Isadora Duncan

    Isadora Duncan was born in San Francisco, lived in Oakland, danced within her own home, at the family school, in her backyard barn, in some early vaudeville, and perhaps, in 1890, at the First Unitarian Church, Oakland. When she was eighteen years old, she left the area with her mother in 1895, returning to perform in San Francisco only in 1917, well after her great European successes. Yet her accomplishments and acclaim made her a California heroine.

    Local dancers have followed her style, attracted to the turn of the century popular aesthetic that recalled ancient Grecian tenets. Mrs. Charles Boynton (née Florence Treadwell), with architect Bernard Maybeck built the Temple of the Wings in Berkeley in 1911. It was completed in 1914 by And Monroe. The Quitzows, Treadwell’s daughter Sulgwynn and son-in-law Charles, taught their version of the “new dance” that Isadora prophesied, although Isadora never danced at the Temple. There are reports that two of Isadora’s students did. Ligoa Duncan, Isadora’s niece says that her father, Raymond, only “played hopscotch” with Treadwell. Nevertheless, generations of Berkeley girls, in Greek tunics, danced at the Temple.

Notes on Duncan Dance

    Tales and legends of Isadora abound. Many are exaggerated, projecting a romantic picture of a dynamic lady whose life is the basis of gossip, novels, film and a somewhat distorted reputation. She provided some of the exaggeration in her own memoir, My Life, a book written when she was in distressed financial straits. In spite of her worshippers and her detractors, her contribution to dance and the image of ‘the dancing body’ is extraordinary. As Ann Daly remarks in Done into Dance: Isadora Duncan in America, she “mythologized herself, because she longed to be noticed and remembered.”

    Isadora was an exponent of an early 20th century aesthetic following the English and German classic tradition in art and architecture. “Classic,” used in this way refers to an enlightened return to a Greek aesthetic, not a reference to ballet. Dance historian Ann Daly notes that “The Greeks had rendered nature into art, and conversely, art into nature.” Locally, the University of California had been established, ‘across the Bay’ in Berkeley in 1868 by scholars trained in the classics. Revivals of Greek Architecture were erected on campuses and as state capitals. By 1903, William Randolph Hearst had built the Greek Theater at UC, Berkeley, which became the venue for University sponsored performances and pageants in Greco-Roman style. These performances often featured the ‘new’ American dance — ‘aesthetic’, ‘classic’ ‘interpretative,’ — dance emerging from a romanticized revival of the antique, a Bay Area blend of naiveté and expertise. In this“romanticized yet classical” image, dance presented a ‘new American girl,’ a goddess free of Victorian garb, free to move in the Olympian, California light.

    Images of this ‘dancing girl’ can been seen in the paintings of Arthur Matthews, turn of the century California painter, whose work has been celebrated at the Oakland Museum. In the catalog of a recent exhibition, Harvey L. Jones writes “It is credible to speculate on the influence of Isadora Duncan … as an influence on Matthew’s paintings of dancing girls, even though he makes no direct reference to Duncan in any of his writings or interviews.”

    Most of Matthews’ paintings of dancing girls were done in the years after Duncan’s departure from California, but the spirit of the Bay Area as the “Mediterranean of the West” which developed around ‘Bayside Bohemia’ persisted in art and architecture, in costume and in a new ‘body image’. Isadora took this California perspective and brought it to the world. She was not alone in following a “Grecian” aesthetic in her commitment to the dance, but her studies, travels, teaching and extensive performances made her an essential exponent of ancient Greek art, lauded for its asymmetrical balance, sculpture made gesture, mimed action, fluid groupings and themes from the great myths.

Angela Isadora Duncan: biography, family and career

    Angela Isadora Duncan, always known simply as Isadora, the youngest of four siblings was born on May 26, 1877 in San Francisco at 501 Taylor Street. She was baptized at Old St. Mary’s Church, 660 California Street, San Francisco and received training in social dance and gymnastics at the German-American Clubs in Oakland. Her grandniece Dorée Duncan in Life into Art, notes that her first public performance in 1890 at age of thirteen was at the First Unitarian Church, 14th and Castro Streets, Oakland. All five Duncans, including Mother Dora performed; the four siblings and Dora at the piano. Isadora’s parents were Mary Isadora Gray, called Dora, and Joseph Charles Duncan, renown in San Francisco as poet, publisher and businessman. Joseph deserted the family when his banking deals in San Francisco failed just months after Isadora’s birth, whereupon Dora Duncan supported the family by teaching piano to thechildren of Oakland and by selling her handmade ‘knitted goods’.

