May 26: Isadora Duncan's birthday, the dancer who changed the history of dance
Isadora Duncan was born on May 26, 1877, in San Francisco. She founded a school of free dance, visited Russia twice, and was married to Sergei Yesenin for two years. Her life is a story of rebellion against academism, revolutionary illusions, and personal tragedies.
Childhood and the beginning of the journey
Duncan's father, a banker and mining engineer, went bankrupt shortly after her birth. The family split up, and Isadora grew up with her mother. To help her mother earn money, she taught dance to the neighborhood children as a child. At age 10, she dropped out of school, considering it useless, and pursued music and dance professionally.
At 18, she moved to Chicago and performed in nightclubs, barefoot and wearing a Greek chiton, shocking audiences. From 22, she lived in London, then Paris. After 25, she achieved great success and toured throughout Europe, performing music by Beethoven, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Schubert, classical motifs, and revolutionary melodies.
The phrase "the beauty of lines" is absurd in itself. A line is only beautiful when it is directed toward a beautiful goal.
Free dance versus ballet
Duncan strove to restore dance to its original naturalness and freedom. Inspired by Nietzsche's philosophy, she wrote the book "The Dance of the Future." She considered academicism a hindrance to art and called herself "an enemy of ballet," believing it to be "the true expression of the essence of tsarism."
She described her impressions of visiting the Imperial Ballet School in St. Petersburg as follows:
Rows of little girls repeated agonizing exercises and stood en pointe for hours, like victims of a cruel and unnecessary Inquisition. Vast, empty dance halls, devoid of beauty and inspiration, with a single portrait of the Tsar on the walls, resembled torture chambers.
In 1904–1905, Duncan performed in St. Petersburg and Moscow. In 1913, she repeated her Russian tour, now with her own school in France. Driven by enthusiasm for her ideas, the Heptakhor studio of the musical and plastic movement opened in St. Petersburg in 1914, existing until the early 1930s.
Russia and Yesenin
Duncan dreamed not only of a new dance but also of a new person. She sympathized with the ideas of the Bolsheviks after the 1917 Revolution. In 1921, she came to Moscow at the invitation of Anatoly Lunacharsky, who promised to open a dance school for her and provide financial support.
As the steamer sailed north, I looked back with contempt and pity at all the old institutions and customs of bourgeois Europe that I was leaving behind.
The reality turned out to be different: post-revolutionary Russia greeted her with famine and lack of heating. Duncan raised most of the money for the school herself. In the first year, 40 students, aged 4 to 10, came to the plastic dance school. They danced barefoot and dressed in scarlet tunics and chitons. The school quickly became known as the "barefoot school." Duncan herself, imbued with communist ideals, waved a red scarf and declared from the stage, "I am red."
Soon after her arrival, she met the poet Sergei Yesenin. She was 44, he had just turned 26. Yesenin spoke no English, and Duncan barely spoke Russian.
Only a genius can become worthy of my body
In 1922, they officially married, and Duncan became a Soviet citizen. Yesenin often accompanied her on tours of Europe and the United States. In 1924, the marriage broke up, and Duncan left Russia forever.
Tragedies and the end
Even before meeting Yesenin, Duncan had lost three children: a daughter and a son died in a car accident in 1913, when the car fell into the Seine; another son died in 1914 shortly after birth. She adopted six of her students; they continued her dance traditions.
Isadora Duncan died in Nice in 1927, strangled by her own scarf, which got caught in a car tire. She was 50 years old.
