~ Women & Dance, Isadora Duncan ~
Isadora Duncan (1877—1927) was an American dancer whose teaching and performances helped to free ballet from its conservative restrictions.
As a child she rejected the rigidity of the classic ballet and based her dancing on more natural movements, an approach she later used in her interpretations of the works of Brahms, Wagner, and Beethoven. Her earliest public appearances, in New York City, met with little success, and at the age of 21 she left the United States.
Through the patronage of the celebrated actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, she was invited to appear at the private receptions of London’s leading hostesses, where her dancing enraptured those who were familiar with the conventional forms of the ballet. It was not long before the phenomenon of a young woman dancing barefoot crowded theaters and concert halls throughout Europe. She made her first tour of Russia in 1905. Duncan toured widely, and founded dance schools in Germany, Russia, and the United States.
Her private life kept her name in the headlines owing to her constant defiance of social taboos. The father of her first child was the stage designer Gordon Craig, who shared her abhorrence of marriage; the father of her second child was Paris Singer, the heir to a sewing machine fortune. In 1913, the car in which her two children were riding in Paris rolled into the Seine River and they were drowned. In 1920 in Moscow, she met Sergey Aleksandrovich Yesenin, a poet. She married him in 1922 in order to take him with her on a tour of the United States. Fear of the “Red Menace” was at its height, and she was unjustly labeled as Bolshevik agents.
During the last years of her life Duncan was living precariously in Nice, France, where she met with a fatal accident: her long scarf became entangled in the wheel of her car and she was strangled.
Painting : A portrait of Duncan, by Paul Swan
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