But it was Duncan who proved that dance could be taken seriously outside the ballet academy and that a solo woman could take charge of her career.ĭespite her opposition to what she called "the sterile gymnastics" of ballet, Duncan also made a profound impact on classical choreography. Martha Graham's stark, serious modernism may have evolved far beyond Duncan's rhapsodies. Much more important, though, was the ground she opened up for other dance pioneers. Yet, at the height of her fame, there were hundreds of Isadora wannabes - young women in Greek tunics who posed in drawing rooms and skipped on music hall stages. Some writers simply dismiss her as a phenomenon of her time, assuming that descriptions of her greatness were the gushings of an overwrought audience in thrall to a beautiful, half-naked woman. Jean Cocteau wrote: "Isadora's end is perfect."Įven though some of Duncan's dances have been reconstructed, it is hard for history to see her as she was. As she was driving in a sports car, chauffeured by the young man she was lining up to be her next lover, the fringes of Duncan's shawl caught in the back wheel and broke her neck instantly. Her death, at 50, was as stagy as her life. By the time Ashton saw her in London she was drinking heavily and her stage performances were becoming erratic. She danced before European royalty and before Lenin, and suffered a string of personal tragedies, including the drowning of her two children. Notoriously, she took many lovers, including the stage designer Gordon Craig, the multi-millionaire Paris Singer and the Russian poet Sergei Esenin. The fluid lines of her costumes not only liberated Duncan's body but also had the great advantage of showing her naked legs and the occasional glimpse of a breast.īy 1907 Duncan had become a worldwide phenomenon - and her real-life performances started to make headlines as much her stage shows. Even more radically, she danced without shoes or corsets. Her stages were decorated with flattering simplicity - grey voile curtains and soft pink lights. For music she chose Beethoven, Chopin, Wagner - great romantic composers who had never previously been used for the dance stage.īut Duncan was also a very canny operator. For inspiration she read the Greek poets, Nietzsche and Havelock Ellis. But it became her mission to elevate dance into a language of liberation and transformation, to make it a vehicle for big emotions, big ideas and great art.ĭuncan was a natural mover and she had reserves of obsessive energy. As a child she had been taught conventional "fancy" dance steps and could easily have made a profitable career in music hall. In Isadora, however, wackiness proved to be the seedbed of greatness. In 1903 mother and four children decamped to the outskirts of Athens, where they tried to build their own temple and persuade the locals to revert to the customs of their ancient forebears. While most enthusiasts limited their affiliation to wearing sandals and sticking to a simple diet, the Duncans attempted to live the life. The whole Duncan family were romantic idealists and deeply susceptible to the prevailing Greek revivalist craze. She was born in California in 1877 and raised by her mother in a very West Coast bohemian style. And the most astonishing thing was her stillness - she had this knack of holding a stillness and then moving at an exquisitely timed moment that made you crumble."ĭuncan has gone down in history as a hard act to follow - a one-off original who, from mixed motives of exhibitionism and evangelicalism, believed she could change the world. "She was apparently unbelievably charming on stage. I loved that."īut Seymour also had to use her own imagination to capture Duncan's unique spirit. There was a little line drawing of Isadora that he'd painted in a peachy pink to remind him of the colour of her dress. "Fred brought along a huge book of photographs and a programme that he'd saved all those years. Seymour, now 65, recalls that Ashton used a lot of visual imagery to help her re-create Duncan's movement style. And the woman he chose to embody Duncan's memory was the 37-year-old ballerina Lynn Seymour. The work started as a single waltz but Ashton extended it into a suite of five as a gift for Marie Rambert, whose company was celebrating its 50th anniversary. It was these qualities he recalled in 1976 when he created Five Brahms Waltzes. As Ashton later recalled: "She had a wonderful way of running forward in which she, what I call, left herself behind and you felt the breeze running through her hair." Within her seemingly restricted vocabulary of steps, runs and leaps she registered pure sensation, pure feeling. And she moved with a freedom he had never seen before.
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