THE ART OF THE DANCE
ISADORA DUNCAN
Oitfi of
THE ART OF THE DANCE
0 we can wait no longer,
We too ta\e ship, 0 Soul,
Joyous we too launch out on trackless seas,
Fearless for unknown shores.
WHITMAN.
ISADORA DUNCAN AT THE PARTHENON
PHOTOGRAPH BY STEICHEN
THE ART OF THE DANCE
ISADORA DUNCAN
EDITED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
SHELDON CHENEY
NEW YORK • THEATRE ARTS, INC.
MCMXXVIII
COPYRIGHT, 1928, BY HELEN HACKETT, INC.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
/ C
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BY J. J. LITTLE AND IVES COMPANY
THE ART OF THE DANCE
with reproductions of original drawings by
LEON BAKST, ANTOINE BOURDELLE,
JOSE CLARA, MAURICE DENIS,
GRANDJOUAN, AUGUST VON KAULBACH,
VAN DEERING PERRINE, AUGUSTE RODIN,
DUNOYER DE SEGONZAC AND
ABRAHAM WALKOWITZ
and with photographs by
ARNOLD GENTHE and EDWARD STEICHEN
PUBLISHER'S NOTE
he essays by Isadora Duncan are here pub¬
lished in book form and copyrighted by
express permission of the author's estate,
by contract with Raymond Duncan. Rights of
translation are reserved and are fully protected.
We extend our thanks for permission to re¬
print the following material: to Boni and Live-
right for "I See America Dancing" (from "My
Life"); to the Nation for "Isadora Duncan Is
Dead" by Max Eastman; to the New Republic
for "Isadora Duncan, Artift" by Shaemas
O'Sheel; to the Public Ledger for an interview in
"Fragments and Thoughts"; to Mary Fanton
Roberts for "The Greek Theatre" and to Charles
D. Coburn for "The Drama of the Future."
We desire to express our cordial appreciation
to all the friends of Isadora Duncan who have
helped to make this memorial complete and espe¬
cially to the writers of the forewords and to
the artifts for their distinguished cooperation.
CONTENTS
introduction by Sheldon Cheney
FOREWORDS
Isadora's last dance by Raymond Duncan
Isadora by Margherita Duncan
isadora-my friend by Mary Fanton Roberts
Isadora duncan, artist by Shaemas O'Sheel
Isadora duncan is dead by Max EaHman
isadora-remembered by Eva LeGallienne
Isadora duncan by Robert Edmond Jones
THE ART OF THE DANCE
i see america dancing
the philosopher's stone of dancing
the dance of the future
the parthenon
the dancer and nature
WHAT DANCING SHOULD BE 71
A CHILD DANCING 74
MOVEMENT IS LIFE 77
BEAUTY AND EXERCISE 80
THE DANCE IN RELATION TO TRAGEDY 84
THE GREEK THEATRE 86
EDUCATION AND THE DANCE 88
TERPSICHORE 90
THE DANCE OF THE GREEKS 92
YOUTH AND THE DANCE 97
DEPTH 99
THE GREAT SOURCE 101
RICHARD WAGNER IO5
A LETTER TO THE PUPILS IO7
MOSCOW IMPRESSIONS IO9
REFLECTIONS AFTER MOSCOW Il6
DANCING IN RELATION TO RELIGION AND LOVE 121
FRAGMENTS AND THOUGHTS 128
L'Envoi 144
Editor's notes 145
ILLUSTRATIONS
Isadora duncan at the Parthenon, photograph by Steichen
Frontispiece
pen and ink drawing by A. W al\0W it Z 4
pen and ink drawing by A. Wal\owitZ 8
drawing by Leon Ba\st 16
isadora duncan dancing the marseillaise,
drawing by Antoine Bourdelle 20
drawing by Antoine Bourdelle 22
drawing by Antoine Bourdelle, hitherto unpublished 26
design for a bas-relief after a dance by isadora duncan,
drawing by Antoine Bourdelle 30
drawing by Antoine Bourdelle 34
drawing by Antoine Bourdelle 36
painting by Fritz August Von Kaulbach 42
photograph by Arnold Genthe 46
photograph by Arnold Genthe 52
photograph by Arnold Genthe 58
photograph by Arnold Genthe 62
photograph by Arnold Genthe 68
crayon drawing by Van Deering Perrine 72
drawing by Andre Dunoyer De Segonzac 80
ISADORA DUNCAN DANNCING GLUCK's ORPHEE,
chal\ drawing by Grandjouan 84
ISADORA DUNCAN DANCING A SCHUBERT MOMENT MUSICAL,
chal\ drawing by Grandjouan 88
drawing by Grandjouan, suggested by Isadora Duncan dancing
Cesar Frances Redemption 96
drawing by Auguste Rodin 100
drawing by Auguste Rodin 104
drawing by Auguste Rodin 112
drawing by Auguste Rodin 116
sketches of Isadora duncan dancing, by Maurice Denis 118
sketches of Isadora duncan dancing, by Maurice Denis 122
drawing by Jose Clara 126
drawing by Jose Clara 130
drawing by ]ose Clara 136
photograph by Steichen 138
photograph by Steichen 142
photograph by Steichen 144
INTRODUCTION
These are the writings of Isadora Duncan on the dance. No one
ever earned better the right to speak about this art, as she might
wish, and without interruption. I am tempted, after cohering
the essays that follow, to leave them without introduction or comment
or explanation. All of us concerned want the book to be her own, to
carry on her spirit, to quicken directly the work that is being done
everywhere in response to her dancing, her courage, her teaching. But
because Isadora Duncan is no longer with us, people are doubly curious
about her writings: they ask, did she really compose all these essays her¬
self, word for word? Is this all that she wrote about her art? Did she
herself plan a book about the dance ?
There are so many myths about Isadora Duncan, indeed, and so
many questions, that some words of introduction seem imperative.
Ju£t as her dancing is, in the end, unexplainable, there are things about
her writing that defy comment; but I will try, quite simply, to answer
the queries that were put to me moSt often while I was arranging these
papers for publication.
In the winter of 1926-27, when I worked with Isadora Duncan over
the arrangement of some articles for Theatre Arts Monthly, we planned
that some day the essays she had written about the dance would be col¬
lected, with additions, in a volume complementary to My Life. She was
writing that extraordinary biography at the time, and was disturbed be¬
cause those who were advising her kept saying, "Don't put into it too
1
much about your art!" She expressed the wish, too, that there be col¬
lected for publication a selection of the portrait-drawings made by
notable artists of Europe and America over a period of twenty years.
The obvious answer was that an illustrated book about her art, as dis¬
tinct from her life, should follow the biography. But she mu£t finish
My Life first. We arranged that I would see her in the following sum¬
mer or autumn, to go over the material she would collect meantime. It
was while I was on my way to Paris in September, hoping to meet her
again, that word of her death came.
