She shied away from the lens, her most recent biographer, Peter Kurth, explains, because ‘she could make no natural motion while posing for the camera.’ Natural motion – as opposed to the engraved arcs and acrobatic tricks of classical ballet, the swooning decadence of the waltz or the silliness of social dancing – was the foundation of her technique. When it came to the mores of her day Duncan was not so much renegade as indifferent.īut when it came to her art, she was uncompromising and deeply protective. She treated cash and champagne as if both were water from a bottomless well. She lectured the rich on their selfishness while begging funds for her dance school, her dream of seeing five hundred children – sometimes it was five thousand – dancing to Beethoven’s Ninth. She bore three illegitimate children without a shred of guilt (the third one died within hours of its birth). She disdained marriage and went from lover to lover, hundreds of them, with abandon. A surprise, this, considering how unselfconscious, how shamelessly exhibitionist and inflammatory her behaviour could be. Her portrait and the sensation of her dancing would be rendered by countless artists in other media, but it turns out that the camera made her selfconscious. Photography, too, was suspect, and in many photos she wears an expression of placid forbearance: the smile of Mona Lisa under eyes that are appraising. She thought that her young son Patrick might be that ‘one’. After her, she believed, would come ‘one who would create the new dance born from the new music’. She was keenly aware of history and presented herself and her art, from the very beginning, as a phenomenon on a continuum with ancient Greece, Renaissance painting, classical music, the Pre-Raphaelites and Auguste Rodin. But more than that, the absence of archival footage, she said, would ensure that future generations remembered her ‘as a legend’. Because music – Chopin, Schubert, Brahms, Beethoven, Wagner – was the spiritual inspiration for so much of what she did, Duncan couldn’t imagine dancing on film without it. In those days film was in its infancy and still silent ( The Jazz Singer was released the year Duncan died). We have no more than four seconds of Duncan dancing because she did not like the medium of film as it existed in the years of her solo career, which began in the 1890s, peaked between 19, and continued intermittently until her death in 1927, at the age of 50. ‘I have come,’ she once said, ‘to bring about a great renaissance of religion through the dance, to bring the knowledge of the beauty and holiness of the human body through its expression of movements.’ Thus spake Isadora. In fact, her classical garb is as much that of the sandalled shepherd of men as it is a barefoot goddess of Greek mythology. The dance over, she stands simply and acknowledges her audience with a Christ-like proffering of her palms. The white column of her neck, the spade-like underside of her jaw, the lifted breastbone crossed in white gauze: had any female dancer before Duncan projected such ecstatic presence and concrete power? Because of her thrown back upper body it seems as if she is running, but she is actually slow and steady, offering herself to something so large she doesn’t need to move fast. Coming out of the turn and moving in the direction of the camera, her arms melt open as her head falls back. She wears a loose gown draped crosswise with a white veil, a floating X over her heart. Duncan enters the frame turning, her arms positioned in an upward reach not unlike ballet’s codified fourth position, but more naturally placed. It is an afternoon recital, early in the 20th century, and it takes place en plein air, trees in the background, like so much of the painting of the day. This small celluloid footprint – light-struck in the manner of Eugène Atget – contains quite a bit of information. * It is four seconds long, the very end of a performance, and it is followed by eight seconds in which Duncan accepts applause. There is only one piece of film that shows Isadora Duncan dancing.
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