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Isadora Duncan's Dance Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2014

Ann Daly
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Extract

In America, around 1900, Edith Wharton wrote in her autobiography, “[O]nly two kinds of dancing were familiar…: waltzing in the ballroom and pirouetting on the stage”. Wharton missed her earliest opportunity to see Duncan, in 1899, when a Boston philanthropist and Newport hostess featured the young dancer at a garden party:

“Isadora Duncan?” People repeated the unknown name, wondering why it had been used to bait Miss Mason's invitation.… I hated pirouetting, and did not go to Miss Mason's. Those who did smiled, and said they supposed their hostess had asked the young woman to dance out of charity—as I daresay she did. Nobody had ever seen anything like it; you couldn't call it dancing, they said. No other Newport hostess engaged Miss Duncan, and her name vanished from everybody's mind.

No doubt, the young Duncan's earliest performances must have looked peculiar. She neither waltzed nor pirouetted. She did not kick up her legs; she manipulated no skirts; she rarely portrayed any specific character. Legend even has it (though not quite accurately) that she was maverick enough at a very tender age to disavow her toe dancing lessons. In her more semantically polemical moments, Duncan rejected the label “dancer” altogether, in order to disassociate herself from the questionable antics of her colleagues. Instead, she set herself apart as an “artiste.” That is what she listed as her occupation on the birth certificate for her second child, Patrick Augustus Duncan, in 1910.

Type
Articles
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , Fall 1994 , pp. 24 - 31
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 1994

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References

Notes

1. Wharton, Edith, A Backward Glance (New York and London: D. Appleton-Century Company, Inc., 1934), 321.Google Scholar

2. Ibid., 321.

3. Seldes, George, “What Love Meant to Isadora Duncan,” The Mentor (February 1930): 64.Google Scholar

4. Folder 64, Irma Duncan Collection of Isadora Duncan Materials, Dance Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New York City, New York.

5. According to biographer Allan Ross Macdougall, she was heard to say this at various times during her later years, when asked about the origins of her dance ( Macdougall, Allan Ross, “Isadora Duncan and the Artists,” Dance Index 5, no. 3 [March 1946]: 61).Google Scholar

6. James, Oliphant, “Plain Words about Dancing,” Westminster Review 136, no. 1 (July 1891): 59.Google Scholar

7. Beland, Elizabeth, “The Eldest of the Arts,” The Cosmopolitan 10, no. 6 (April 1891): 644.Google Scholar

8. Battersea, Lady, “Ethics of Amusement,” World's Congress of Representative Women, edited by Sewall, May Wright, vol. 7 (Chicago: Rand, McNally & Company, 1894), 135.Google Scholar

9. “Dancing Literature and Dogma,” The Saturday Review 60 (1 August 1885): 151.

10. Herbert, Spencer, “Professional Institutions. III—Dancer and Musician,” Popular Science Monthly 47 (July 1895): 364–374 Google Scholar; Spencer, Herbert, “Professional Institutions. III—Dancer and Musician,” Contemporary Review 68 (July 1895): 114–124.Google Scholar

11. Mrs.Grove, Lilly, Dancing: A Handbook of the Terpsichorean Arts in Diverse Places and Times, Savage and Civilized (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1895).Google Scholar Also see Foote, Susan Leann, “Lilly Grove Frazer and Her Book Dancing,” M.A. thesis, York University, 1986.Google Scholar

12. Vance, Lee J., “The Evolution of Dancing,” The Popular Science Monthly 411 (October 1892): 739–756 Google Scholar; Rowbotham, J. F., “Dancing as a Fine Art,” Eclectic Magazine 52, no. 1 (July 1890): 16–23 Google Scholar; Barr, Amelia E., “Characteristic Dances of the World,” Lippincott's 271 (April 1881): 330–341.Google Scholar

13. Dodworth, Allen, Dancing and Its Relations to Education and Social Life, with a New Method of Instruction (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1885), 3.Google Scholar

14. Sause, Judson, The Art of Dancing, (Chicago, New York, San Francisco: Belford, Clarke & Co. Publishers, 1889), 128.Google Scholar

15. Philip, Hayman, “The Magic of Dancing is Sorcery Sweet,” Theatre 36 (1 May 1891): 238.Google Scholar

16. Duncan, Isadora, Der Tanz der Zukunft (Leipzig: Eugen Diederichs, 1903), 23.Google Scholar

17. “Emotional Expression,” The New York Herald, 20 February 1898. Duncan may have picked up her ideas about the character formation of children while in Oakland or San Francisco, where Emma Marwedel, a pioneer of Friedrich Froebel's kindergarten plan as a method of education reform, was laying down its American foundations. Marwedel and other education progressives believed that free kindergartens, as a means of “character training,” began the path leading to the emancipation of childhood, the perfection of motherhood, and the regeneration of the human race—Duncan's own concerns, too. Wealthy women like Mrs. S. B. Crocker and Mrs. Stanwood were underwriting the establishment and maintenance of free kindergartens there ( Swift, Fletcher Harper, “Emma Warwedel, 1818–1893, Pioneer of the Kindergarten in California,” University of California Publications in Education 6, no. 3 [1931]: 139–216).Google Scholar

18. Quoted in Shapiro, Michael Steven, “Froebel in America: A Social and Intellectual History of the Kindergarten Movement, 1848–1918” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1980), 44.Google Scholar Although I have found no evidence directly linking Duncan and Froebel, her ideas seem to echo his. He believed in the correspondence between the evolution of natural forms and the stages of a child's growth and stressed an ethics of unity as an expression of God's plan for order. The purpose of children's education, then, was to lead the child toward the “inner law of Divine Unity.” Froebel's techniques included singing, marching, and dancing. Shapiro's dissertation establishes the high profile of kindergarten in San Francisco and around the country during the 1880s and 1890s, which further suggests Duncan's likely exposure to these ideas.

