![]() ![]() Isadora Duncan was a revolutionary artist who influenced the renaissance of the 19th century with her Greek-influenced, free-styled ballet dancing.ĭuncan was given ballet lessons from a very young age. Duncan also began to develop her notion of a natural dance of her time, recognizing the solar plexus as the body's natural movement source.ĭuncan was an American dancer and the founder of the modern ballet school, Isadorables. ![]() Soon, she came up with new methods and costumes varying degrees of success and criticism. This enthralled audiences in theatres and concert halls across Europe. Her books are available from Amazon or Kindle, or can be ordered from most leading book stores and libraries.As a strong opposer of conventional ballet, Isadora Duncan danced barefoot, clad with sheaths influenced by Greek imagery and Italian Renaissance paintings. The floaty draperies she always liked to wear made her the icon she became, but also caused her death when her scarf, billowing out behind her as she rode in an open car, got caught in a wheel and broke her neck.Ĭatherine Broughton is a novelist, a poet and an artist. It is a cruel irony that Isadora was killed by one of her own scarves. Isadora, mad with grief, lived in Switzerland for a while, and then moved to Nice in the south of France. Both children, aged 3 and 7, died in a road accident – drowned, along with their nanny, when the car went in to a river. Isadora had two illigitimate children, by different men, one of whom was of the Singer (sewing machine) family. The poet Sergei Yesenin, eighteen years younger than Isadora The marriage didn’t last he was a violent and emotional man who eventually killed himself – long after Isadora had returned to Europe. Impressed by the Russian Revolution Isadora moved to Russia for a short while, where she met and married a Russian poet. Her style, with its improvisations and primitive tones, was embraced within the arty and thence the fashionable sectors of Paris, and she soon became famous. She rejected classical ballet with its strict rules and regulations, and she danced barefoot, wearing flowing garments made of loose voile, sometimes very scantily clad. Although she tried to encourage boys to dance, her pupils remained 100% girls. The Arts & Crafts movement incorporated the very heathen designs and modes that Isadora loved and, coinciding with freedom of speech, votes for women, shorter and looser clothing, Isadora found herself an icon of the dance form of art.įrom London she moved to Paris where she set up a dance school which she named The Isadorables. There she was caught-up in the great surge of “back to nature” feeling that prevailed in almost all art forms, from the recent pre-Raphaelites with their precision for plant life through to Art Nouveau and its flowing forms. Unhappy with the American way of life, Isadora moved to London in 1899, aged 21. ![]() She was interested in Hellenistic history, and the flowing scarves and simple tunics for which she eventually became famous, date from this “Greek” phase in her life. She was slightly wild, even reckless, and hated conformity in any form. Alongside her mother Isadora gave dance and music lessons, and she tried to get in to theatre. Her parents divorced when she was little and, as far as I am aware, she didn’t see her father again. She was born in San Francisco, the youngest of four children, to a middle-class family of business people. She has her tragic place in history more due to her unusual philosophy and extrovert ways, in an era where conformity was more the norm and, unlike her counterparts such Coco Chanel, does not have a rags-to-riches story to tell, nor stunning invention or breakthrough in science. Isadora Duncan was an American (1877 – 1927) who lived and died in France. Snippets of French history: Isadora Duncan, an American dancer. ![]()
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