    Elizabeth, Isadora’s sister, who was five and a half years older, taught dancing before Isadora did and ultimately, became the leading Duncan dance teacher, since Isadora was continually performing. Isadora and Elizabeth inherited their love of music from their pianist mother. Their Irish aunt, Augustina, called Aunt Gus, taught them jigs, reels and other dances seen in the minstrel shows and perhaps in the Irish Community Centers of San Francisco. Elizabeth lived with Aunt Gus for some time and undoubtedly picked up the repertory there, but Isadora, who did study ballet later during her career in vaudeville, taught the popular social and theater dancing at their home school.

    Augustin, the next child, called “Gus”, an actor who married actresses, became a manager and dramatist, often arranging concert engagements for Isadora and her students. He produced a 1915 Dionysian season in New York with Isadora, consisting of a staged version of Orpheus with both a singing and speaking chorus and Duncan dancers. Isadora chose Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 to accompany the mourning dances in Oedipus. Critics responded, “Is it a Greek play in the Duncan manner or a Duncan play in the Greek manner”? He also produced Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris which seemed to get a better critical response. For the rest of her career, Isadora would turn away from literary productions and chose great dramatic solos, inspired by actresses Eleanora Duse and Ellen Terry. Terry was the mother of Gordon Craig, Isadora’s lover.

    Raymond established a unique place for himself as poet, playwright, potter, and sandal maker. The substance of his creative life was adoration for Greece. He lived in Greece for years, weaving tunics and chlamys by hand and making leather sandals for himself and his sister. As others did at that time, back in California, he adopted a diet of yogurt, goat cheese, fruit and milk, that was characteristic of vegetarians then … and now. He wore togas at all timesand established a teaching center in Paris, the Duncan Akademia. There, and in his gallery on 57th Street in New York City, he and his colleagues taught dance à la Grecque, Greek music, poetry, and lyric drama. Raymond staged exhibitions of rugs, tapestries and batiks and his printing press made available writings by and about himself, his sister and the contemporary poets of his time. By 1984, the Akademia building was demolished, the Raymond Duncan collection and memorabilia were moved to the Bibliothequede l’Opera, Paris and the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts. Isadora’s grandniece, Dorée, had a collection that was subsequently destroyed by fire in her New York home. Her book, Life into Art produced with colleagues, Cynthia Splatt and Carol Pratl contains some early Duncan material.

    Joseph Duncan’s desertion forced the family to leave San Francisco and move to Oakland, which at the close of the 19th century, is described as “untamed wilderness”. The Duncans are pictured at 1365 8th Street, Oakland, with a large group of local children, students of piano and dance. A 1905 Isadora diary notes, “Danced alone — and also appeared in combined dances with two brothers and a sister.” If she danced the contemporary stage dances of thattime or her ‘natural’ dance, we cannot know. It probably was a mixture of both. An 1894 photo shows the family in Western vaudeville outfits kicking and cavorting.

    When Joseph Duncan recovered his fortune, for a short period from 1893-1895, the Duncans moved back to San Francisco, to Castle Mansion, which stood on the northeast corner of Sutter and Van Ness, now the site of the Regency Theater. It was during that period that the Duncan children expanded their classes and repertory and were able to tour ‘along the coast’. Isadora is listed in 1894 in the San Francisco City directory as a “Teacher of Dance.” By1895, driven by her ‘vision’, the family’s failing economic situation and a personal calling for a “Whitmanesque dance of the future,” Isadora and her mother left the Bay Area to find a theatrical outlet for Isadora’s ambition. However, there were many mishaps and adventures in the process of fulfilling her vision of creating a “'new” dance, both in American and in Europe. She probably met the first opposition to her work in San Francisco.

