Isadora Duncan (1877-1927) was the “mother of modern dance.” A woman who consistently threw off tradition, she forged her own path through art, and life.
Isadora Duncan (1877-1927) was the “mother of modern dance.” A woman who consistently threw off tradition, she forged her own path through art, and life.
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This month, we’re featuring the stories of queer stars of stage and screen. They’re women who expanded the norms of gender and sexuality in the limelight, and behind the scenes.
Today, we’re talking about the “mother of modern dance.” A woman who consistently threw off tradition, and forged her own path through art, and life.
Let’s meet Isadora Duncan.
Isadora Duncan was born in 1877 in San Francisco. She had three older siblings, and a mother and father – a traditional Catholic family.
But all that changed when she was very young. Isadora’s mother discovered that her husband wasn’t quite who she thought he was, and divorced him. She then renounced her Catholic faith entirely. It was a shocking move, especially for that era.
From then on, Isadora’s mother embraced atheism, and read passages to her children from a popular atheist, Bob Ingersoll. This rebellious start influenced a lot of Isadora’s future. She later wrote:
“I believe that whatever one is to do in one's after life is clearly expressed as a baby. I was already a dancer and a revolutionist”
For much of her life, Isadora’s family lived in varying levels of destitution. When Isadora was a child, her mother worked almost constantly, teaching kids music from their home.
While their mother was occupied, Isadora and her siblings were left to their own devices.
One day, when she was six years old, she decided to gather up a gaggle of local kids – all of them too young to even walk. She stood before them, waving her arms, and teaching them to dance. By the time Isadora was 10, parents were paying for their kids to attend her dance classes.. It became so lucrative that Isadora dropped out of school to teach full-time
Isadora always had a unique manner of dance. She was focused on natural movement, and improvising. She hated the typical rigid, systematic approach of dance instruction. Instead, she taught her young pupils to dance to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem The Arrow and the Song. She recited the poem and told her students to listen to the meaning, and use that to inform their dance.
I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For who has sight so keen and strong,
That it can follow the flight of song?
Later, Isadora wrote: “ My first idea of movement, of the dance, certainly came from the rhythm of the waves.”
Others took notice of her innate talent, but they tried to control it. When she took lessons from one of the top ballet teachers in San Francisco, she asked why ballerinas danced on their toes. The teacher replied: “Because it is beautiful.” Isadora felt the opposite. After three classes, she quit
Isadora decided she needed to leave San Francisco to pursue her art. In the 1890s, she and her mother traveled to Chicago. It was challenging for her to find work as a dancer with her specific, unique style. Often Isadora and her mother went hungry. It got so bad that she reluctantly agreed to dance in a different style – one that involved frills and skirts and kicks. She needed the money.
Eventually, Isadora and her mother continued east, to New York, and then on to London. When they arrived in Europe, the Duncan family carried on much like they did in Chicago or New York: barely getting by, as Isadora danced and met artists. Eventually, when Isadora was 21, they moved to Paris.
In Paris, Isadora continued her quest to find what she called “the divine expression of the human spirit.” Sometimes that meant she would stand still for hours, searching for the source of all movement. Her dancing there caught the attention of wealthy socialites and royalty. But her devotion to the purity of her art meant the family was always teetering on the edge of poverty.
She traveled to Berlin with Loie Fuller, another dancer and artist. By 1902, she had danced her way into a contract in Budapest. Then on to Italy, and finally, she traveled to Greece – a place she had always revered. Whose art and history she tried to emulate in her own work.
Isadora returned to Germany in 1904, and started a dance school for youths. It brought to fruition one of her childhood dreams. During these years in Europe, she also gave birth to two children: a daughter, Deirdre, and a son, Patrick. Tragically, both of her children would die young, in a car crash in 1913. It was a loss she grieved deeply.
In 1921, Isadora traveled to Russia. It was just a few years after the Russian Revolution, and the new Russian government had agreed to support another school of dance.
Of the trip, she wrote: “I had brought no dresses along. I pictured myself spending the rest of my life in a red flannel blouse among comrades equally simply dressed and filled with brotherly love.”
Isadora was always fervently against matrimony. She was inspired by the Soviets’ views on marriage, and her mother’s own experience with divorce. And she wrote that early on in life, she had decided to “fight against marriage and for the emancipation of women and for the right for every woman to have a child or children as it pleased her, and to uphold her right and her virtue.”
Oddly, she did eventually go against those convictions. Not with either of the fathers of her children. But in 1922 she married Sergei Yesenin, a much younger Russian poet. The reasons for such a union are unclear. Some evidence shows that marriage happened so Sergei could get a passport to travel to America. Which is where they eventually went.
While Isadora was performing in the U.S., she regularly shocked the crowds. At one show in particular, she announced that she was bisexual, an atheist, and a communist. During these years, Isadora notably had a relationship with Mercedes de Acosta, a writer well-known for her queer romances – and someone we’ve talked about before on this show.
Throughout her life, Isadora endeavored to create a modern style of dance. But, she was specific about how she went about it. Her dancing was for artists and elites to enjoy, not the masses. And, she was vocal about her disdain for dance styles of people of other races – particularly dances rooted in ancient Egypt and Asia. She also viewed modern ragtime and jazz dancing – which had grown popular thanks to African American dancers – as “deplorable” and “primitive.”
Isadora died suddenly and dramatically on September 14, 1927. She was riding in a sports car in Nice, France. Her scarf billowed behind her and got stuck in the wheel spokes of the car, breaking her neck. She was 50 years old.
There’s very little video or written evidence of Isadora’s dances and technique. And so these days her influence largely lives on, thanks to the many students she taught at her dance schools. Today, dancers still emulate her and dance the pieces she choreographed so long ago.
All month, we’re highlighting queer stars of the stage and screen.
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