She moved from the provate salons to the great stages, and was soon touring throughout Europe and America.
Already famous and sought after in every country, Isadora had a triumphal career by the age of 30. But she wanted to do more. She considered it her mission to pass on the natural way of dancing and living. Besides, she had always 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. Therefore, she started opening dance schools to teach children in the context of culture and art. Often, she would provide for all of their needs out of her own pocket. The children went on to perform in many great dance companies throughout the world and Isadora’s ideals of dance were thus passed on to the later generations.
Even though at one time her dance was thought of as crude and unacceptable, Isadora Duncan had made her mark on the world of dance through her termination and perseverance. Even the president, Theodore Roosevelt, loved her, as he put it, “Isadora Duncan seems to me as innocent as a child dancing through the garden in the morning sunshine and picking the beautiful flowers of her fantasy.” |