    Although the word “Bohemian” used today, tends to characterize those who live ‘outside’ an ‘ordinary’ life style, “Bohemian” in late 19th century San Francisco characterized wealthy San Franciscans who had made their money in mines, railroads, banking and real estate and had developed ‘special’ tastes. Initially, in 1870, a Bohemian Club was formed by a group of artists, scholars and writers, who welcomed their rich boosters since wealth brought support for art … and paid the bar bills. Oscar Lewis in Bay Window Bohemia details the membership of the club, citing its need to meet in hotels, bars and restaurants since, as of 1890, private residences of large size were few. Even today, San Francisco's Bohemian Club and its retreat in Northern California are exclusive and limited to the families of the early founders and their friends. Kenneth Starr, in California Dream, characterizes Bohemians of that time as those with “aggressive luxury … knownfor their love of theater, cuisine and books.” In Artful Players by Birgitta Hjalmarson describes the Bohemian Club as “a group of hard-up writers, artists, actors and musicians” … the club had been infiltrated by men of more lucrative professions, blessed with the wherewithal to keep the club out of debt.

    Gelett Burgess, in 1897 gives us a snapshot of San Francisco as Romantic in situation and complexity of its population — “cosmopolitan, picturesque, radiant with local color — it has, besides, the unlovliness of youth and crudity with the sordid and dreary aspect of the Philistine as well.”

    The Duncans‘ flight from California was a response to the Philistine aspect of San Francisco. Isadora, abandoned by her father and unable to receive attention from neither the public nor the Bohemians of her time, sought recognition elsewhere.

Duncan’s Career

    After Isadora and her mother left San Francisco in 1895, her first stage appearance was at the Masonic Roof Garden in Chicago. In October, she joined producer/manager Augustin Daly’s theater company and had small roles in productions of Miss Pygmalion, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Geisha and Much Ado About Nothing. When the Daly Company reached London, in 1897, Isadora studied ballet with Kattileen Lanner and later in New York with Marie Bonfant, but, by 1898, she had quit the Daly Company, returned to New York and was giving ‘salon’ recitals. Following the fashions of the time, in New York, she danced to recitations by Khayyam’s, Rubaiyaat, spoken by Justin McCarthy. Her work was not well received either by critics or patrons.

    Isadora was joined by Elizabeth, Raymond and Dora in London in 1900 and pursued studies in Greek art at the British Museum. Prominent London persons became her patrons and a group of English artists and critics, led by the painter Charles Halle and the music critic John Fuller-Maitland, introduced her to Greek statue art, Italian Renaissance paintings and symphonic music. During this period, Fuller-Maitland convinced her to stop dancing to recitations and to begin using the music of Chopin and Beethoven for her inspiration.

    In Germany, 1902, Duncan, who had been studying German, read Nietzsche’s philosophy and soon after began formulating her own philosophy of dance, identifying the source of the body’s natural movement in the solar plexus. In 1903 she delivered a talk in Berlin to the Berlin Press Verlin, which was later published as The Dance of the Future. In it she argued that the dance of the future would be similar to the dance of the ancient Greeks, natural and free. Duncanaccused the ballet of “deforming the beautiful woman’s body” and called for its abolition. The Dance of the Future became a clarion call for the new dance, for the freedom of women … “she is coming, the dancer of the future: the free spirit who will inhabit the body of new women; more glorious than any woman that has yet been; more beautiful than all women of past centuries the highest intelligence in the freest body!”

    Between 1904 and 1907, Duncan lived and worked in Greece, Germany, Russia and Scandinavia and became close to famous artists, including the theater designer Gordon Craig, and the Russian director Stanislavsky. She visited the Imperial Ballet in 1906 in St. Petersburg and met Pavlova and the choreographer Michel Fokine. Fokine had made many changes in the ballet of his time to provide the Imperial Ballet with wider dramatic expression, technical expansionand musical range. Isadora’s influence is usually noted as furthering interest in Greece and ‘natural’ dance, but that influences was negligible since she rejected what she regarded as ballet’s limited physicality and its lack of individualized expression. In Fokine’s Memoirs of a Ballet Master he says Duncan reminded us: Do not forget that beauty and expressiveness are of the greatest importance. The new Russian ballet answered: Do not forget that a rich technique will create natural grace and expressiveness,through the really great art form.