When a group of friends determined that the firft memorial to her
in America would be a volume of essays on her art, it was natural that
its form should follow the general plan thus sketched by the dancer
herself. This book is at once a memorial tribute and a completion of
one of her own wishes. Lacking, unfortunately, that final shaping that
she would have given it, it may be considered, nevertheless, far more
than a random and unforeseen collecting of casual papers.
The present collection of the writings is as near complete, I believe,
as is humanly possible to put together at this time. It includes all the
widely published essays and program notes, many fugitive open letters
and articles that had gone into obscure files, and a certain number of
pieces apparently never before transcribed from the dancer's manu¬
scripts. Inevitably the issuance of the book will call forth letters, memo¬
randa to students, and possibly a forgotten manuscript or two in the
hands of friends. But the collecting has been undertaken with the co¬
operation of the family, of Elizabeth, Auguftin and Raymond Duncan,
and of many of those friends who were closest to Isadora Duncan; and
her own papers were turned over to the editor for perusal. Nothing
that bears on her art has been omitted, nothing suppressed. There have
been difficulties: there are four or five versions of some of the essays,
due to the re-shaping of program notes for magazine use, or vice versa,
or due to translation and re-translation; the handwritten scripts some-
2
times offer evidence of haste, and a word is obscure here and there. At
moments of inspired composition, too, the sentences tumbled upon one
another without punctuation, and the writer followed her own method
of indicating emphasis and pause: the writing grew larger with the im¬
portance of a phrase, then dwindled, with dashes, mere space or a
broadening of the pen stroke indicating full stops. It is a system expres¬
sive in the original, but impossible to transfer into rigid type.
Thus in editing the essays I have been obliged often to supply punc¬
tuation and occasionally to choose between words. But I have put one
rule above all others: don't intrude unnecessarily—preserve the writer's
own statement about her art as she put it down. Where several versions
exi£t, I have tried to get back to the original, and this tracing back has
led to the correction of numerous damaging errors and changes made
by typiSts and editors. Occasionally it has seemed wisest to drop a para¬
graph from an article, where it was an exatft or almost exa£t repetition
of an earlier statement. Three or four pieces have been excluded as
being outside the subject matter of this book: the art of the dance.
These include an article on the art of Gordon Craig, which seems to
exift only in German; one that was done only too frankly as a "promo¬
tion" article about Nice; variant statements of the plan for a school;
fragments and lyric bits.
In fairness to the writer it mu£t be noted that six of the essays in
this colledion are translations. Some of these were doubtless written in
French, and translations are as much as we shall ever have; but in other
cases there is evidence that the French versions were taken from Eng¬
lish originals, since disappeared. In the translation from the original
into French, and from the French back into English, there has been
double opportunity for departure from the writer's exadt shades of
meaning. I have simply done my best in the matter. I have, of course,
indicated in the notes which essays are thus translated.
Answering the third, and ofteneft asked, of the questions, these
3
essays are indeed Isadora Duncan's own. There are myths to the effect
that her autobiography and her occasional magazine articles were un¬
dertaken in collaboration with "professional" writers. The manuscripts
of book and essays are sufficient evidence to the contrary. There is truth
in this: early in life she was influenced by and greatly indebted to the
several members of her own family who were so close to her spiritually
and as co-workers. During that period manuscripts were doubtless
worked over jointly; and Raymond Duncan muft be mentioned par¬
ticularly in connexion with the lecture-essay, The Dance of the Future.
But that is the only reservation. Script after script exists in her own
handwriting, characteristically, impetuously, put down. When the
scripts had been copied out and punctuated, Isadora Duncan often cor¬
rected again, and added to, the typed copy.
For those who did not know the woman but only the dancer on
the stage, it is as well to say definitely that we are not concerned here
merely with a "star" who has risen, she knows not just how, to an
eminence where her opinions are good newspaper copy. Despite the
extraordinary directness of her art and her actions, her utter surrender
to impulse, Isadora Duncan was master of the tools of the intellect. She
based her philosophy on the value of the beautiful, and she trusted an
inner emotion beyond any of the thought-out rules and systems of man:
she was an "intellectual" last of all; and yet she was equipped with
strength of will and mental capacity very unusual. Her heredity had
meant contaCt with the arts and what is vaguely called "culture" from
her earliest years: through her father who was scholar, collector, devo¬
tee to Greek civilization, and dilettante poet, and through her mother
who was musician and lover of literature. Isadora spoke several lan¬
guages, and occasionally she wrote in French. Her reading covered a
wide range in philosophy, poetry, drama and history. She knew thor¬
oughly and particularly Whitman, Shakespeare, Goethe, Haeckel,
Rousseau, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. She read widely for the pleas-
4
PEN AND INK DRAWING BY A. WALKOWITZ
ure of reading, but she also searched avidly through the literature of
the dance, of music, of philosophy, for nurture of her art, for confirma¬
tion of her ideas. She spent literally years in museums and Studios, with
the art of the ancients and the art of the moderns. She was in personal
contact, moreover, with many of the greatest creative figures of her
time, with sculptors, painters, poets, acStors, musicians. Probably no
one knew more intimately the great men and women of the early
Twentieth Century. I say so much because the newspaper reporters, in
an age when flaming personality and outspokenness were fair game for
journalistic "copy," left the impression, all too widely, that her in¬
tensity, her love of life and beauty, were not matched by mental gifts
or ability in solid expression. She truly cared nothing for opinion out¬
side those who loved her or who saw life as an expression of beauty,
and she was willing to play a game with the journalists who catered
to the reSt of the world, to the conventional sensation-lovers. They did
her injury—in the ordinary view—almoSt beyond repair. It is to be
hoped that these considered writings—yes, stridtly her own—will help
to restore the truth about her.
No one pretends that these essays actually explain her own art.
When she danced it was divinity speaking, no less. She comes as near
to an explanation of the origin of her dance as any dancer ever has. She
tells us again and again that the dance muSt come from within, from
the soul, "from some melody of another world," from a divine fluidity.
But when she danced it was a thing beyond explanations, beyond anal¬
ysis, above words. And yet I think no other dancer can read this book
without feeling new inspiration, understanding, new life, and certainly
no dance-student will read it without profit, stimulus, deeper insight.
But let us still make the reservation that nothing written can explain
Isadora's own gift, the flame of beauty that burned in her, the way she
swept across the world, and, by her dancing, shattered schools and tra¬
ditions, accomplished a revolution, re-vivified an art.
