#92 FAMOUS AND TRAGIC ISADORA--the Duncans Part 5
Distant cousin, Margherita Sargent, came from a respected, stable Boston family. Her parents were married for over fifty years, her father, Rodulphus, was a noted Boston dentist who practiced for over 60 years and until he was almost 80.
When Margherita married Augustin Duncan, she became part of an artistic and intellectual, but also a quite unorthodox, family. Augustin was considered the anchor for his siblings—brother Raymond and sisters, Elizabeth and Isadora. Augustin was an actor, Elizabeth a dance educator and Raymond a philosopher/craftsman eccentric. The most famous of the siblings was youngest sister, dancer Isadora, who performed to great acclaim throughout Europe and is considered the creator of modern dance.
ISADORA ANGELA DUNCAN
Born in San Francisco on May 26, 1877 and raised primarily by her mother, Isadora showed an early talent for dance. She left formal schooling at age 10 as she disliked the rigid structure of traditional education and preferred to learn through dance, art, and nature. She began teaching dance to children and developed her own revolutionary style of movement.
Raymond, Isadora, Augustin 1903
DANCING CAREER
Isadora's professional career began in Chicago at age 18. In New York, she struggled to find work in traditional ballet companies and she refused to perform in vaudeville circuit shows. Isadora convinced her mother and siblings to move to London in 1898 and where she began performing solo dances in the drawing rooms of the wealthy; she drew inspiration from the Greek vases and bas-reliefs found in the British Museum. Earnings from these engagements allowed her to rent a studio and create larger stage performances. It was in Paris, however, in 1900, that she was embraced by its intellectual and artistic elite for her unconventional, free-form of dance which emphasized natural movement in contrast to the rigidity of ballet. Isadora wrote that the future of dance was to return to the free form and free-spirited dance like that of the Greeks and that ballet was a disgrace to the human body, too rigid and stifling to the body’s soul. Isadora spent the rest of her life touring Europe, Russia and America dancing to sold-out audiences and often with a full orchestra.
In 1904, she and her sister, Elizabeth founded a dance school in Germany; the school’s mission was to teach young the philosophy of dance. The chief principle of Duncan’s teaching was not to allow the child to make a single dance move without understanding its motive. Her first six students were known as the Isadorables and she supposedly adopted all of them in 1919. In 1914, Isadora relocated her school to the United States. With many patrons, she founded dance studios in Europe and the United States, but none lasted.
Critics debated her right to try to interpret the classics
like Beethoven’s symphonies, but they, nonetheless, were awed by Isadora’s physical
movement. “Miss Duncan is grace and beauty developed to their utmost…The
happiness of the physically perfect young animal is in her joyous
movements…Bare-armed, bare-legged, barefooted and clad in an ancient kirtle of
fabric so diaphanous…that she was virtually naked, there was nothing but purity
in her dance…Her dancing is a thing entrancing to see. Her arms are white and
cleanly signalling instruments of graceful expression. The poise of her little
head, changing with every fleeting emotion, is a delight of delights. Her body,
slender and flexible and thrilled with the truest instinct…Her limbs, slim and
clean of outline, are the limbs of young chastity in joyous movement. Her
little feet, naked, high in arch and instep, seem but to need an occasional
contact with earth in feathery tripping. She runs hither and thither in the
dance, at times in consonance with the music’s beat, at other times regardless
of it.”
Isadora received international recognition as an American
modern dancer and choreographer, a pioneer in this style and has been dubbed The
Mother of Modern Dance. Her free spirit could easily be seen in her dancing but
also in her scandalous personal life.
Like her brother, Raymond, Isadora was drawn to Greek culture. Both were known to go barefoot and wear long, draping clothes wrapped in the free-flowing style of the ancient Greeks, regardless of any weather. In 1911, Isadora wore her white Greek tunic at a lavish Paris party, while she danced barefoot on tables among 300 guests and 900 bottles of champagne.
According to her students, Isadora took her work very
seriously. She craved solitude to work out her ideas and nobody was allowed to
watch. Even her accompanist had to sit in a corner with his back to her. She
never practised her dances before a mirror; she only used a large wall mirror
hidden behind curtains to check on her gymnastics and barre exercises.
Self-observation, she felt, interfered with her concentration and expression.
Isadora was a very impatient teacher; she would demonstrate a perfectly-executed
dance sequence, then immediately expect her students to repeat it. She would
continue to repeat the dance movements until one student caught it, then expect
that student to teach everyone else.