19. Kem, Stephen, Anatomy and Destiny: A Cultural History of the Human Body (Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1975), 64–65.Google Scholar

20. “Emotional Expression.” See note 17.

21. The Dionysion pamphlet seems to have been published for performances at the New York Metropolitan Opera House in October 1914 (Dance Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New York City, New York).

22. Whitman, Walt, Leaves of Grass (1892; reprint, New York: Bantam Books, 1983), 124.Google Scholar

23. Hertelendy, Paul reports this finding from the memoirs of Florence Treadwell Boynton (Paul Hertelendy, “New Light, Old Legend: Isadora's Early Years,” Oakland Tribune, 18 December 1977, Isadora Duncan Collection, Performing Arts Library and Museum, San Francisco, California).Google Scholar

24. Graham, Patricia Albjerg, “Expansion and Exclusion: A History of Women in American Higher Education,” Signs 3, no. 4 (Summer 1978): 759–773.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25. Duncan, Isadora, The Art of the Dance. Edited by Cheney, Sheldon. (New York: Theatre Arts, Inc., 1928), 99.Google Scholar

26. Duncan to Ainslie, Berlin to London, Douglas Ainslie Papers, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin, Texas.

27. For a consideration of how the manifesto reflected its European and, in particular, German, context, see Jeschke, Claudia, “The Dance of the Future,” Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Conference of the Society of Dance History Scholars (Riverside, CA: Dance History Scholars, 1987): 106–118.Google Scholar

28. Duncan, , Der Tanz, 12.Google Scholar

29. Never mind that Nietzsche rejected Darwin's fatalistic, mechanistic principle of natural selection and supplanted it with the power of the individual free will to create change. This basic incompatibility (among others) between her sources was not important to Duncan's purpose. Rather, she drew upon Nietzsche's poetic vision of the future and the power of the will.

30. In 1908, the year of Duncan's first American tour, Mencken's, H. L. The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (Boston: Luce and Company, 1908)Google Scholar made an immediate success. By 1925 no European thinker of the nineteenth century, except for Darwin, Spencer, and possibly Thomas Henry Huxley, had been so widely reprinted. There had been 200,000 copies of his works printed in the United States since the first, in 1899 ( Drimmer, Melville, “Nietzsche in American Thought, 1895–1925” [Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 1965]).Google Scholar

31. Duncan, , Der Tanz, 26.Google Scholar

32. See Atwell, John E., “The Significance of Dance in Nietzsche's Thought,” in Illuminating Dance: Philosophical Explorations. Edited by Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. (Lewisburg, PA and London: Bucknell University Press and Associated University Presses, Inc., 1984), 19–34 Google Scholar; Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Kaufmann, Walter. (1883–1885; reprint, New York: Viking Press, 1966).Google Scholar

33. Duncan, , Art, 101.Google Scholar

34. In synthesizing Duncan's theory of dance and tracing its sources, I have built on the sturdy foundation provided by biographers and scholars such as Fredrika Blair, Deborah Jowitt, Elizabeth Kendall, Allan Ross Macdougall, and Nancy Chalfa Ruyter. See Blair, Frederika, Isadora: Portrait of the Artist as a Woman (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1986)Google Scholar; Jowitt, Deborah, “The Search for Motion,” in Time and the Dancing Image (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1988)Google Scholar; Kendall, Elizabeth, Where She Danced: The Birth of American Art-Dance (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979)Google Scholar; Macdougall, Allan Ross, Isadora: A Revolutionary in Art and Love (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1960)Google Scholar; Ruyter, Nancy Chalfa, Reformers and Visionaries: The Americanization of the Art of Dance (New York: Dance Horizons, 1979).Google Scholar

35. Duncan, Isadora, blue notebook, 1904, 83–84, folder 141, Irma Duncan Collection of Isadora Duncan Materials, Dance Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New York City, New York.Google Scholar

36. Ibid., 87–89.

37. Whitman, , Leaves, 315.Google Scholar

38. Nietzsche, , Zarathustra, 34.Google Scholar

39. Duncan, , Der Tanz, 24.Google Scholar

40. Duncan, , Art, 122.Google Scholar

41. Nietzsche, , Zarathustra, 75.Google Scholar

42. Duncan, Isadora, “Form and Movement,” The Theatre Dionysus notebook, Roberts, Mary Fanton Collection of Isadora Duncan materials, Theatre Collection, Museum of the City of New York, New York City, New York.Google Scholar

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid.

45. Duncan, , blue notebook, 96–97.Google Scholar

46. Duncan told a reporter: “One works for years to perfect some one artistic thing like that of merging one motion into another, but what difference does it make? Who sees it? Nobody understands” ( Ruhl, Arthur, “Some Ladies Who Dance,” Colliers Weekly, 5 February 1910, Isadora Duncan Clippings, Dance Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New York City, New York).Google Scholar

47. Duncan, , Art, 69.Google Scholar

48. Duncan, , Art, 99.Google Scholar

49. Duncan, Isadora, “The Dance,” Theatre Arts 2, no. 1 (December 1917): 21.Google Scholar See also Duncan, , Art, 99.Google Scholar

50. Duncan, , Art, 101.Google Scholar

51. Duncan, Irma, Duncan Dancer: an Autobiography (Middlelown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1966), 54.Google Scholar