5
No one ever lived her life and her art more indivisably. These
essays about her art ought, indeed, to be read with the outlines of her
life in mind. Without a glimpse of the living woman, the intense hu¬
man being, the reader may lose much of the implication of Isadora
sitting day after day, week after week, silent in the Parthenon, brood¬
ing over something to be discovered out of the Doric columns and the
surrounding hills; or Isadora seriously asking a child, "Are all natural
things beautiful, then?"; or Isadora saying to the massed proletariat
children in Moscow, "Raise your arms slowly upwards and outwards
toward the Heavens"; or Isadora answering, "Not only love but every
part of life should be practised as an art." No one ever lived life more
deeply, more diredtly, more magnificently. Friends, critics, casual
readers, put down the book, My Life, with the same exclamation:
"What a Life!" A few, realistic-minded or cynical, give the exclama¬
tion a sneering intonation. To the others it is a confession that this life
is unexplainable, beyond words, in the diredtness of the woman's re¬
sponse to an inner urge, in obedience to a spirit, the divine in the
human. Of all the people I have known in the world I think of Isadora
Duncan as the one person whose soul was closest to the surface, lea£t
embarrassed by protective thinking or convention, whose very re¬
action was generous, creative, ultimately right.
To me there is an epic quality in her life. The picture of the girl-
figure emerging out of Victorian times and customs, out there on the
very edge of Western civilization, in California, vibrating to some wave
of Whitmanesque affirmation, Starting eastward with absolute self-
confidence, conquering all of America and all of Europe for her idea,
by a revelation, a presentation of her dance—in this picture of the
march of the spirit of Isadora Duncan across the world, I find a great¬
ness, a Stirring elemental implication.
The reader of the present volume who has not yet read My Life
will perhaps do well to keep that progression in mind—I have ar-
6
ranged the essays, after the firSt two, in approximate chronological
order—and he may find it illuminating to recall certain "periods" of
the dancer's life. FirSt the Victorian beginnings, the girlhood, the danc¬
ing that was in a sense free already, but pretty, rather sentimental,—
hardly more than a sweet child, in the frilled frocks of the period, but
already burning with the desire to go forth and conquer the world for
her "great idea"; and indeed in this period making her way from San
Francisco to Chicago, to New York, to London, and so to Paris. Then
the life of the maturing young woman, the love life lived fully, the
dancing coming to a fuller expressiveness, with great successful tour-
nees, lecturing in Germany, travels to Greece, motherhood, schools
launched—success, indeed, homage, passionate love and tender love,
and a world conquest well Parted, not for her own dancing but for the
children of the world. Then a great and overwhelming personal trag¬
edy, the drowning of her children; her life and her art almost shattered
for the time; but finally a return to the dancing, less prettily, with a
di£ta£te for the sentimental things, a new note of depth, power, great¬
ness. But while fighting the ghoSt of that sorrow, she finds it difficult to
keep the schools functioning—the war does its part—and we read in
successive essays her appeals for aid in establishing national or interna¬
tional schools, descriptions of the Moscow attempt, open letters asking
that somehow she be enabled to pass on to the children of men all that
she has discovered about movement as a means to grace in living. Her
la£t essay contained the explaining line, "I have only made movements
which seem beautiful to me."
The reader bringing some such background of understanding of
the woman's life to the reading of the essays will find that they, in turn,
complement and illuminate many incidents and motives of her living.
Through it all one should remember the intense feminine nature be¬
yond the artift-creator, the essential womanliness, the torrential but
tender mother-love in her. I who have sought through her papers for
7
these essays have continually come face to face with that emotional
background of her art: her love of human beings and particularly her
love of the child. The letter to the adopted girl-pupils near the end of
this collection breathes it; the reports she exacted from the schools
when she was on tour are full of echoes: routine matters ending with
"Anna had a radish from her garden today," or "Irma has a new
tooth." There are letters to her own children too—"Be careful about
the stairs"—and then I have caught glimpses of the personal terror
she felt, after they were gone, the confusion and the blank wall, when
she who had so gloriously conquered life was perilously near to ex¬
tinction by life.
These essays are naturally less impetuous than her autobiography
—that biography that is above all, like her life, intense, revealing, di¬
rect, at times outrageous if judged by any accepted set of conventions.
She made her own world, she wrote her own rules; she wrote her life
in impetuous leaps forward, as she lived it. The essays are rather the
crystallization of her thoughts between leaps. The connected story of
her development as an artiSt is yet to be written—the material for it is
well-nigh inexhaustible, and we may expeCt to see many a book that
will attempt to present both the artist and the woman fully. But mean¬
time this volume of her own writings may serve better than any other
to fill the gap in My Life, out of which she left treatment of her art, on
advice.
The tributes to Isadora Duncan are added, firSt as a proper me¬
morial feature, and then with the hope that the writers, speaking of
her dancing as seen from without, by her family, by friends, by critics,
may serve toward a completer comprehension of her art. The picture
can thus be made fuller, more detailed.
Nothing was more characteristic of Isadora Duncan's dancing
than its disarming effeCt upon the arti£t-speCtator. It demanded imme¬
diate surrender; all pre-conceived notions of what the dance should be
8
\ I
7
IO" \
[iff. y
(I M
m
\ xt 1 \
\ Kx j \
(iy J*
PEN AND INK DRAWING BY A. WALKOWITZ
dropped away. Creators like Rodin and critics like Lavedan and Faure
forgot their cherished critical Standards. That had been true, however,
from the very Start: before Isadora Duncan had gone farther east than
Chicago, the greatest of Western sculptors of that time, Lorado Taft,
wrote, "This rare artiSt is poetry personified. She is not the Tenth Muse
but all the nine Muses in one—and painting and sculpture as well."
Not quite so early perhaps, but from Chicago, came that essay by Floyd
Dell with the line, "She has touched our lives with the magic of im¬
memorial loveliness." In her foreword in this volume, Mrs. Roberts
sufficiently quotes some of the leading New York artiSts of the day,
Barnard, Henri, Bitter; and I may add that from letters and clippings
the liSt might be extended to many of the moSt sensitive and creative
men in the American art world: Edwin Arlington Robinson, John
Drew, Jacob Adler, Percy Mackaye—and critics like Caffin and Melt-
zer. The London artiSts, during the next period, seem to have been
more reserved about writing their impressions—one remembers Isa¬
dora's reference to their polite shyness, in My Life—but the programs
of 1899 and 1900 remind one, in the liSt of patrons, of the lions of that
era: here are Henry James and Holman Hunt, Andrew Lang and
Walter Crane, Comyns Carr and Frederick Wedmore, all lending sup¬
port of the "Dance Idyls of Isadora Duncan."
In Paris Rodin wrote, "Not talent but genius ... It is art su¬
preme and complete," and that explaining line, "She has achieved in
sculpture feeling without effort." Carriere surrendered quite as com¬
pletely ; but it was always the sculptors who felt moSt akin to this dancer
in her revelation of plastic form. Bourdelle confessed that he never
would have done the Theatre Champs-Ely sees panels except for her.
