Isadora Duncan

Duncan was unconventional both in her professional as well as private life and flouted traditional rules of morality. She was a bisexual and was taken in by the revolution in Russia and was supporter of Communism.

She had two children out of wedlock - one with theater designer Gordon Craig and one with sewing machine magnate Paris Singer. Both of her children tragically drowned in the river Seine in 1913.

She had a passionate affair with Spanish-American poet, Mercedes de Acosta and was linked to actress Eleonora Duse and writer Natalie Barne. In Moscow, she was married to poet Sergei Yesenin for a short period.

Angela Isadora Duncan was born on May 27, 1877 in San Francisco, California, to Joseph Charles Duncan, a banker, mining engineer and connoisseur of the arts, and Mary Isadora Gray and was the youngest of four siblings.

Soon after her birth, her father lost his job in the bank and was humiliated publicly. The family became very poor and things worsened when her parents divorced by 1880.

Her mother moved to Oakland with her children, and struggled to make ends meet as a piano instructor. Isadora found school stifling and dropped out at ten to be self-educated at the public library.

She and her sister Elizabeth earned extra money by teaching dance to local children. After a series of ballet lessons at age 9, she declared ballet a school of “affected grace and toe walking”.

In 1896, Duncan became part of Augustin Daly's theater company in New York where her unique vision of dance clashed with the popular pantomimes of theater companies and felt disillusioned.

She moved to London in 1898, performed in the drawing rooms of the wealthy and earned enough to rent a dance studio to develop her work and create larger performances for the stage.

She traveled to Paris and was inspired by the art works at the Louvre Museum and the Exposition Universelle (held in Paris, in 1900, to celebrate the achievements of the past century).

In 1902, Loie Fuller, a pioneer of both modern dance and theatrical lighting techniques, visited her studio and invited her to tour with her. She toured all over Europe, introducing her innovative dance technique.

In 1904, she opened her first school to teach young women her dance philosophy in Grunewald, Germany. The Isodorables, a group of six young girls instructed by her, would later continue her legacy.

In 1903, Duncan gave a lecture in Berlin, published as a pamphlet, ‘The Dance of the Future’, which received a great deal of publicity and there was an outpouring of support for her ideas.

In 1917, in San Francisco, she performed solo scenes from Iphigenia in Aulis, to Gluck’s composition to rave reviews. Critic Redfern Mason described her as, “this ever-young figure of Hellenic myth made incarnate with a flower-like beauty”.