Isadora Duncan’s life was a mixture of talent, rebellion and tragedy. Not only did he revolutionize classical ballet, but he also dared to think and express himself freely, no matter what.
Isadora Duncan was one of those women who came into the world to break taboos, considered the forerunner of modern dance and one of the most fascinating and revolutionary personalities in the artistic world, in addition, her life and death took place within the limits of modern dance. the unusual.
- Isadora Duncan’s life was also marked by pain and tragedy.
- Who knew her described her as a generous.
- Maternal woman.
- For the public she was always someone who brought to the limit the expression of feelings through the body.
- Considered a woman who always said what she thought.
“My motto: no limits”. ? Isadora Duncan?
Isadora Duncan’s dance style was pure feeling; dared to break with the rigidity of classical dance and offer more authentic movements.
In his autobiography he said that he fell in love with dance while watching the movement of the waves at sea, so his movements were free and fluid, endowed with maximum emotional expression, as if wrapped by the waves of the sea. .
Her real name was Dora Angela Duncan; She was born in San Francisco (United States) on May 27, 1877. Her father, Joseph Charles, was a banker and her mother, Dora Gris, a music teacher. They had four children and Isadora was the youngest. When she was a child, her father abandoned them.
As a result, the family has faced great financial difficulties, so Isadora’s mother began giving piano lessons to pay for household chores and then founded a dance school. Older children worked as teachers at their mother’s school.
At the age of 10, Isadora decided to interrupt her studies and teach the little ones with her siblings.
The family later moved to Chicago, where Isadora studied classical dance, but a fire left the family on the street and, as a result, they had to move back, this time, to New York.
In the big city, the young Isadora managed to find a place in a theater company. In 1898, the father, still absent, tragically died in a shipwreck.
Perhaps because of her admiration for the classics of European music, Isadora Duncan insisted on travelling to Europe and convinced her family to do so, even though at that time the migration movement was quite the opposite: from Europe to the United States. The Duncans settled in London and later Paris.
Isadora has spent a lot of time contemplating Greek art in major European museums, adopted many of the postures he saw in the sculptures of his dance, his previous experiences and discoveries began to shape his style, which forever changed the history of dance.
Isadora Duncan began to dance barefoot on stage and covered only in a Greek-style robe, and also combd and danced with compositions that were not made to dance, he improvises and creates in the middle of the stage. Veils and rigid movements of classical dance have been left behind.
Unsurprisingly, he was initially heavily criticized. However, in a short time he gained the admiration of connoisseurs and art critics, he was not only irreverent in the world of dance, but also in his personal life, full of scandals, so Isadora Duncan decided to forget the impositions of dance. time and being a single mother of two.
He had several lovers and some of them were well known. In addition, there were also rumors about his alleged homosexuality, but there is no evidence that they are true.
She ended up being an extremely outrageous character for the time, on one occasion she took off her robe and exposed her breasts, challenging the audience around the authenticity of her dance.
In Argentina, he danced the country’s national anthem in a bar, was not paying attention to his finances and, as a result, had to pay the hotel bill with a fur coat and jewelry he had.
In America, she was dismissed with contempt as the “communist bitch” for a speech she gave to the public.
Perhaps the most difficult time of his life came in 1913, his two sons, still young, died when the vehicle they were travelling in was the victim of an accident on the Seine in Paris. It took him years to overcome this tragedy, if at any point in his life he surpassed it.
Isadora Duncan became an admirer of the Russian revolution and was invited by Lenin himself to live and dance in Russia, there she met and married the poet Sergei Esenin, 17 years her minor, however, the marriage lasted little due to alcoholism. of Esenin, who ended up in a psychiatric hospital where he committed suicide.
Two years later, on September 14, 1927, Isadora Duncan died. She wore a long scarf around her neck. So when he got into a car, he was so unlucky that he was strangled to death by his own handkerchief stuck in the tires.
Irreverent, fascinating and certainly atypical, Isadora Duncan is one of those unforgettable figures, who has gone through the annals of history for her ability to dance, to break prejudices and taboos: social models that have been imposed on women, especially in the artistic world. .