PERSONAL TRAGEDIES
Isadora was free-spirited, an atheist, communist sympathizer and bisexual. She scoffed at marriage, wore revealing clothes while prancing around barefoot and had children out of wedlock with different men. Even in Europe’s more progressive cities, her behaviour was considered scandalous; in the more conservative USA, she was spurned and treated as an outcast. In 1906, she gave birth to her first child, Deidre, whose father was Gordon Craig, a famous set designer; the two never married, though remained close friends. Her second child, Patrick, was the result of a years-long love affair with Paris Singer, a son of the sewing-machine magnate, Isaac Singer. (Isaac a husband of nine wives, father of 24!) Paris was married when he fell for Isadora and begged her to marry him, (Paris invested heavily in Isadora’s dancing enterprise) but she had strong anti-marriage views.
At age thirty-five, Isadora was at the peak of her career—she had everything any artist or young woman could wish—fame, success, money, two lovely children and a man who was not only devoted to her but willing to use his fortune to further her art.
On April 13, 1913, both her children (Deirdre aged 6 and Patrick, aged 3) and their nanny died in a freak car accident. After their car stalled on a hill overlooking the Seine River, the chauffeur left the car to recrank the stalled engine and did not properly set the parking brake. At that point, the vehicle rolled down the hill into the river’s deep waters, quickly sinking to a depth of 20 to 30 feet. It took an hour and a half to locate the car in the river’s mud; the nanny and both two children had drowned in each other’s arms. Isadora danced her grief at their funeral, and then as she said, all happiness in her life went out.
The tragedy brought out the gossips in full
force and the grieving Isadora wanted nothing more than to escape it all. For
two years , she cast about pre-war Europe, living on credit on islands in
Greece and in shuttered beachfront dwellings in Italy. She lashed out at her
dearest lovers and friends, the very people who held her up. But life had
cracked her spirit in two; on the one side, the brilliant young talent who
captivated audiences everywhere; on the other a broken-hearted mother spinning
dangerously on the edge of sanity.
Isadora considered quitting the stage and becoming a nun or
a nurse. Her Paris school was turned into a hospital during World War I and
Isadora tended to the wounded. She never
mentally recovered from her children’s deaths although she did try to direct
the trauma into her choreography. She had several more public love affairs;
another child died shortly after birth.
In 1922, as her old-time popularity in Paris and London
started to wane, (due, some said, to her growing stoutness) she went to Russia
to dance. The Russian people were missing their famous ballet dancers who had
left/were killed during the Revolution; they were therefore quite ready to
overlook Isadora’s stoutness and welcomed her with open arms. The Soviet
government helped her fund a dance school and put a thousand children aged 7 to
14 years, under her tutelage. But that government’s failure to follow through
on promises to support her work caused her to return to the West. Isadora
brought some of her Russian dancers with her and adopted them so that they
could legally travel around the continent with her; many later became dance
instructors.
At a party in her honour, she met Sergei Yessenin, called the “poet of the revolution.” He was eighteen years her junior, hardly more than a schoolboy, badly nourished, and was indulging in drunken sprees and suffering from epileptic fits. They fell in love and were quickly married; Isadora had to become a Russian citizen and give up her American citizenship. But the marriage was rocky from the start with Sergei’s verbal abusive temper, moody outbursts and alcohol abuse. The French government allowed her and her Russian husband to reside in Paris “so long as they indulged in no Red propaganda.” An agent was assigned to follow the couple to ensure they did not carry any secret messages to the Soviet embassy.
In 1923, Isadora returned to the United States with her husband to perform in Boston, but her very scanty costume and recent marriage to a Bolshevik angered her fellow Americans. “Isadora was barred from appearances because she wore so little clothing and because that little persisted in slipping out of place as her body writhed and twisted in her classical dances. Righteous-minded Bostonians were shocked at the glimpses the …Duncan draperies gave of her body…It was in the finale that the spectator saw Miss Duncan at her altogether best. She came out in a dark, transparent gown. Her right breast was entirely bare. The slightest movement permitted the gown to part, and in this almost naked condition, she went through five minutes or more of classical dancing.” In response, Isadora said, “Bostonians are afraid of the truth. They want to satisfy their baseness without admitting it. A suggestively clothed body delights them. There is a Puritanical instinct for concealed lust. The Boston conservatives are impoverished by custom and taboo. They are the lifeless and sterile of this country.” In New York, management had to drop the curtain when Isadora bumped into the piano so many times, that the pianist stalked off stage leaving her to try to perform without music. Isadora blamed her “deliriously drunk performance” on a bottle of poisoned champagne.
