logotipo

Isadora was born in San Francisco, the youngest of four children. Her father, Charles Duncan was a poet and he divorced her mother Mary Dora, a music teacher, shortly after Isadora's birth. The family plunged into poverty. Despite their poor condition the Duncan environment was rich in cultural, artistic and intellectual stimulation. After the failure of the marriage, Mary Dora rejected her Irish Catholic religious background and became a follower of the agnostic Robert Green Ingersoll. Ingersoll, a lawyer, a Civil War veteran and a former attorney general of Illinois achieved some notoriety for his lectures and writings which attacked popular Christian beliefs. Isadora's mother would read Ingersoll's works to her children.

The absence of a father and the strong unconventional attitudes of her mother created a stridently independent woman who preached and lived a life that we might call distinctly "feminist." This independence, married to her artistic nature, created a soul that forever battled the demands of conventional society with the demands of her art. Isadora didn't straddle the fence between the two worlds. Her body and her soul were clearly attuned to the calling of her art.

Given the realities of her childhood she eschewed the concept of marriage (although she did get married now and then) on both personal and political grounds. She recognized that marriage and the artistic spirit are not compatible.

The Dance of Passionate Passions
Isadora Duncan was a woman brimming over with passion. And love, like art, was a continuing obsession. Her first love affair, at age 11, was a secret from the object of her affections. Vernon, a young chemist who worked in a drug store was a dance student of Isadora's older sister Elizabeth.

Her second intense love affair began in Paris in 1905 when she met the stage designer Gordon Craig. This affair produced Isadora's first child, a daughter named Deirdre born in 1906. Despite her deep passion for Craig the inevitable conflicts between life, love and art emerged. Liberated women do not always fall in love with liberated men.

Isadora's second child, a son Patrick, was born in 1910. This birth was the result of a romance with Paris Singer, heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune. Again her love life conflicted with her artistic life.

This dialectic between "love" and "art" is but an umbrella covering a wide range of dualities. The tension between her creative life and domestic responsibility, between her public persona and her private self, between her passionate love and her motherly love...all this tension and conflict somehow found its expression in her art, which was exhibited in the movement of her body. Commenting on Duncan's art, Linda Tomko, wrote in her essay "She Saw America Dancing" (Women's Review of Books, Volume XIII: June 1, 1996), that Isadora's dancing was

Her commentary on the pregnancy and birth of her daughter is moving and heartfelt. But despite these expressed feelings, one suspects that like her lovers, her children too were sacrificed for her art. She talks about not seeing her young daughter for six months at a time while on dance tours. Despite expressions to the contrary, Isadora sacrificed everything for her "art."

The Sacrificial Dance

And then tragedy struck. In Paris, on April 13, 1913, it was a rainy afternoon. Isadora's children were accidentally drowned when the automobile they were in rolled into the Seine river. Her already faltering relationship with Singer all but collapsed. And so did her life, for awhile. But again, her "art" restored her, in part. After a convalescence that included refugee work in Albania and romance in Constantinople she returned to Paris.

Although the love affair with Singer was over he continued to support her and her dream of creating a dance school community. For a brief time the school flourished in Paris at the Bellevue Hotel which Singer had purchased for Isadora. But by 1914 the world situation had become ominous as the Great War began to unfurl its fury in Europe. Her school and its students were moved to New York to avoid the hostilities. Isadora had also become pregnant again, but the baby died at childbirth. (The father apparently was an Italian lover euphemistically referred to as Michael Angelo).

Isadora spent most of the war moving around. She performed in South America where she was surprised to see "the mixture of black and white races taken with nonchalance." She learned to dance the tango in Argentina. She visited and performed in Cuba. In 1917 she toured in America, but her performances were not well received.

In 1921 the Soviet Union invited Isadora to Russia to open a dance school. There she met the Russian poet Sergei Esenin, seventeen years her junior. She married Esenin in 1922 and together they toured the United States. Their reception in America was uniformly hostile. They were accused of being "Bolsheviks" and their politics, not their art, became the main focus of their appearances. The marriage soon dissolved (Esenin would commit suicide in 1925).

The End Dance
In 1926 Isadora began her autobiography, My Life in which she covered her life history up to her departure for Russia in 1921. On September 14, 1927 while riding in an automobile, Isadora Duncan died tragically and suddenly when the scarf around her neck got caught in the rear-wheel spokes of the open-air car. She died instantly.