Considered by many to be the creator of modern dance, Isadora Duncan was a free spirited innovator, who refused to conform to the stiff and regimented forms of traditional dances, such as ballet. Her ultimate dream was to own her own dancing school and teach children the beauty of dance.
"To dance is to live. What I want is a school of life."
Born in San Francisco in 1877, she began dancing as soon as she could walk and was said to be teaching the other school girls how to dance when she was as young as 6. She moved to New York in her early teens to dance with the Augustin Daly theater company but it wasn't until she moved to Europe that she became famous.
Isadorable was how she became known to the press and her fans and although the Americans regarded her as scandalous, (due to her penchant for dancing in little more than a large transparent scarf draped across her body) the Europeans loved her. Her ability to express her self through movement and emotion while on stage was inspiring to everyone and painters,sculptors and other artists fought to capture her essence through their own mediums.
Commercial performance was her least favorite part of dancing and she preferred to focus instead on teaching and building schools. The first 2 schools were in France and Germany both funded by her on/off boyfriend millionaire Paul Singer the heir to the Signer sewing machine fortune. The third school was started and funded by the Soviet Union after she moved there in 1922 but she returned a few years later after becoming discouraged with the country's lack of promised support and poor living conditions.
With Signer she had her second child out of wedlock, the first was born to her previous boyfriend Gordon Craig(who was actually married), a theater set designer and serial adulterer.
Isadora's life was also wrecked with tragedies, the first most notable being the terrible accident in 1913 that claimed the life of her 2 children. The children and the nanny were in a car returning from lunch when the driver stopped to turn the hand crank of the car, forgetting to engage the hand brake the car rolled down the embankment into the Seine river where the children and nanny both drowned.
Inconsolable, Isadora fled to Corfu where her sister and brother were living at the time. From here she went to Tuscany, where she began a lesbian affair (not her first) with actress Eleonora Duse. In her auto -biography (which she wrote in 1927, in a bid to gain some sort of financial stability to her dwindling estate) she also claims that she begged an Italian stranger to sleep with her in the hopes that she would have another child. She did indeed become pregnant, but the baby was stillborn.
In 1920 she met the Russian poet Sergey Aleksandrovich Yesenin and they married 2 years later, despite him being 18 years younger than her. Their marriage was not a happy one, his Russian fans hated her, they were labeled as communists and when Isadora brought him on tour with her in America, they were treated so badly she swore she would never return to America. (she didn't) His presence on her tours was also extremely disruptive due to his alcoholism and drunken rages that left many hotel rooms destroyed and a great amount of negative press for Isadora. He left her in 1924 and committed suicide less than a year later.
By 1925, her scandalous love life, constant public drunkenness, and released autobiography, (that not only shocked people but saw her lose several friends due to her public ousting of their relationships) had all succeeded in making her somewhat of a public mockery. She still insisted on living life excessively, racking up hotel costs for rooms she couldn't pay for and wearing extravagant clothing. One of these extravagances, her ridiculously long silk scarves, would lead to her untimely death in 1927. Getting into her latest love interests convertible car in Nice, France, her scarf became entangled in the wheels and strangled her. (There are unconfirmed reports of her actually being decapitated) She was only 50 years old.
Her legacy and dance style lived on not only through those she inspired but through the 6 dancers she adopted while running the dance school in Germany. All of which took her second name Duncan and were also referred to as the Isadorables. One of them Maria-Theresa Duncan, created the Isadora Duncan international institute in New York in 1977. IDII continues to educate and instruct in the original choreography, style and techniques of Isadora Duncan.
"You were once wild here. Don't let them tame you." -Isadora Duncan teaching her students how to dance freely.
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