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49.00 USD
Isadora Duncan (1877-1927) is often called the "Mother of Modern Dance." Born in San Francisco, she was the youngest of four children. Her father had been wealthy and cultured—a dabbler in poetry and music, and an art connoisseur—who made his money in banking and mining, but his fortune crumbled and he was forced to sell the family home in 1878. Duncan's parents divorced in 1880 following an affair between her father and Ina Coolbrith (California's first poet laureate), who was working as a librarian at the time.
Following the divorce, Duncan's mother moved the children to Oakland, where she struggled to support them by working as a seamstress and a piano teacher. The children had no contact with their father. Despite the family's poverty, the children continued to be exposed to music, dance, and literature. A few years later, Duncan met Coolbrith at the public library and discovered in her a mentor, as did many others, including the writer Jack London.
Like her contemporary, Ruth St. Denis (for information on Miss St. Denis, follow link below this paragraph), Duncan studied Delsarte and skirt dancing. She also studied ballet for a short time, but quickly rejected it's formality for movements that felt more natural. And it's clear that movement did come very naturally to her for, at least by some accounts, she began to teach dance to other children when she was as young as six. Certainly, by the age of fourteen, she was much sought after as a dance teacher.
https://www.etsy.com/listing/385538420/ruth-st-denis-pioneer-of-modern-dance?ga_search_query=ruth+st+denis&ref=shop_items_search_1
Rebellious against the restrictions of her small world, and frustrated by the constant sacrifices required by poverty, Duncan longed to travel the world to the places she had, by then, only read about in her books. We can only imagine what passion and persistence it must have taken, but she finally convinced her mother to take her to Chicago in 1895.
Theatrical producer Augustin Daly "discovered" her there, sending her on to New York, but she enjoyed only limited success. So once more, she convinced her family to move, this time to London. At first, London seemed more of the same, until the famed stage actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell spotted her dancing under the stars in a garden with one of her brothers and took the family under her wing.
After being celebrated in London and honored by British royalty, Duncan danced to cheers in Paris, Berlin, and Munich. While in Europe, she studied Greek myth and art, basing her dance costumes on Classical Greek attire. Eventually, she found her way to Athens, where she noted the similarity between the poses she took and those of classical statues. She vowed to build a temple to art on a hill facing the Acropolis. She started teaching Grecian peasant boys to dance as she imagined the dances of ancient Greece and Byzantium to have been, but could not sustain herself and her family that way. On she went to Vienna, and back to Berlin. Her Bohemian lifestyle and celebrity status brought her in contact with the intelligentsia and cultural elite of the time. Rodin, Nijinsky, Gertrude Stein, and Bourdelle, all paid her tribute.
While in Berlin, Miss Duncan opened a school and taught her new style of dance, perhaps thinking of herself as a Grecian priestess, passing ancient glory on to her pupils. Her students became known as the Isadorables and eventually grew into a touring company.
An atheist and bisexual, Duncan constantly challenged social norms. Eschewing marriage, she gave birth to two children, a girl in 1906 and a boy in 1910, whom she adored, fathered by two different lovers.
In 1908, she started working with pianist James Skene, called Hener, of whom she wrote enthusiastically that he was "a pianist of great talent and indefatigable energy." Hener was a follower Aleister Crowley, and in 1910 or 1911, he invited Crowley to a party where Duncan and her closest friend, Mary d'Este (later called Desti, the mother of film director Preston Sturgess) were introduced. Duncan was, apparently, not particularly taken by Crowley. However, Mary was instantly fascinated, sitting on the floor with him and "exchanging electricity" before leaving with him for Zurich's National Hotel. (Desti would later be known as Crowley's "Scarlet Woman.") For the record, whatever Duncan may have thought of him, Crowley waxed rhapsodic over her dancing, which he characterized as a form of “magical unconsciousness.”
In 1913, a terrible accident took the lives of both of Duncan's children. According to Wikipedia, "The children were in the car with their nurse, returning home after lunch with Isadora and Paris Singer. The driver stalled the car while attempting to avoid a collision with another car. He got out to hand-crank the engine, but forgot to set the parking brake. The car rolled across the Boulevard Bourdon, down the embankment and into the river. The children and the nanny drowned." Although Duncan took a few months to mourn quietly with her family, and even tried having another child, only to lose him just days after the birth, stillness was not a natural state for her. Soon she was back on stage, expressing her grief through the dances Mother and Marche Funebre.
By 1916, Duncan was touring across Europe and America, even traveling to South America. She completed her tour in 1920, and in 1921, moved to Moscow. Believing that the Soviet Union was "a free and heroic society," Duncan founded a new school of dance with the support of the new government. In Moscow, she met the young poet Sergei Esenin. Wanting to take him with her on a tour that was to include America, she broke a vow she'd made when she was just twelve and married him. The two traveled together, touring both Europe and America. In America, at the height of the 1920s "Red Menace" scare, Duncan and her husband were labeled Bolshevik agents, a criticism she rejected. As she left America once more, she declared, "Good-bye America, I shall never see you again!"
Duncan and Esenin soon separated, then divorced. By 1925, he was dead, either of suicide or murder. Two years later, in Nice, France, Duncan died of what might be called misadventure. Once more, an automobile was involved. Duncan, heading off in a sporty two-seater convertible driven by French-Italian mechanic Benoît Falchetto, refused her friend Mary Desti's advice to wear a cloak, insisting that her exorbitantly long, red scarf, a gift from Desti that had come to be something of a signature item of clothing for Duncan, was sufficient. Duncan's last words were said to have been, "Adieu, mes amis. Je vais à la gloire!" ("Farewell, my friends. I go to glory!"). Later, Desti shared privately with a friend that Duncan's words had actually been, "Je vais à l'amour" ("I am off to love"), Desti explaining that she had been embarrassed to share with the authorities the more salacious phrase. As the car pulled away, Desti called out to her friend, concerned that the scarf, fluttering in the wind, was a danger. Her fears, sadly, were all too well founded. The scarf became caught in one of the open-spoked wheels and wrapped around the rear axle. Duncan was pulled violently from the car, nearly decapitated, and bashed against the pavement.
The great dancer and much beloved teacher of so many was cremated, her ashes placed beside those of her children.
A lovely card in very nice unposted condition. Please examine our high res scans for detail.
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