Isadora Duncan, adverse to fortune in private life, and yet a great artist who paved the way for modern dance and that he had one strong influence on ballet and theater today. She moved with wistful grace and irresistible intensity in the new style she had created, so fluid, so different from the rigid forms of ballet. He felt that the ballet of the time distorted the human figure, and he knew how to influence him to accommodate his own principles of natural and expressive movement. The way he moved his hands and arms and the way he ran across the stage suited his ballets well.
She liked to be talked about, even at the cost of scandal, but she was always very serious about her work
Born in San Francisco in 1878, the youngest of four siblings, Dora Angela Duncan remembered her childhood, landlords claiming back rents and hasty moves from one hovel to another. Her father had abandoned the family shortly before she was born, but her mother kept her brood together by giving piano lessons and knitting mittens and scarves which the boys sold from door to door.
Dorita, as they called her then, began to improvise small dances to the tune of romantic compositions, when he was barely able to walk. At ten he had already left school and was starting to give dance lessons. As a teenager she was slender with long legs and a wild beauty. She was dancing in a Chicago roof garden when she met impresario Augustin Daly, who offered her a position in his New York repertory company.
Unsuccessful as an actress, she soon launched into a string of dance performances
The scandals were not long in coming. It was that time when the word "leg" was never pronounced in good society. Yet here is Isadora twirling around the stage with bare arms, neck and legs, and just a few flaps of chiffon here and there. Forty ladies walked out, indignant, in the middle of a performance. Few artists ever had such venomous reviews. One concluded with the announcement of Isadora's departure for London, "which is sad, considering that, at this moment, we are at peace with England." However Isadora fascinated London from the beginning. Her vibrant beauty and sensual freshness conquered London society. She danced in private homes, and three of her performances were sponsored by none other than Princess Helena, daughter of Queen Victoria. In Paris, the reception was equally enthusiastic.
The sculptor Augusto Rodin drew her portrait and said of her: " He borrowed from nature that force which cannot be called talent, but which is genius"
But his chaotic private life was in stark contrast to his artistic success. His tragedy was that he could not reconcile love and art; he couldn't live without one or the other. In Budapest, in 1902, a Hungarian actor wanted to marry her. After a stormy relationship, he became convinced that the man was not for her. She then met Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria who immediately offered her his Italian villa. Isadora accepted and court circles were scandalized. An even greater cause of scandal was the bathing suit she was wearing. In those days the ladies bathed in the sea modestly dressed in black, with mid-length skirts, black stockings and shoes. Isadora appeared in a light blue tunic that reached just above her knees, low-cut, with thin shoulder pads, without stockings or shoes. The prince used to walk along the seaside coast, with opera glasses aimed at Isadora, murmuring: “Ah, la Ducan! Gorgeous, wonderful!"
Idol of Europe, Duncan now demanded and received enormous compensation. Berlin hailed her as the "Holy, divine Isadora!"
Her shows inspired by Greek antiquity and the Renaissance period, in which she debuted barefoot, with loose hair and wrapped in sarongs and flowing veils, soon had great success throughout Europe.
It was right here that met production designer Gordon Craig, who was to become the father of her first child, Deirdre (1906). In Munich the students unharnessed their horses and pulled his carriage through the streets after applauding the performance with overwhelming enthusiasm. Instead of spending her money on clothes and furs and jewelry, Isadora wanted to adopt 20 poor girls and found a small school in Germany to teach them his theories on art and movement. He thought he could give them a better life, so that later they could spread joy and beauty, like a flash of light on this sad planet.
Extravagant as it was, the idea of school haunted her to the end of her days
Wherever he went and whatever he did, school was his main interest and he tried to raise funds for that purpose. At that time she, Isidora, went to conquer Russia, the cradle of the classical ballet which she detested. In her simple costumes, against the backdrop of simple drapery, she danced to music by Gluck, Bethoven, Chopin. The most famous Russian ballerinas, including Anna Pavlova, came to see her. An authoritative expert on Sergei Diahilev himself stated that Isadora had given an irreparable jolt to the classical ballet of Imperial Russia. Prince Peter Lieven, patron of ballet, said that she was the first to express the meaning of music in dance, the first to dance to music and not to dance to the accompaniment of music.
