Isadora Duncan (May 27, 1877 — September 14, 1927) was a dancer, considered by many to be the creator of
modern dance. Born in the United States, she lived in Western Europe and the
Soviet Union from the age of 22 until her death at age 50. In the United States she was popular only in New York, and only later in her life. She performed to acclaim throughout Europe.
Duncan's fondness for flowing scarves was the cause of her death in an automobile accident in
Nice, France when she was passenger in an
Amilcar, and her silk scarf, draped around her neck, became entangled around the open-spoked wheels and rear axle, breaking her neck.
[1]
Angela Isadora Duncan was born in
San Francisco, California, the youngest of four siblings. Her older brothers were
Augustin Duncan and
Raymond Duncan; her older sister was Elizabeth Duncan. Their parents were Joseph Charles Duncan (1819–1898), a banker, mining engineer and connoisseur of the arts, and Mary Isadora Gray (1849–1922). Soon after Isadora's birth, her father lost the bank and he was publicly disgraced. Her parents were divorced by 1880 (the papers were lost in the
San Francisco earthquake), and her mother Dora moved with her family to
Oakland. She worked there as a pianist and music teacher. In her early years, Duncan did attend school but, finding it to be constricting to her individuality, she dropped out. As her family were very poor, both she and her sister gave dance classes to local children to earn extra money.
[citation needed]
In 1895 Duncan became part of
Augustin Daly's theater company in New York. She soon became disillusioned with the form. In 1899 she decided to move to Europe, first to
London and then a year later, to
Paris. Within two years she achieved both notoriety and success. Her father, along with his third wife and their daughter, died in the 1898 sinking of the British passenger steamer
SS Mohegan.
[citation needed]
In 1909 Duncan moved to two large apartments at 5 rue Danton, where she lived on the ground floor and used the first floor for her dance school. She rejected traditional ballet steps to stress
improvisation, emotion and the human form. Duncan believed that
classical ballet, with its strict rules of posture and formation, was "ugly and against nature"; she gained a wide following that allowed her to set up a school to teach.
Duncan became so famous that she inspired artists and authors to create sculpture, jewelry, poetry, novels, photographs, watercolors, prints and paintings of her. When the
Théâtre des Champs-Élysées was built in 1913, her likeness was carved in its
bas-relief over the entrance by sculptor
Antoine Bourdelle and included in painted
murals of the nine
muses by
Maurice Denis in the auditorium.
In 1916 Duncan traveled to
Brazil and performed at
Rio de Janeiro's
Theatro Municipal in August and at
São Paulo's
Teatro Municipal on September 2, 3 and 5 with pianist
Maurice Dumesnil. Writer and journalist Paulo Barreto, known as
João do Rio, claimed to have seen her dance "naked" in the forest of
Tijuca, in front of Rio's most famous
waterfall..
[citation needed]
In 1922 she acted on her sympathy for the social and political revolution in the new
Soviet Union and moved to
Moscow. She cut a striking figure in the increasingly austere post-revolution capital, but her international prominence brought welcome attention to the new regime's artistic and cultural ferment. The Russian government's failure to follow through on extravagant promises of support for Duncan's work, combined with the country's spartan living conditions, sent her back to the West in 1924.
Throughout her career Duncan did not like the commercial aspects of public performance, regarding touring, contracts and other practicalities as distractions from her real mission: the creation of beauty and the education of the young. A gifted, if unconventional
pedagogue, she was the founder of three schools dedicated to teaching her dance philosophy to groups of young girls (a brief effort to include boys was unsuccessful). The first, in
Grunewald, Germany, gave rise to her most celebrated troupe of pupils, dubbed the
Isadorables, who took her surname and subsequently performed both with Duncan and independently. The second school was short lived prior to
World War I at a château outside Paris. She founded the third while in Moscow in the wake of the
Russian Revolution.
Duncan's teaching and her pupils caused her both pride and anguish. Her sister, Elizabeth Duncan, took over the German school and adapted it to the Teutonic philosophy of her German husband. The Isadorables were subject to ongoing hectoring from Duncan over their willingness to perform commercially; Lisa Duncan was permanently ostracized for performing in nightclubs. The most notable of the group, Irma Duncan, remained in the
Soviet Union after Isadora Duncan's departure. She ran the school there, angering her mentor Duncan by allowing students to perform in public and commercial venues.
Later life
By the end of her life Duncan's performing career had dwindled and she became as notorious for her financial woes, scandalous love life and all-too-frequent public drunkenness as for her contributions to the arts. She spent her final years moving between Paris and the Mediterranean, running up debts at hotels. She spent short periods in apartments rented on her behalf by a decreasing number of friends and supporters, many of whom attempted to assist her in writing an autobiography. They hoped it might be sufficiently successful to support her. In a reminiscent sketch,
Zelda Fitzgerald recalled how she and
her husband sat in a Paris cafe watching a somewhat drunk Duncan. He would speak of how memorable it was, but what Zelda recalled was that while all eyes were watching Duncan, Zelda was able to steal the salt and pepper shakers from the table.
[8]
In her book
Isadora, an Intimate Portrait,
Sewell Stokes, who met Duncan in the last years of her life, describes her extravagant waywardness. Duncan's
autobiography My Life was published in 1927. Composer
Percy Grainger called Isadora's autobiography a "life-enriching masterpiece."
[
Death
Duncan's fondness for flowing scarves was the cause of her death in an automobile accident in
Nice, France, at the age of 50. The scarf was hand-painted silk by the Russian-born artist
Roman Chatov, and was a gift from her friend
Mary Desti, the mother of American film director
Preston Sturges.
On the night of September 14, 1927, Duncan was a passenger in the
Amilcar[10] automobile of a handsome French-Italian mechanic Benoît Falchetto, whom she had nicknamed "Buggatti" (sic). Before getting into the car, she reportedly said to her friend
Mary Desti and some companions, "Adieu, mes amis. Je vais à la gloire!" (Goodbye, my friends. I go to glory!). However, according to American novelist
Glenway Wescott, who was in
Nice at the time and visited Duncan's body in the morgue, Desti admitted that she had lied about Duncan's last words. Instead, she told Wescott, Duncan said, "Je vais à l'amour" (I am off to love). Desti considered this embarrassing, as it suggested that she and Falchetto were going to her hotel for a tryst.
When Falchetto drove off, Duncan's large silk scarf, a gift from Desti, draped around her neck, became entangled around one of the vehicle's open-spoked wheels and rear axle. As
The New York Times noted in its obituary: "Isadora Duncan, the American dancer, tonight met a tragic death at Nice on the Riviera. According to dispatches from Nice, Miss Duncan was hurled in an extraordinary manner from an open automobile in which she was riding and instantly killed by the force of her fall to the stone pavement."
[11] Other sources described her death as resulting from strangulation, noting that she was almost decapitated by the sudden tightening of the scarf around her neck.
[12] The accident gave rise to
Gertrude Stein's mordant remark that "affectations can be dangerous."
[13] At her death, Duncan was a
Soviet citizen. Her will was the first of a Soviet citizen to be
probated in the U.S.
[citation needed]
Isadora Duncan was cremated, and her ashes were placed next to those of her beloved children
[14] in the
columbarium at
Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. The headstone of her grave contains the inscription in French: "Ballet School of the Opera of Paris." (
École de Ballet de l'Opéra de Paris)
Born in Chicago in 1862, Loie Fuller began her stage career as a child actress. During her twenties, she performed as a 
By 1892, Fuller had moved to Paris and was performing with the