One might add almost endless names of widely known critics, writers,
adtors, artiSts, who were swept off their feet by the freshness of her
dancing, over a period of ten years in Paris. With Rodin and Carriere
on one program are linked no end of Princes and Princesses, Counts,
9
Duchesses, etc., and such really outstanding figures as Besnard and
Clemenceau. Germany accorded her equally unreserved homage, par¬
ticularly the artiSt group in Munich; and from Russia one may men¬
tion the printed tributes of Stanislavsky and Komisarshevsky.
I have considered whether this memorial volume should include a
further selection from these many tributes. I have thus catalogued them
to indicate the extraordinary range of creative people to whom the
dancer appealed, and to suggest the uncritical response to her dancing.
I have traced all this through hundreds of letters—and yes! in the files
there are scores of poetic tributes: verses that range from the moSt pa¬
thetic inarticulate gropings of profoundly Stirred souls to those lines by
Percy Mackaye beginning,
Through what vast wood,
By what wild paths of beautiful surprise
Hast thou returned to us,
Diana, Diana of desire ?
But after all, this is primarily the book of Isadora Duncan's own writ¬
ings, and wants only an indication of that response, that quickening of
perception, of enjoyment, wherever she went dancing.
The illustrations are tributes, perhaps, as much as the forewords.
The artiSts have co-operated to fill out the essays with the most illumi¬
nating pictures of Isadora Duncan dancing. The thanks of the editor
and the publishers go out to these artiSts. It may be added that four of
them have announced the early publication of collections of their
sketches or photographs of Isadora Duncan: Grandjouan, Bourdelle,
Clara and Genthe. Fortunately, that so-valuable record of the spirit that
was Isadora is to be adequately perpetuated. One may pause to wish
that similar heed will be given to crystallizing and applying her ideas
about education, about sensitizing the soul to beauty, about movement
in the training of children.
10
While I have been working over the scripts this thought has come
to me oftener than any other, this question: What is the world going
to do with Isadora Duncan's ideas, with her plans, the spirit sown by
her dancing and her teaching, her impetus ? I have pondered over the
sheer value loft to the world in the failure to heed her plea for a great
international school of the dance, or of movement—for a hundred
schools, everywhere. More than anything else, I hope that this book
will serve to carry on her work, her "mission"—yes, she once called it
that; that, outside the Memorial School now being started in Paris, and
the school in Salzburg, women everywhere will increasingly realize the
values ftill being loft out of child training; that educators will better
understand the right place of beautiful movement as an element of
full and harmonious living.
Isadora Duncan's personal influence has now flowed into the gen¬
eral ftream of human living, and has turned the current, if ever so
slightly. Her ideas, what she has written in this book, may yet be used
further to turn the current toward those fields she glimpsed, where the
freedom of the human soul and the beauty of the human body are twin
actualities, not merely vague ideals—united in dancing. We who have
had the gift of her own ecftatic and inimitable dancing shall indeed be
showing ourselves unappreciative, if we fail to carry on the work, the
plan and ideal, that Isadora has sketched in the following pages, in
unaccustomed words.
Sheldon Cheney.
ii
ISADORA'S LAST DANCE
by raymond duncan
In face of the great dissension in the arts, during this la£t half cen¬
tury, in their Grange separation one from the other, and their
juxtaposition to the actions of life, like a genie directing the scat¬
tered orchestra Isadora appeared and raised her arms. She carried the
Dance to celestial summits and sowed the dream of a new world.
Not a dancer was Isadora, but a prophet speaking the unique world
language, voicing a beauty not only immense and sublime, but within
the reach of and understood by the mass. Her art is the smile of the
gods which at moments descends into our hearts, and her life is a re¬
flection of the calvary of the world, in the mad crush of its misery.
Quite young, Isadora bloomed as an earthly garden sparkling in the
sunlight. But bruised and wounded by the long years, her gesture cre¬
ated a radiant light leading the way to a superhuman ideal.
No one is capable of explaining her art and her message, but in
the centuries coming she will be seen. The great movement produced
by her in the world and in the arts of today is but the effervescence of
the ardent kindling which will fix her message when the flame leaps
forth.
Someone asked Isadora if there was a life after death, and she an¬
swered: "That is not my care; for what are we but sparks of a furnace,
sparks dying in the eternal night, sparks of the primordial foundry, a
torch of forms and figures, ghosts and shadows?"
We weep for her, but, enlightened through our tears, a great vision
J3
calms us. In the Theatre du Chatelet, in the Trocadero, great crowds
were united; in New York, in Berlin, in the Steppes of Siberia, in
distant Afghanistan, in Athens and in Rome—everywhere an im¬
mense communion of the innumerable crowd, before the simple gesture
of a woman. The vision of a divine art snatched from the firmament,
and served as the Host to the crowd. The answer is there, and no critic
can say, no artiSt can see, and no pupil can imitate. But the people have
drunk and eaten.
In her laSt triumph in Paris, in July, 1927, rising in one sublime
spring, she remade the life-road of anguish. Immense, and of a gigantic
eloquence, she made come out from crushing death the pure flower of
an eternal beauty.
We saw a promise, but we did not understand that the work was
accomplished. We had hoped to be continually carried toward the
heights of the unknown. The lesson is hard. For now it is for us to
rise with our own wings and to accomplish, within the eternal torment
of life, the sublime effort ever unfinished.
All these laSt days she prepared a new program: "Adieu, all my old
dances," she said; "I will create one that will replace them; through
Hell and its tortures I will pass, and to Paradise I will dance."
In her Studio in Nice, during long nights, she danced the first steps
of this great attempt. She put her arms around me and said: "Come,
Dante, I, Virgil, I will guide Thee." And I followed, and I felt the
beating of her heart and the rhythm of her breathing. I followed, my
eyes half closed, for I dared not look; and together we passed through
the horrors of Hell, which cannot be said nor seen, but which can be
received.
One other evening, she called Jean Cocteau, who was with us:
"Poete, tu es Virgil, dirige mon frere Raymond vers le paradis ou je
serai Beatrice." He put his arm on my shoulder, and with his right
hand, curiously thin and agitated, directed my vision toward Isadora
*4
dancing before us. And I opened my eyes wide, and it was not my sifter
that I saw, but a blinding celestial beauty. And I said: "This is a
dance."
"Yes, but the music is lacking," she answered.
And today, all the birds of heaven have flown there high to sing
the divine melody, the clouds cover the blinding sight, and my eyes are
veiled.
And I wait long days, and perhaps even years, to join her and con¬
tinue our voyage in the great and vast eternal night.
L5
ISADORA
by margherita duncan
It would be easier, I should say, for a man to be a hero to his valet
than for a woman to be a heroine to her sister-in-law; for this re¬
lationship is close enough to destroy illusion, while diftant
enough to be free from family prejudice. I can therefore speak of Isa¬
dora with some knowledge, yet with the impartiality of an outsider,
since I entered the Duncan family long after my first impressions of
Isadora Duncan the dancer had been formed.
