As Isadora Duncan emerged into the world on 27 May 1877 in San Francisco, classical ballet, ballroom and folk dancing each already existed, but modern dance was still waiting to be invented, by her, as it would come to pass. Isadora Duncan was considered one of the first and most important artists of this then-new art form, which she herself christened “free dance.”
Isadora Duncan came of age in a society undergoing rapid change in the wake of large-scale industrialisation. The telegraph, telephone, automobile, subway and assembly line altered the lives of humans, causing everything to become increasingly faster. As a response to this increasing mechanization, a counter-movement developed in the modern urban centres, unified by a strong desire for a return to nature. A part of this movement, Isadora Duncan used her body to search for natural forms of expression. She was uninterested in the artificial and proscribed sequences of movements typical for ballet – instead she felt that movements should arise from inside, giving voice to one’s own spiritual impulses. For hours on end, the young Isadora Duncan stood still, listening intently to the world within. To express pain, she noted, a musician does not simply mimic the sounds of weeping either. In the same way, she herself had no desire to move across the stage with bent back and mimed lamentation.
Isadora Duncan invented her own form of expressive dance characterised by gestures. She went inside the music, performing barefoot and draped in loose-fitting tunics. In an era in which women were expected to wear corsets and dresses extending to their ankles, this caused quite a scandal and her conception of dance was largely met with ridicule. The birth of modern art was not playing out in the USA at the time, but in Europe instead. Together with her mother, a music teacher who raised her children alone under the most humble of circumstances, and her sister Elizabeth, Isadora Duncan crossed the Atlantic on a cattle ship in 1899 with money gained through panhandling. Soon thereafter, in 1902, an audience in Budapest celebrated her dance to Johann Strauss’ An der schönen blauen Donau as a sensation. Duncan danced music – barefoot, as pure emotion, and for 30 days in a row her performances were sold out. Duncan was subsequently celebrated all across Europe and in Russia, her dance revolution had begun. She kept company with the most important artists of the time, wrote manifestos about the art of dancing and women’s rights. In 1904, together with her sister Elizabeth, she founded a boarding school for dance in Berlin. She was not concerned with dance as an art form alone – instead she also saw it as a way to “heal the damages wrought by civilization”.
Alas, time and again her life was overshadowed by tragic events: in 1913 both of her children were killed in an automobile accident, her third child died shortly after birth. In 1927, she herself would become the victim of a fatal accident, at the young age of fifty, in Nice, when her scarf became entangled in the wheels of her car.