Believing she had turned Communist, the audiences booed and taunted when she went on stage. In anger, she bared her breasts and yelled at the audience, “This is red and so am I.” The American Legion wanted her deported. American officials investigated Duncan’s political views and said that “if she is spreading any red propaganda, as alleged, she will find herself at Ellis Island on her way to a permanent sojourn in Russia.” At further performances, four policemen were placed on the stage to monitor her dances. She left the country in a fury, vowing never to return.
When Sergei was sober, he was completely under the
domination of his masterful wife, obeying her orders like a dutiful schoolboy;
but when he was full of brandy or champagne—as he was most of the time even in
prohibition America—he was entirely out of control. At times, Isadora was
forced to cancel dancing engagements because of the blackeyes he gave her. In
New York, one night he smashed all the furniture in his hotel room and hurled
it out the window. Sergei was always penitent after his sprees and Isadora indulgently forgave him. But after their return to Paris, he behaved so
insanely that none of her friends or patrons dared visit her studio that
Isadora decided to call an end; she hired guards to escort him back to Russia.
“I can’t have him around. There is too much of the devil in him.” There were
repeated rumours of their divorce, but this was not the case. Isadora continued
to love her “mad child of a genius” and to regard him as the greatest poet of
all time
In 1925, Sergei was found dead from a gunshot wound under mysterious circumstances but the Russians labelled the death a suicide.
LEGACY
Critics wondered why Isadora was such a celebrated dance
pioneer in Paris, Munich and London but whose talents were so unrecognized in
her own country. Many saw her gifts. “Do you realize what you are looking
at? Do you understand that this is the most incomparably beautiful dancing in
the world? Do you appreciate what this woman is doing for you—bringing back the
lost beauty of the old world of art?” “I
had always thought that dancing was a light pleasure, a joyous thing, a sometime
vulgar thing, often a thing that provoked sensual instincts…But I suddenly saw
something very beautiful and I found myself weeping. There was an exaltation
and inspiration. I saw that she was one of the rare persons of this world and
that her art could, in some strange way, bring completeness to what was
otherwise so discouragingly incomplete.” And sculptor Rodin declared. “She is a
natural on the stage where nature is so seldom seen. She preserves in the dance
the perfection of line, and at the same time is as simple as the antique, which
is the synonym of beauty. Suppleness and feeling—these are great qualities.”
Although Isadora was considered wealthy, she handled her
finances poorly, something that she and sister Elizabeth often argued about; the
two also often disagreed about teaching style. Isadora ran up hotel
bills while moving between Paris and the Mediterranean. She was destitute,
suffered from alcohol abuse and depression from the unresolved grief of her
children’s deaths. She spent her last days in a Paris hotel room, sketching her
memoirs for her autobiography, My Life, which was finished posthumously
by friends. Her last performance was in Paris on July 8, 1927.
DEATH
One of Isadora’s favourite gifts was a shawl from her closest friend; she wore it constantly. The shawl was two yards long, sixty inches wide, of heavy crepe with a handpainted great yellow bird covering it and blue Chinese asters and Chinese letters in black. In Nice, France, on the evening of September 14, 1927, Isadora wrapped her body with the scarf and hopped into the backseat of a open-air convertible Amilcar. When her driver heard screaming, he stopped the car to find her dead behind the vehicle. A gust of wind caught the scarf and wrapped it around the spokes of the car’s rear tire. Isadora was pulled her from the car, broke her neck and was dragged to her death. She was 50 years old.
Isadora’s coffin was covered with the purple robe Isadora wore when she danced Chopin’s funeral march. Two men and two women dressed in flowing Greek robes stood guard. Among the profusion of flowers was one inscribed “Russia mourns Isadora’s death.” Isadora was later cremated and her ashes placed next to her children in the columbarium at Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. On her headstone of her grave is inscribed Ecole du Ballet de l’Opera de Paris.
At the time of her death, Isadora was a Soviet citizen; her
will was the first of a Soviet citizen to undergo probate in the USA.
Said one of her protégées, “They write about Isadora’s
life—her devotion to the Soviet, her marriage, but for her genius, they cannot
spare a word. They do not understand Isadora.”
Isadora Angela Duncan b. May 26 1877 in San Francisco, California m. Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin (1895-1925) on May 2, 1922 in Moscow, Russia d. Sept 14, 1927 in Nice, France sister-in-law of 4th cousin 3x removed (Netterfield-Kenney line)
She did so much in 50 years.
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