Of a soul who has made such a contribution to the beauty of the
world as Isadora, I would not also ask that she possess the ordinary do¬
mestic virtues. She might very well have left those to the women who
have no other justification for their existence, and ftill have entered
Heaven and sat on the right hand of God. If she had regarded me as
an intruder and treated me accordingly, I would have said: "What of
it? She is a great artift. She doesn't need to be anything more. If she
does not permit me to love her as a sifter, I shall ftill adore the artift
and be grateful for the joy and exaltation she gives me from the distance
of the Stage."
But she was never anything but loving and kind to me, even
considerate, sparing my feelings many times through the sympa¬
thetic understanding that is not often found in so positive a nature
as hers. The luftre of her divinity was not dimmed by my approach to
her within the family circle; it was enhanced by the glow of warm
human love. She remained goddess and was perfect sifter as well. If
16
From SvetlotJ's Contemporary Ballet
DRAWING BY LEON BAKST
she had faults, I could not speak of them, even if I would, for to me
they are blotted out completely by her great lovingness. She had too
much love in her nature ever to be unkind.
The first time I ever saw Isadora Duncan she was dancing on the
Carnegie Hall £tage to the music of Gliick's Iphigenia. I experienced
what I can only describe as an identification of myself with her. It
seemed as if I were dancing up there myself. This was not an intel¬
lectual process, a critical perception that she was supremely right in
every movement she made; just a sense that in watching her I found
release for my own impulses of expression; the emotions aroused in
me by the music saw themselves translated into visibility. Her response
to the music was so true and inevitable, so free from personal eccen¬
tricity or caprice, her self-abandonment to the emotion implicit in the
music so complete that although I had never seen nor imagined such
dancing, I looked at it with a sort of delighted recognition.
I think this experience of mine muft have been common among
her audiences; for the desire for beauty lies at the bottom of every hu¬
man heart and she gave it expression, so that in watching her we had
a sense of satisfied longing. She so expressed the aspiration of the soul
that no one could see her dance and be quite the same person afterward.
I have known people whose whole course of life was changed by this
awakening of their latent aspirations, who abruptly gave up what they
were doing and turned to something entirely new.
This was not always dancing; but that reaction was a frequent
one, and those who became dancers were right in their feeling, though
wrong in their judgment. They thought it was easy to do what they
saw her do, because it looked easy. Technique, I take it, is the maftery
of one's medium of expression to the point at which the means dis¬
appears and only the result is seen; they mistook the perfection of Isa¬
dora's technique for lack of it, and thought that all they had to do was
let themselves go, and the same beauty would come forth.
17
This very natural mistake led to much inexpert dancing, which
made the judicious grieve; and none more than Isadora. For art was a
religion with her, artiSts were the gods of her Olympus whom she wor¬
shipped wherever she met them, and half-baked or pretend ones were
her particular aversion. She always maintained that art demanded the
devotion of a lifetime, and to be a dancer worthy of the name of artift
one should begin to train the body before the age of nine. That is why
she taught only children, and never for money; because teaching was
part of her life-work, a means of creating beauty and handing down her
conception of the art of dancing, and could therefore never be bestowed
lightly nor used as a way of earning her living. Of all the children who
came to the firSt two schools she founded, that in Berlin in 1904 and
that in Paris in 1914, the six girls known as "The Duncan Dancers" are
the only ones who remained with her to maturity and can truly be
called her pupils. Her third school is Still carried on in Moscow by
Irma, one of those six original pupils.
Isadora's uncompromising attitude on the subject of art often made
her enemies, for she was ruthless in her absolute artistic integrity. I
remember an incident at the Masque of Caliban, given in the Lewisohn
stadium, New York City, in 1916. The author, Percy Mackaye, had
persuaded Isadora to inaugurate it, and while waiting to begin, she
found herself near a group of "Greek" dancers, trained by one of her
imitators. One of these girls, excited by the occasion and the proximity
of the great dancer, said to Isadora archly, "If it weren't for you, we
wouldn't be doing this. Don't you feel proud?" Isadora looked at the
poor child and said, "I regard what you do with perfect horror."
Of course the girl could not be expected to understand the grounds
for this rebuff, and must have gone away much hurt. Later, in relating
the occurrence to us, Isadora explained what she meant, putting her un¬
erring finger on a fundamental and too frequent fault in dancing.
"Their movements are all down," she said, "grovelling on the earth.
18
They express nothing but the wisdom of the serpent, who crawls on
his belly."
Isadora's dance was the antithesis of this. Her rhythmic line was
always up; from her fir ft joyous dances which seemed to float in pure
sunshine, to those laSt tragic compositions which Still expressed the in¬
domitable reaching upward of the human spirit. This was the message
which she was forever crying out to the world, from the beginning to
the end of her life. To me it meant man's immortality, the divinity
within him which lifts his soul toward Heaven when he is happy, and
makes his feet leave the earth in the dance; and in the darkness of
despair Still turns his eyes heavenward seeking the light of hope and
understanding. Whatever one's interpretation, it was always a message
of courage and freedom, and all her gestures were free, open, outward
and upward.
Early in her career, she conceived a dance typifying human experi¬
ence which was like a mirror of her own subsequent life. It was not
born of any piece of music, but of her own thoughts. She danced it
sometimes, without music, and her audiences loved it and had named it
Death and the Maiden after Schubert's song. In Paris the gallery never
failed to shout for La ]eune Fille et la Mort at the end of a program, and
once I saw her respond to that demand. We saw the gaiety of a youthful
heart, suddenly Stilled for a moment by a firSt apprehension of disaster
—this fear thrown off and the gay business of life resumed—but the
terror returning again and again until it overcame her, and she fell, de¬
feated by forces Stronger than herself. She called it The Maiden and
Life. But I think her audiences were right; life baffled but never de¬
feated her, till kindly Death snatched her away.
In her work, as in her life, tragedy loomed larger and larger, as
outlined in this prophetic little dance; for the artiSt always gave what
was in the woman's heart, and as that saddened, the change was re¬
flected in her dancing. In the beginning, when her spirit was un-
19
clouded, her dances were the perfection of that joy which is symbolized
by light feet that scarcely seem to touch the earth. As her experience of
life deepened, new elements entered into her dancing. At first her pro¬
gram to the music of Gliick's Orpheus had only the Happy Spirits of
the Elysian Fields in it; later she added the tortured souls in Hades,
and this firft introduction of "ugliness" into her work was regarded
by many of her admirers as the end of her career. They thought that
no one would go to see her if she departed from the "purely beautiful."
Again, juft before the tragedy which wrecked her happiness for¬
ever, another dance without music was born from her prophetic soul.
