Path: Lesbians : Famous lesbians : Isadora Duncan
(This is a computer translation of the original article in Spanish. It should not be regarded as complete or accurate.)
Ballerina Isadora Duncan, whose complete name was Dora Angela Duncan, was born on May 27, 1878 in San Francisco (California, United States). Her father, Joseph Charles Duncan, was imprisoned for planning the theft of a bank shortly after Isadora to have been born. Her mother, Dora Grey, requested the divorce although her husband was absolved of the charges after a long judicial contest. Although they were calling her Angela, she adopted Isadora's name as the classic reminiscence of the name. Isadora's passion for the dance began very soon in her infancy: at the age of five she said to her mother that she would be a ballerina and revolutionist. Often she could be seen in the beach practising new movements of dance in time of the waves and teaching to move her other girls. At the age of ten she left the studies to give ballet classes. Her mother, who was supporting the family giving classes of piano, educated her from then, teaching her to appreciate the classic Greeks and the classical music, and inculcating her innovative ideas on the women. In her adolescence she received classes of a librarian who allowed her to gain access to the big classic of the Literature and the Philosophy as Walt Whitman, John Keats and Friedrich Nietzsche. Soon she moved to Chicago with her family and started studying classic dance. A fire ruined her family and they turned out to be forced to move to New York. There, Isadora, with 19 years, was employed at the company of theater of the playwright Augustin Daly.
At the age of 21 she traveled to London, where her peculiar style of dance - inspired by the classic Greece and by the forces of the nature, plenary meeting of musical innovations and of style, and distant of the athletic conception of the American dance-, was received enthusiastically. In London she initiated her studies of art in the British Museum, which served her to design new movements. In spite of her success, many critics were pushing her provocative ways back for the epoch: she takes off, with tunics, without making herself up and interpreting musicians not written specifically for the dance. Her first school of dance founded her in Grunewald (Germany) and put as director her sister Elizabeth who was choosing poor girls and them was helping economically in addition to teaching them to dance. These girls were known as "The Isadorables", a game of words. Already reached the reputation, she founded several schools of dance for Europe and took charge of skillful ballerinas as Martha Graham and Mary Wigham. In 1902 she bought a hill in Athens to make a reality her project to create a temple of the dance, uncompleted for economic questions.
Isadora was atheistic, bisexual, socialistic, revolutionary and partial to the free love. She had numerous lovers, both men and women. Her first lasting love and friend for life was the English theatrical designer Edward Gordon Craig, with whom she had a daughter so-called Deirdre. Her second son, Patrick, was a fruit of her relation with the millionaire Paris Singer (heir of the empire of the sewing machines Singer). Between her lovers there were Ivan Miroski, Mercedes De Acosta, Oscar Berege, Eleonora Duse and Heinrich Thode. She frequented the lounges of Natalie Barney in Paris. In 1912 she married the Russian poet Serguei Esenin, seventeen years minor and also bisexual. After many trips together around the world, they returned to the United States where they were accused of communists and returned again to Europe. In 1913, her two sons of previous relations, three-year-old Patrick and Deirdre of five, died drowned in the river Seine along with the babysitter after a car accident. Eight months after the tragedy she had another son, who died in her arms to twenty minutes of being born. The depression, the alcohol and the sexual excesses removed Isadora of the stages during some time. She tried to commit suicide in several occasions and she would write to a friend: "my poor brain has been maddened more than it can be known nobody". In 1925, Serguei Esenin suffering from strong depressions, left Isadora and returned to the Soviet Union where he would end up by committing suicide. Isadora moved to Nice (France) and continued her artistic career. Her influence as brilliant ballerina, innovative and free artist of ties, criticism of the culture and the art, revolutionist, and advocate of the rights of the woman, turned her one of the persons most emphasized from the XXth century. She died on September 14, 1927, strangulated by her own scarf that got hooked up in a wheel of her convertible while she was driving. Curiously from the death of her children, drowned in a car, only she was mounting in convertible for fear of that the same was happening to her. Her body is buried in the cemetery Pére Lachaise of Paris. In 1928 was published My life, her posthumous autobiography.
Some appointments of Isadora Duncan:
"Imagine a ballerina who, after a long
study, prayer and inspiration, has acquired such a grade of workmanship that her
body is simply the luminous declaration of her soul; whose body dances with the
chords of a music heard internally, in an expression of something external, a
deeper world. This is the real creative, natural but not imitative dance, which
she speaks in movement out of itself and out of any thing bigger than all
the identities ".
The philosopher's stone of the dance, 1920.
"I happened many days and nights in the study,
looking for that dance that could be the divine expression of the human spirit
by means of the movement of the body. For hours I would remain stand, my hands
doubled between my breast, covering the solar plexus... She was looking, and
finally I discovered, the central spring of the whole movement, the crater of
the power of engine, the unit of which all the deviations of the movement are
born, the mirror of the vision for the creation of the dance. "
My life, 1928.
Video of Isadora Duncan dancing (.mov
format, for Quick Time)
- Isadora Duncan Dance Foundation
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