The Isadorables

    In 1904, Isadora established her first school of dance in Grunewald, outside Berlin which housed eighteen to twenty girls, ages four to ten, who were educated free of charge. In order to provide the tuition for the girls, it was necessary for Isadora to tour extensively. In her absence, Isadora’s sister Elizabeth was the director of the school. It was Isadora, who provided the artistic vision for the venture. Financial difficulties combined with Elizabeth’s desire to assume a more significant position in the school forced the Grunewald experiment to close in 1908. Elizabeth opened her own school in Darmstadt, the majority of the pupils leaving with her. Six of the girls, who had become the principal dancers of the Grunewald school joined Isadora and were called: “Isadorables.” They were Anna Denzler, Maria-Theresa Kruger, Irma Erich-Grimme, Elizabeth (Lisa) Milker, Margot (Gretel)Jehl, and Erica Lohmann. In 1919, Isadora legally adopted the six girls, and of these, Irma, Lisa and Anna permanently assumed the name Duncan.

    Irma’s memoir, Duncan Dancer, relates that in 1915, the six Isadorables, former students of Elizabeth, then at the Bellevue-sur-Seine school in Paris, appeared with Duncan at the Century Theater, New York, in 1915 in a production of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris, staged by Augustin Duncan. Augustin also arranged performances for the six Isadorables at the Booth Theatre and Carnegie Hall in 1918 and on tour to American soldier’s camps. By the season 1919-1920, the girls reached California, visited Isadora’s mother and appeared at the Columbia Theater, San Francisco and in Oakland. Critic Redfern Mason observed their reception by writing, “The girls put their memories into the dancing and the house simmered with contentment.” Three Duncan dancers, Anna, Lisa and Margot returned to the Bay Area on Monday night, February 18, 1924 at the Oakland Auditorium Opera House with Max Rabinowitsch at the piano. Their program included works by Chopin, Mozart and Schubert.

    The 1917 Performances in San Francisco Isadora presented three programs during the last week of November 1917. First, on November 25, she danced solo scenes from Iphigenia in Aulis, music by Gluck. Redfern Mason wrote We saw this ever-young figure of Hellenic myth made incarnate with a flower-like beauty. “There is something ingenuous in all great art,” says Heinrich Heine, and it is that ingenuous note of Miss Duncan’s art which her emulators strivevainly to imitate … Miss Duncan has come back to her own people and they pay her the tribute which is due to inspired art”. (SF Chronicle, 11/26/17)

    Two days later, November 27, she danced to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, to Schubert’s Symphony in B minor (Unfinished), Tchaikovsky’s Andante Cantabile for strings, a suite of Waltzes, Op. 39 by Brahms, concluding the afternoon with Rouget de Lisle’s La Marseillaise, France’s call to arms. Then, on Friday afternoon, November 30, 1917 at 3 pm, with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Oscar Spirescu, Isadora danced three pieces by Schubert, four pieces from Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 (Pathétique), Tchaikovsky's’s Marche Slav (to honor the Russian Revolution) and again, La Marseillaise. It was, after all, warm time for both America and Europe.

    Isadora remained in San Francisco through the end of 1917, traveling next to Los Angeles, where Ruth St. Denis saw her perform. On January 3, 1918, Duncan for the last time in San Francisco, at the Columbia (Geary) Theater in an all Chopin program, played by Harold Bauer. Mason’s review notes the city's reaction. “It is the art more of the spirit than of the flesh. The sonorities of the piano and the movements of the dancer interpreted Chopin, not in a crude realism reducible to specific and limiting images, but in surges of psychic ecstasy and despair, uplifting of the spirit … in which the mystery that veils music was momentarily uplifted. San Francisco has been a little hesitant in its attitude towards Miss Duncan. But yesterday she came into her own.” (SF Chronicle, 1/14/18)