She found herself doing over and over again, in her studio, a gesture
that began in black despair, and ended in hope—eternal hope and as¬
piration. Thus, all unconsciously, she traced in art the line her life was
to take thereafter; for she was so Stricken by the sudden loss of her
children that at firft she was as if paralyzed; she not only could not
dance, she had no impulse to express even her sorrow. D'Annunzio
told her that her disaster was the mo£t fortunate thing that could have
happened to her as an artift, because of its effect on her work. But she
would not believe him; for, as she said, grief clogs the spirit, numbs
the soul; there is no impulse to self-expression in sorrow—only a desire
to keep still and be let alone.
And so Isadora remained for a long time, all her usual outward-
flowing currents turned inward to brooding inaction. Gradually, how¬
ever, her powerful vitality asserted itself and she regained sufficient
elasticity of spirit to feel the old impulse to express. She began to dance
once more, but naturally not the old dances of joy. Instead she set to the
Poeme Symphonique, La Redemption, of Cesar Franck that gesture
she had been doing in her studio; and in it we saw not her private grief
merely, but the suffering of all the world which was then in the throes
of the laSt war. And because it was war-time, and she was filled with
the spirit of fighting for liberty, she roused us with the Marseillaise,
20
© Librairic dc France
ISADORA DUNCAN DANCING THE MARSEILLAISE
DRAWING BY ANTOINE BOURDELLE
and with the Marche Slav, which seemed to bring an enslaved people
finding freedom before our very eyes. The drama of the war was re¬
flected too in the Symphonie Pathetique of Tchaikowsky, which was
part of her 1916 program. It would have been impossible for her, in
those years, to go on giving her old programs, as if nothing had hap¬
pened to her or to the world. And yet there were critics in America,
and no doubt elsewhere, who called these later programs a "substitu¬
tion" for her earlier ones, because her gestures, appropriately, were
larger, Stronger and slower, and the enchanting lightness which had
delighted the world was gone. These critics spoke as if she were a "per¬
former," who, no longer able to do the old tricks, had learned new
ones, easier ones. If they had Stopped to realize that a long line is harder
to draw than a short one, a long note harder to sing than a short one,
and a slow movement harder to sustain than a quick one, they might
have recognized that the change in Isadora's work was not substitution,
but evolution. All great artiSts tend to simplify their means and in¬
tensify their expression at the same time. The movements Isadora
executed were only a means to expression. If she moved less, it was be¬
cause she was able to express more. I have heard people say of her laSt
performance at the Mogador in Paris, shortly before her death, "Why,
she scarcely moved!" meaning that she scarcely danced. But her pub¬
lic saw that she was more marvellous than ever before and had reached
the pinnacle of her career.
One evening at Carnegie Hall, on her laSt visit to America, in 1922,
she danced Schubert's Unfinished Symphony and Ave Maria, for the
firSt half of her program. She was never more tremendous and uni¬
versal. The cycle of life, with its eternal renewal, was before us. A
geSture reaching toward the earth and then lifted upward recurred
again and again, suggesting the love that nurtures children, that brings
the whole race out of the bosom of earth up into the arms of God. And
21
unutterable agony and suffering were there—but always that hopeful,
loving, upward gesture.
I was so moved that I felt I mu£t speak with her, and went to her
dressing-room immediately, a thing I seldom did during the intermis¬
sion. We wept together, both shaken by the experience we had just
lived through. And she said, "Now I have finished. I have said all I
have to say tonight. But because the manager insists upon variety, I
muft go on and do the Seventh Symphony, and I have no heart for it.
I should Stop now."
She was right. The reft of the program was only an indication of
what she used to do, and it was a violation of her artistic conscience to
reproduce an outgrown conception. It was the only time I ever saw
her give less than a fresh creation of living emotion in a dance, for no
matter how often she repeated a program, she always imagined it anew.
Dancing was always an experience to her, not merely a performance,
and never movement for its own sake.
In 1911 I was privileged to hear her enunciate this principle to her
pupils in a way I shall never forget. She had been teaching them the
dance of the Happy Spirits in her Orpheus program. After they had
learned the gestures and the groupings, there came a day when that was
not enough and she spoke to them something like this:
"Don't be merely graceful. Nobody is interested in a lot of grace¬
ful young girls. Unless your dancing springs from an inner emotion
and expresses an idea, it will be meaningless and the audience will be
bored. I'll show you the difference. Firft I will dance the music in the
way I want you to dance it, then in the way I want you to avoid."
Whereupon she performed one of her marvels of apparent sim¬
plicity; a little skipping, a few upward and outward gestures of the
head and arms, and heavenly beauty was created, the serene joy of the
Blessed Spirits filled the studio. Then she executed the same move¬
ments, with no perceptible variation, but in such a merely graceful
22
© Librairic de France
DRAWING BY ANTOINE BOURDELLE
manner that I was astonished at the different result. I would not have
believed that she could make a dance look like that. And she was not
exaggerating her effect by any least simper of face or body. She was
simply leaving out the animating spirit, and what was left, unbeliev¬
able as it may sound, was, as she said, entirely uninteresting. Except as
an objed: lesson.
Remembering this distinguishing characteristic of her art—its
meaning—we sometimes overlook the fad; that she was, in the ordi¬
nary sense of the word, a remarkable dancer. There was nothing mus¬
cular or athletic about her, and yet she performed astonishing feats of
strength, elasticity and endurance. No one has ever equalled her for
lightness; not any one of her pupils—though they could all leap higher
than she—and certainly no toe dancer, whose rigid foot removes the
spring of the body at its source and defeats the very purpose for which
the tiptoe position was obviously invented. When she danced the Blue
Danube, her simple waltzing forward and back, like the oncoming and
receding waves on the shore, had such an ecstasy of rhythm that audi¬
ences became frenzied with the contagion of it, and could not contain
themselves, but rose from their seats, cheering, applauding, laughing
and crying. Such a response could not have been evoked by any mere
virtuosity. It was the spirit shining through that made her body seem
lighter than air. The complete control of her mind over her body made
her dancing a real marvel, both of physical mastery and of expressive¬
ness. I believe that marvel never was before and never will be again.
She was, in the true sense of the word, inspired; gathering within her¬
self forces beyond the boundaries of her own or any personality, and
sending them forth so that we all felt them, and were exalted by a
vision of unknown worlds. We felt as if we had received the blessing
of God, and looked upon her as one of His prophets, filled with the
wine of His Spirit.
23
ISADORA—MY FRIEND
by mary fanton roberts
Isadora was to me something at once magical and elemental, like
dawn at the edge of the sea, pine trees in a quiet moonlight grove,
or bells ringing from far, undefinable distances. And so I always
find it hard to put her presence into words, even though my memories
of her are crowded with her greatness and her loveliness, each signifi¬
cant, vital, a supreme justification of her all-too-brief, beautiful life.
Yet, on the other hand, to write about her means an opportunity to
express again my deep spiritual indebtedness to her. Isadora opened
windows for the soul. I could never watch her dancing or listen as she
talked without a sense of a quickened spirit, without seeing beauty
more poignantly and feeling truth more profoundly.
