biography
| name: |
Duncan, Isadora
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originally Angela Duncan
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| sex:
| female
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| lived:
| (1877–1927)
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| biography:
| Dancer, born in San Francisco, California, USA. Her parents were divorced shortly after her birth and she was raised by her poor but romantic mother, who filled her children with the sounds of music and notions of unconventionality. Isadora showed an early talent for dance, and by age ten left school to teach dancing. She soon began to dance in public, and in 1896 went with her mother to New York City where she joined Augustin Daly's theatre company as a dancer and actress. Disliking traditional dances, in 1898 she began to perform her own free-style of dancing. She made her debut in London (1900), where she became interested in recreating what she perceived as the ancient Greek dances, and by 1902 was performing her own dances on the Continent to great acclaim. She began a dance school in Berlin, tried to start a ‘Temple to the Dance’ in Greece (1903–4), had a child by Gordon Craig, the British stage designer, and performed in Russia (1905–8). Wherever she went she gave lecture-demonstrations of what she called ‘the dance of the future’ based on her improvised movements intended to unite music, poetry, and nature, and usually performed barefoot in revealing Greek tunics and with flowing scarves. Her American tour (1908) was not successful, but she went back to Europe and more acclaim. She also had another child, this one by Paris Singer, heir to the sewing-machine fortune. Tragically both her children drowned while in a car that accidentally rolled into the Seine (1913) and her life became even more erratic, though she showed a new profundity in her dances. In the following years she travelled in the USA, South America, San Francisco, Athens (Greece), dancing and teaching with mixed success, and tried to start a school in Moscow (1921–2). In 1922 she married the much younger Russian poet, Sergei Essenin, but he was mentally unstable and drank his way through her money. Her US tour of 1923 led to charges of her being a Bolshevik, and they fled back to Russia with no money. Essenin deserted her the next year and committed suicide in 1925. Her school for young dancers had been taken over by others and she was penniless, so she went to France, where she gave one legendary final performance in Paris and wrote her autobiography, My Life (1927). She died in Nice, France, as dramatically as she had lived, when her long scarf caught in the spokes of a car wheel, breaking her neck. Although her influence on dance and the arts is debated, to some in her day and since she represents one of life' greatest free spirits. |
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