Born: 26 May 1877, United States
Died: 14 September 1927
Country most active: United States and Europe
Also known as: Angela Isadora Duncan
This bio has been republished from Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde. See below for full attribution.
A founder of modern dance and proponent of women’s freedoms, Isadora Duncan was born in 1877, the youngest of four children to Joseph Duncan and Mary Isadora Gray. After her father was tried for illegal banking schemes, her mother divorced him and raised her children in a free-thinking household that encouraged Duncan’s impulsive, revolutionary spirit. Even as a young girl Duncan rebelled against her classical ballet lessons in favor of spontaneous and expressive movement, her signature style throughout her career.
Duncan began performing in 1890 with her brother’s theater in San Francisco. In 1896, she joined the Chicago-based dance company of theater producer Augustin Daly, soon traveling with them to New York and London. She rose to international prominence while dancing privately in salons across Europe. Often performing as a one-woman corps de ballet and always in a “Greek” costume of draped silk or chiffon with bare feet and arms, she developed her own dance technique based on a simple vocabulary of steps, skips, glides, leaps, and pantomime that eschewed masculine movements. Famously androgynous, she defied traditional gender roles, bearing three children out of wedlock by three different men: a daughter with the stage designer Gordon Craig, a son with Paris Singer, heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune, and a third, who lived only briefly, with a passing acquaintance Romano Romanelli. Choreographer Agnes de Mille wrote that, when young, Duncan danced with grace; when older, with grief, following the death of her children who drowned in a car crash in the Seine in 1913 (Life into Art 10).
From 1907 to 1910 at the Caffè Giubbe Rosse in Florence, Mina Loy occasionally crossed paths with Duncan and Craig, supposedly the most conceited man Loy ever met. Loy crossed paths with Duncan in Berlin in 1921, and Loy and Duncan both frequented writer Natalie Barney’s Paris salon between 1923 and 1927. Hoping to urbanize her daughter Joella’s provincial sensibilities, Loy enrolled her in the Duncan school at Potsdam directed by Isadora’s sister Elizabeth, although Joella did not take to the lessons (Burke 313).
Loy regarded Duncan as “the representative modern woman artist,” who embodied in barefoot dance the “free footed verse” of writer-suffragists like herself (Burke 111). Duncan is the subject of Gertrude Stein’s 1911 poem “Orta or One Dancing” and Loy’s 1952 poem “Biography of Songge Byrd”: “How can I / describe that woman’s art – / her flitting / motion to her song / must make her seem unreal / she was so ariel / so unbound / that if at times she seemed about to fly / her audience found it only fitting” (Loy).
Duncan gave her final performance on July 8, 1927 in Paris at the age of forty-nine and died in September of the same year in Nice, when her long scarf caught in the rear wheel of a car and strangled her. A crowd of ten thousand attended the cremation of her body at Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
Guzman, Genevieve. “Isadora Duncan.” Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde. Edited by Suzanne W. Churchill, Linda A. Kinnahan, and Susan Rosenbaum. University of Georgia, 2020. https://mina-loy.com/biography/isadora-duncan/. Accessed 29 May 2023.
From Famous Women: An Outline of Feminine Achievement Through the Ages With Life Stories of Five Hundred Noted Women. Written by Joseph Adelman, published 1926 by Ellis M Lonow Company:
Isadora Duncan, an American dancer and teacher, born in San Francisco. She revived Greek dances in New York, later in Paris and other European capitals, and was the first to introduce the barefoot dance in simple free draperies – the antithesis of ballet and toe dancing. Her dances interpretative of Beethoven, Gluck and Chopin, were greatly admired, and brought back a beautiful spirit of the dance that had been forgotten. Her temporary retirement in 1913 was caused by a sad accident – her two children were carried by a runaway motor car over the Seine embankment in Paris, and drowned.
She then devoted herself to training young girls in her art, and in 1918 – 1919 the Isadora Dancers, composed of six maidens, appeared at Carnegie Hall in New York. The purity, grace, and poetic charm of these young dancers, were a fitting tribute to the genius of their teacher.