Quite instinctively Isadora clarified life; so translucent was her
spirit that the wisdom of the ages poured through her, and illuminated
existence for herself and for those close to her. She ignored the super¬
fluous; unconsciously, she eliminated all futility and pettiness about
her. So far as I could judge, she never remembered an injury or held
a grudge. She was too busy going about the great simple business of
her life, the quest of beauty through her art.
Another fundamental quality of Isadora was her unworldliness. I
have never known so unworldly a person. To be sure she was extrava¬
gant, as most unworldly people are. Money to her was something to
be used or immediately given away either wisely or thoughtlessly. Yet
she wanted money, asked for it, begged for it; there was no limit to
24
her desire for it. She wanted vast fortunes. But she wanted money all
for one purpose—to build a great theatre for the dance—a theatre with
the spacious beauty and democratic outlines of a Greek auditorium. She
wanted to establish schools all over the country for little children,
where they could be taught all the grace and charm they are entided
to—schools that would make children's bodies beautiful, Strong,
capable, that would make their spirits free and joyous. It Stirs the imagi¬
nation to think what the coming generation might have been if Isa¬
dora's schools had been established when she firSt began her campaign
for the education of children through dancing. It was no small ideal
—this international system of education, its goal to capture beauty for
all people—an education no money could buy, each child selected be¬
cause of peculiar fitness to the work, the price, devotion to the work,
and each child given the full opportunity to develop, through music
and movement, a perfection of body and an enlightened spirit. That
Isadora should die without realizing this dream for human betterment
is an almost unendurable tragedy to those who loved her!
Isadora's art was not only a sure and fine vehicle for beauty, but
also a potent force to evoke in an audience a greater emotional sensitive¬
ness to all art—toward all life, in fact. She seemed to create, as it were,
audiences with a sensitized response to beauty, to rouse in people not
only a greater love of art, but a greater understanding of humanity and
always a more sympathetic appreciation of spiritual values.
Moreover, those who gathered about her, who assimilated her art,
who loved her, seemed to gain a finer affection for one another. Wher¬
ever she lived she drew about her groups of people who were Stauncher
friends for knowing her; as well as great lovers of all art, of all fine
effort, because of her art and her fine effort. In other words, she stimu¬
lated in people a vision that made them see beauty more unerringly
and life more tenderly. The experience of people who came closely in
contact with her life and who loved her, and sought her art, was, I
25
have heard many say, like living through some splendid adventure
hitherto undreamed of.
To enrich life for the world, that is indeed genius beyond apprai¬
sal. I increasingly underhand what Rodin meant when he told me,
one afternoon in Isadora's garden by the Seine, "that she was the
greatest woman who ever lived." And, quite underStandably, Rodin's
sketches of Isadora were, I believe, among his greatest achievements.
It has always seemed to me that each thing Isadora attempted was
supremely done—her dancing, her extraordinary production of the
Oedipus Rex in New York, her training of little children to understand
the arts, and to express their sense of beauty in dancing, and later her
magnificent autobiography, a literary accomplishment, a spiritual
achievement. She seemed spontaneously to create among those about
her a generosity in human companionship. She made people feel the
need and the power of it. She had a rare sympathy for all art and all
artists. These qualities, as I recall, through twenty years of friendship,
loom up before me as the expression of a splendid, liberated, powerful
spirit, almost unconscious of self, but magnificently conscious of all
that was divine in life.
As I think of Isadora's extraordinary power to express beauty
through movement and gesture, I realize that I do not always asso¬
ciate this gift with the Stage. I have seen her create fine sculpture forms
through music without gesture; I have seen her do beautiful dances of
arresting power without music; but also quite away from theatre and
Studio, I have seen her accomplish what was to me an even greater
miracle, as she walked in flowing draperies through a green wood or
on a gray sandy beach, or stood immobile on a rocky ledge as the ocean
dashed spray up to her feet—always somehow, in quiet geSture or utter
silence, seeming to refled: or gather within herself the splendor and
majesty of immutable things.
I remember such an experience at Long Beach on a late fall day.
2 6
© Librairie dc France, courtesy La Revue dc La Fcmmc, Paris
DRAWING BY ANTOINE BOURDELLE, HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED
We were picnicking on the beach and I waited for her at the end of the
boardwalk. In the early evening she came swiftly toward us. Back of
her were the breakers rolling high in deep shining black waves, and
the sky a dark sapphire blue. She wore an old, white, loose, woolen
coat given her in Afghanistan by the shepherds. This caught the wind
as she swung towards us in the twilight. She pulled a little cap from
her head and waved a gesture of greeting, and as she walked against
the tumult of the wind, her movements so free and gracious, she seemed
like a great moment in one of her own dances. And the sea and the
wind and the sky accepted her in a mysterious comradeship.
Perhaps one of Isadora's rarest gifts was as a messenger of beauty;
many workers in all the arts felt this service and acknowledged it with
deep sincerity. To Russia, Pavlowa told me, she brought "freedom in
dancing." To Nijinsky she was "the great inspiration." I recall one
memorable time when a little party of us were together at a ftudio
luncheon in New York, and both Isadora and Nijinsky were there.
After the table had been cleared away some one played the piano. I
cannot recall who it was, but it was one of the great men playing di¬
vinely. And Isadora and Nijinsky danced together—Isadora creating
the dance as the music flowed from the piano, and Nijinsky dancing
with her as though he had rehearsed each entirely new measure for
weeks. It was an amazing performance—Isadora's extraordinary
power of instantaneous creation and Nijinsky's sensitive response to her
mood and to the music.
George Grey Barnard once said to me, "Isadora Duncan holds
within her genius an art to open untold dreams of man; no greater art
has existed in any age, and none is more needed by our young world,
where feet and life often drag heavy weight." Carl Bitter, who was
one of her ^launch admirers said, "the influence of Isadora Duncan's
work is not confined to America; it affed:s the art expression of the
entire civilized world." And Robert Henri, who had a profound
27
friendship for Isadora, saw a quality in her work that made him think
of "the great voice of Walt Whitman." "Back of her gesture," he said,
"I see a deep philosophy of freedom. When she dances it is not only
the beauty of her expression that fills me with emotion, but the promise
she gives of a full and beautiful life for those who are to come."
Isadora was also a great teacher, for she inspired her pupils to a
more sensitive understanding, just as she did her audiences. Years ago,
when she had a temporary school in New York, she asked me to write
my impression of it, which I did with much pride and humility, and
which I quote here because Isadora herself liked what I had written:
"A great space, silent and high, separated from the world by cur¬
tains of blue; soft lights Streaming down rose scarves; back in the
shadows low couches in brilliant colors—this is the setting for Isadora
Duncan's school in the heart of New York.
"A man (a musician, an artiSt) sitting at the piano. A Greek figure
of ageless beauty, of ageless tragedy Standing nearby.
