Using her last dollars, she bought a ticket on a cattle boat and sailed to Europe in eighteen ninety-nine. Isadora Duncan arrived in London. She visited the British Museum every day for several months. She studied Greek vases and sculpture with their images of ancient Greek women dancing. The people liked what they saw.
Soon art lovers in the city were talking about this new dancer from the United States. People began to think of her as a great talent.
Isadora Duncan began using the music of Chopin, Strauss, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner in her performances. Her fame, and wealth, began to grow. Sometimes she dressed in long white tunics, the kind of clothing worn by ancient Greek women.
She wanted people to see her body as she skipped, jumped and ran barefoot across the stage. Some people criticized her for doing this. They thought it was not moral to dress this way. At the time, most women wore dresses that covered as much of the body as possible, especially the arms and legs. She danced and opened dancing schools. Newspapers wrote about her. Artists created sculpture, jewelry, photographs and paintings of her.
And by nineteen ten, Isadora Duncan had become the most famous dancer in the world. Isadora Duncan was often asked to explain her style of dancing and to say how dance as an art might change over time. In nineteen-oh-three, when she was twenty-six, she made a famous speech in Berlin.
She said:. The movement of the waves, of winds, of the earth is ever in the same lasting harmony. We do not stand on the beach and inquire of the ocean what was its movement of the past and what will be its movement in the future.
Every creature moves according to its nature … that is according to its feelings and physical structure. The movements of the savage were natural and beautiful. So too were the movements of the classical Greeks wearing simple tunics and sandals. Within two years of performing her own choreography, Duncan had achieved both notoriety and success.
In , Isadora settled in Gruenwald outside of Berlin and opened her first dance school. She subsidized the entire establishment with proceeds from her tours. Initially, she enrolled twenty girls and boys, but her effort to include boys was unsuccessful and was finally dropped due to a lack of funds. By this time, Isadora had begun to achieve celebrity status among the artistic and cultural illuminati of her day. Duncan had vowed never to marry, but out of wedlock, she had a daughter named Deirdre whose father was the famous set designer, Edward Gordon Craig.
Although their passionate love affair ended after several years, he was to remain her lifelong friend. Her second child, Patrick, was fathered by a wealthy heir to a sewing machine fortune named Paris Singer. Later, in , Deirdre and Patrick drowned with their nanny as their car rolled into the river Seine. Isadora was devastated. Her dances Mother and Marche Funebre , featuring music by Scriabin and Chopin respectively, were inspired by her loss and conveyed her heartbreak on a universal level.
Between and , she performed solo and toured extensively across Europe and America, including one sojourn to South America.
Here she began to develop her theories of dance education and to organize her famous dance group, dubbed by the press, the Isadorables. When she performed in Russia she made a profound impact on the Russian ballet which immediately via Mikhail Fokine and his Les Sylphides adopted her musical choices and more naturalistic approach to movement.
Although Isadora was drawn to Greek myths and philosophy, her work was grounded in the deep expressive power of the body. She recreated, rather than copied, ancient themes and allowed the body to feel weight and the force of gravity. This striking modernism continued as the tragic events of her live unfolded. After the deaths of her two children she stopped dancing and creating for over a year and when she returned it was with a weighted force and abstraction that connected her initial creations, inspired by nature and antiquity, to large group works and a focus on political struggle.
Isadora and Irma Duncan devoted student and teacher of the next generation traveled to Russia in , at the invitation of the Russian government, where they formed a school for children. There Isadora created and performed works which embodied the fight for long denied freedoms, and dedicated songs and dances to the Russian workers and Russian children.
Duncan struggled emotionally during her later years. She died in Nice, France, on September 14, , when her scarf got caught in the back wheels of an automobile in which she was riding. The same year of her death, Duncan's autobiography was published, My Life , which has gone on to become a critically acclaimed work.
Over the years, many other books, along with several films, have offered accounts on Duncan's life and art. We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Subscribe to the Biography newsletter to receive stories about the people who shaped our world and the stories that shaped their lives.
Josephine Baker was a dancer and singer who became wildly popular in France during the s. She also devoted much of her life to fighting racism. Martha Graham is considered by many to be the 20th century's most important dancer and the mother of modern dance.
0コメント