Isadora: Last Years

    The tragic death of Isadora’s two children, Deidre, her daughter by Gordon Craig and Patrick, her son by Paris Singer, was the turning point in her life. That event in 1913, the ill-fated Dionysian in New York in 1915 and the horrors of World War I, turned her dance from lyric to dramatic. She now depicted the burden of motherhood to the music of the Russian composer, Aleksandr Scriabin and an heroic and patriotic call to arms in La Marseilles. In 1921 the Russian Commisar of Education, Anatol Lunarcharsky invited her to open a school in Moscow, and hoping to fulfill a long-standing dream, she went, and as had happened before, found herself having to raise the funds to maintain the school through her concert work. Her adopted daughter Irma, one of the Isadorables ran the school until 1927. But Isadora had fallen in love, and, in 1922, married a young Russian poet, Serge Essenin. With him, she returned to the United States for one last performance in 1923, accompanied by Essenin, but, since she made what was deemed as political speeches from the stage, was condemned as a Bolshevik and the couple were deported. After many difficult tours in Russia, she left Moscow in 1923 to raise money for the school, but never returned. From then on, she divided her time between Paris and Nice, giving her last performance in Paris on July 8, 1927. On September 14, 1927, in Nice, Duncan was killed in an automobile accident, her long scarf caught in the wheels of the Bugatti, an open sports car that a friend was driving. Isadora Duncan is buried in Pere Lachaise Cemetery, Paris

Isadora's Duncan’s Legacy

    Isadora’s aesthetic, formed in childhood, as described by Ann Daly, was “a product of her clannish upbringing, unsupervised romping in the out-of-doors in Oakland and at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach, dime novels, barn theater productions, an Irish grandmother … and salon-like evenings of Shakespeare and Chopin.” But by the time Isadora returned to San Francisco in 1917, she had established her fame as the epitome of the “classical” (i.e. Greek) dancer. With California energy, physical vitality, theatrical confidence, and a fin-de-sièclefascination with movement and freedom from the Victorian age, Duncan evolved her ‘new’ dance.

    What were the elements of this ‘new’ dance? Turn of the century theater artists had discovered François Delsarte, a French philosopher who had taught a system of gesture, used to interpret theatrical texts. In his codification of human gesture, “head, heart and lower limbs corresponded to Mind, Soul and Life.” Delsarte’ study was spread across America by Steele Mackaye, an actor-director and was soon was practiced by women seeking reformation in healthand freedom. McKaye’s student, Genevieve Stebbbins compiled the Delsarte system and helped promote it as part of “physical culture”, “from elocution to gymnastics to statue posing.” Stebbins taught the Delsarte ‘zones’, associating the body with ‘higher significance’ and assuring all that she was “training the body easily to express a beautiful soul — and vice-versa.” American physical education programs, especially in women’s schools, promoted “physical culture.” Photos at the Hearst Gymnasium, UC Berkeley, reveal the Duncan/Delsarte influence. Other Women’s Physical Education Departments, such as that at Barnard in NYC, sponsored similar programs.

    Another important element in Duncan’s philosophy of ‘expression’ was the writing of American poet, Walt Whitman. Elizabeth Kendall reports that Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road” was Duncan’s favorite poem. “Whitman taught the importance of those surges of feeling inside a person, the rhythmic rise and fall of nearly inexpressible emotion.” Also, Dora Duncan (Isadora’s mother) had welcomed the theories of Irish agnostic Robert Ingersoll, whopreached a gospel of humanity and the worship of art and culture. As Isadora embraced European culture, she absorbed the work of important artists, musicians, and other dancers, Loie Fuller in Paris and Adeline Genee in Vienna. But it was from the great actresses, Eleanora Duse and Ellen Terry, that she learned the ‘drama’ in dance that captivated and challenged her audiences, presenting the solo figure on a bare stage dancing her ‘new’ dance.

    Isadora Duncan remains the foremost ‘dancing image’ of San Francisco, though almost a century has passed. To go beyond Isadora, we must look to those who danced after her, honoring her legacy, her spirit and her dedication as a California woman. Kevin Starr, California State Historian summarizes Isadora’s contribution. “Arising out of special local American circumstances, Isadora Duncan brought a universalized California message to America first and then to Europe. In both her life and her art, Isadora Duncan sought to celebrate the female as universalized human image, complete in itself, equal to the male form as a representation of humanity. Today, we are beginning to accept this notion, but it was revolutionary when Isadora Duncan first introduced it.”

There is a book which Lois feels is the best on Isadora. Google Books provides a preview copy, which you may read, then links to online shops where you may purchase it, though we recommend that you patronize your local bookstore, if you are fortunate in having one.

Here is the book:  “Isadora”, by Peter Kurth.