By James Aitchison

Famed for her lithe, legendary beauty, she pioneered modern contemporary dance.  She performed across Europe, the United States and Russia.  Arguably, today she is remembered more for the macabre — some say absurd — manner of her death.

Many films have celebrated her life.  Vanessa Redgrave portrayed Duncan in the 1968 film Isadora, nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

Who was this dance iconoclast?  And how did tragedy pursue each stage of her life?

Born Angela Isadora Duncan in 1877, she was the youngest of four children.  Her father, Joseph Charles Duncan was a San Francisco banker and mining engineer.  Shortly after her birth, Joseph Duncan’s bank collapsed and he was investigated and charged.  Isadora’s mother, Mary, humiliated by the financial scandal and his many affairs, divorced him.  (In 1898, as a portent of future tragedy, Joseph Duncan, together with his third wife and daughter, perished when a passenger steamship ran aground off the Cornish coast.)

After the divorce, Isadora’s mother moved the family to Oakland, California where she worked as a seamstress and piano teacher.  When Isadora dropped out of school, she and her three siblings earned money by teaching dance to local children.

Her free, improvised dance techniques soon brought her into conflict with the norms of the day.  In 1896 she joined Augustin Daly’s theatre company in New York but was soon disillusioned.  Attempting formal ballet classes, Duncan was left even more disappointed.

Duncan moved to London in 1898, the year of her father’s death, where she performed for wealthy patrons in their drawing rooms.  The Greek vases in the British Museum inspired her costumes.  She performed barefoot and earned enough to rent a studio and create larger performances.  In 1900 she was in Paris, delighting audiences with her liberated dance style.

By 1902 Duncan was performing across Europe where her innovative dance technique was hailed as revolutionary.  She emphasised natural movement in dance — free expression, natural movements, and the integration of music and poetry — in contrast to the rigidity of traditional, highly codified ballet.  Incorporated in her technique was a new “American athleticism”.  She believed movement originated from the solar plexus.  She emphasised “evolutionary” dance motion, each movement born from the one that preceded it.  It is this new dance philosophy that earned Duncan the title of “creator of modern dance”.

Compare a traditional ballet such as Swan Lake with the contemporary dance seen in the movie West Side Story, to appreciate Duncan’s gift to choreography.

Throughout her career, she revolutionised the dance world.  Her style allowed for individual creativity and emotional depth.  At the time of her death, she was one of the most renowned dancers globally.  Her legacy has profoundly influenced the art of dance, expressing the human spirit through the body’s movement.  She believed dance “should encircle everything that life had to offer, joy and sadness”. 

She established schools in Germany, Paris and later New York.

Duncan’s life was as daring and unconventional as her dancing.  She had three children with three different fathers.  Deirdre was born in 1906, fathered by theatre designer Gordon Craig.  Patrick Augustus, born 1910, was fathered by Paris Singer, one of the sons of sewing machine magnate Isaac Singer. As a portend of Duncan’s own death by automobile, both Deirdre and Patrick drowned in 1913 when their nanny’s car plunged into the River Seine in Paris.  A third child, a son, was born in 1914; she begged Italian sculptor Romano Romanelli to sleep with her because she was desperate for another child.  The baby died shortly after his birth.

Duncan married Russian poet Sergei Yesenin in Moscow in 1922.  They separated.  Yesenin returned to Leningrad where he suicided in 1925.

However, by the late 1920s, Duncan was struggling financially and suffering depression.  She never recovered from the devastating loss of her three children.

Holidaying at Nice in the French Riviera, Duncan climbed into an open racing car driven by a handsome young French-Italian mechanic Benoît Falchetto.  It was a cold day, 14 September 1927.  She wore a long, flowing silk scarf.  Her friend Mary Desti had wanted her to wear a cape in the open vehicle but Duncan insisted on wearing the scarf.  She wrapped it around her neck and left it trailing behind her.  As the car sped off, she called to friends: “I go to my glory…” Moments later, the end of the long scarf became entangled in the spoked wheels of the car.  Desti watched in horror as the scarf tightened around Duncan’s neck and pulled her from the car, breaking her neck and almost decapitating her.

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Isadora Duncan’s life was marred by tragedy.  Her lifestyle was as liberated as her dance style. She gave the world a new vision of what dance could be.  As one epitaph stated: “Her life and untimely death continue to evoke interest and reflection on the interplay between art, life, and tragedy”.