At the peak of success, Isadora met Paris Singer one of the heirs of the very rich Singer, of sewing machines. Although he was married and the father of five children, Isadora had a son, Patrick, by him
At the time he had a splendid career, money for school, two children, fame, then came April 19, 1913. Isadora's two children, aged seven and two, drove to Versailles with their nanny. At a bend along the Seine, the car's engine stalled. The driver, without applying the handbrake, got out to turn the handle to restart the engine. The driverless car leapt forward and plunged into the Seine, which was 12 meters deep at that point. It took several hours for the car to be found. That night, after the bodies of Deirdre and Patrick were brought to Isidora's studio, hundreds of Fine Arts students covered the bushes outside the studio with white flowers. At her funeral Isadora kept repeating. “ No tears, no tears. I want to be brave enough to make death beautiful, to comfort all mothers who have lost their little ones.”
Since then his life has been a continuous hectic moving from Paris to New York, Naples, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, San Francisco, Athens. At the outbreak of the First World War, the Marseillaise became his greatest triumph. He danced it for the first time in 1916 at the Trocadéro in Paris, while German guns pounded Verdun.
For the show, Isadora wore all red
His deep emotion transpired from the intense and superbly evocative movements. When came the phrase "To arms, citizens!” the audience, moved to tears, rose to their feet and intoned the chorus fervently. Leaving one breast uncovered she looked like the personification of Freedom. However, the recognition Isadora most wanted was that of America, and this she never got. It astounded Indianapolis, Louisville and Milwaukee.
In his frank and naive way he asked: “Why should one part of my body be more immoral than another?"
She said in an interview in Boston that she would refer to dancing naked rather than strutting around in the provocative semi-attire of chorus girls. To a Boston audience she said: “You here, were once savages. Don't let yourself be tamed. You don't know what beauty is". He tore at his robe and pointed to his body saying: "This, this is beauty!"
She caused further furor when in 1922, she married the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin, 17 years her junior. He was one of the most exquisite poets of his time, but also a supreme egoist and a heavy drinker. He had been idolized in his homeland, the Soviet Union, but the one who shone, every time the two appeared together, was Isadora, and Yesenin couldn't stand this. Her jealousy of her bordered on her paranoia, to the point of using vicious violence on her, robbing her, betraying her and finally even trying to kill her. One evening in Berlin, Isadora was weeping over an album of photographs of her missing children when Yesenin came and, in a drunken fury, grabbed the album, threw it into the fire and went out. Finally at the Angleterre Hotel in Leningrad, in the same room where he and Isadora had spent their honeymoon, Yesenin hanged himself. But before him she cut the veins in her wrist and wrote his last poem in his blood: "Goodbye, my friend, goodbye!” You are still in my heart, darling.”
While Isadora was not his only widow, the Soviet judiciary discovered that she was nevertheless Yesenin's legitimate heir. For five volumes of her poetry she was awarded 300.000 rubles in royalties. She was almost penniless, but she gave the money to his mother and sisters.
The shadows of twilight now fell upon her
The once flaming hair was streaked with reddish dye. She was plagued by superstition and obsessed with the idea that blackbirds were messengers of death. She insisted she saw three blackbirds circling the ceiling of her children's room just before they drowned.
But even in those autumn days of 1927, in Nice, Isadora never lost her zest for life. One evening she had an appointment for an after-dinner drive in a Bugatti sport. While waiting for her he opened her gramophone, the record came down it was the hit of the moment "Bye Bye Blackbird”. She was dancing when her escort arrived. She took the long red shawl and characteristically threw it around her neck, letting it fall over one shoulder to the ground. As she got into the car she waved goodbye to her friends. “Goodbye” he cried laughing “I'm going to the Fatherland."
His last words
The low two-seater lurched forward, the end of the shawl caught on the spokes of a rear wheel and snapped her neck in an instant. As the shawl was severed as her body was lifted from the car, the gramophone echoed tinny across the cobbled street: "Put away all my sorrows, all worries, I'm going away singing slowly ... Goodbye, dear blackbird, goodbye."