"With the firSt chords of the music, lovely figures of youth appear,
outlined againft the blue, moving with gracious freedom; splendid
white limbs gleam through gray-blue draperies; upturned faces are
remote with ecstasy. As the music floods through these fluent forms,
they are no longer separate dancers, but the spirit of youth bearing the
world rich gifts of beauty; through these liberated bodies flow the
melody of all the world, the joy of all the ages, bringing hope for the
future of all races.
"Isadora Duncan 'teaches' her pupils by a gesture, a glance, a softly
spoken word; and the response is magical. For she gives unsparingly
from her own spirit of inspiration, courage, exaltation, and the mes¬
sage is received by free spirits in free bodies.
"Why should not the rapture which touches these children into
ineffable beauty be the birthright of every child in every land?"
I used to go a great deal with Isadora to hear music and see plays
28
and I always noticed the way in which she gave her whole-hearted at¬
tention to whatever was being presented. If some one in her Studio
played for her, or sang, or read poetry, her delight and interest were
intense and genuine; in fact, she had a rare courtesy toward all life and
all people. There were no barriers to her respect for humanity. Natu¬
rally she loved best what gave her greatest joy—the poet, the sculptor,
the painter, the writer; but for all people, if they came to her to show
their achievement or to ask for help, she had an instant response, a soul
that never failed to give sympathy and understanding.
For her art, Isadora drank from the deep springs of life, and these
springs she found in amazing places, for during her life she walked
wherever she chose; there were no closed doors to her interest and love.
The pathways of her life were sometimes rocky and sometimes rose-
strewn, but she moved over them with enchanted feet, with shining
eyes, with an outlook that touched the horizon. There was an ineffable
quality to her spirit that kept people from mourning over her, and
that kept her, too, from surrendering to the shadows of life. She moved
from tragedy to tragedy as though she were on mountain peaks, and
at the very end of her life she danced as though her art were her sole
preoccupation, as though expressing beauty was the single reason of her
existence.
Isadora's own ideal of what the future might bring for the world
she once wrote for a program I did for a New York performance, as
follows: "Oh, she is coming, the dancer of the future; the free spirit,
who will inhabit the body of new women; more glorious than any
woman that has yet been; more beautiful than the Egyptian, than the
Greek, the Early Italian, than all women of past centuries—the high¬
est intelligence in the freeSt body!"
And for the same program she asked me to quote something of
Walt Whitman which she said had been a lasting inspiration to her
and influence in her life: "O we can wait no longer. . . . We too take
29
ship, O soul. . . . Joyous we too launch out on trackless seas, fearless
for unknown shores. . .
To those who have seen Isadora dance, and most of all to those of
us who loved her, her death is an irreparable loss as her life was a trans-
cendant gift.
30
© Librairic de France
DESIGN FOR A BAS-RELIEF AFTER A DANCE BY ISADORA DUNCAN
DRAWING BY ANTOINE BOURDELLE
ISADORA DUNCAN, ARTIST
by SHAEMAS o'sHEEL
Europe will mourn her with a sharper grief and a more poignant
realization of the void that is left by her going. French and
Germans, Russians and Italians, all are Good Europeans in rev¬
erence for genius. To them Isadora was one with the glory that was
Greece, one with the glory of all great art in all ages, peer of Phidias
and Botticelli and Michelangelo, sifter of great Ludwig, and Gliick,
and Chopin, and Wagner; but our awareness of her as an artift: was
clouded by our interest in her as good copy for sensational ftories in
the public prints. Yet in the shadow of the fantastic tragedy at Nice,
it is we most of all who should mourn and remember and honor our
own. For she was our own, and it seems to me that no woman born
of centuried Europe could have done what she did—that somehow it
was defined and appropriate that America should cradle the woman
who recreated in our day the oldest of the arts.
Whether there is a kind of Platonic absolute of art is a question in
dispute since the days of Lessing; but if the revelation of beauty and
the sanction of wonder, the awaking of aspiration and the disquieting
of thought and the release of energy for purposes beyond food and
shelter, raiment and safety, are the ends for which all the arts alike
assault the mind and soul by the several portals of the senses, it seems
to me that Isadora Duncan was the greatest artift of our times; for it
seems to me that more than any other in the firft quarter of this cen¬
tury, she brought us, fused and incandescent, that awakening and dis-
31
quieting and release. It is necessary to say this to the generations who
never can see her and who cannot be aware to what extent all the art
they touch will bear her hidden impress; for every poet and musician
and plastic artist of her generation sat at her feet, and she entered into
sculpture and painting, music and poetry so pervasively, so organically,
that her influence can be traced no more precisely than the rain that
falls in the forest can be traced to the arbutus and the oak-leaf that it
nourishes. Alas that her art, the moft robust in facing the moment, was
the moft fragile in the fingers of Time!—the price of its incomparable
aliveness was its utter evanescence. Words muft do their poor beSt to
preserve some memory of a thing that was as infant and perfect and
beyond the power of words as the slant of an April shower in sunlight
over green hills, or the toss of a branch of young leaves, or the arched
flight of a marten, or the breaking of white waves on dark waters.
Words!—why did not some of the pompous promoters of the new
"art" of the motion pictures ever think of devoting a trifling sum to
making a record of Isadora's dancing? Why did she never think of it
herself? At least some pale and imperfect image of her might have
gone down to the generations to make evident what I and others abler
than I must despair of telling with words.
When Isadora went to Munich, the dance as a great art did not
exift. There was the lace-and-china-and-powder-puff prettiness of the
ballet, and there was dramatic dancing, leaning heavily on decor and
properties and costumes, and Striving to act out a story that it was
fundamentally a bit ridiculous to ad: out in a dance. But the dance as a
great art, holding up its head among the hierarchies with the art of
Palestrina and Beethoven and Wagner, with the art of the sculptor of
the Sphinx and the painter of bisons in the cave of Altimira, with Leo¬
nardo and Rembrandt and Rubens, Greco and Monticelli and Van
Gogh, with Homer, Chaucer, Coleridge, Shelley, Yeats—as such an
art the dance did not exift. She re-created it from the same pregnant
32
elements whose fiery substance has been seized by all great artifts:
nature, wonder, the ancient mysteries and the old symbols—seen with
high intelligence, felt with a sensitiveness aware of overtones and un¬
dertones, moulded by genius, the shaping power that is not to be meas¬
ured nor understood.
Words are of little use to describe any good dancing, and of how
little, therefore, to suggest hers! There was a bare ft age, flooded with
equable light, and a background of unfigured curtains whose heavy
folds reached up into darkness. Bare of limb and splendid of limb she
came and moved before us; like a curled leaf drifting over the grass.
Plutarch wrote that music is audible dance and the dance is silent music.
Say rather visible music, music translated for another sense, doubly
alive. She danced only to great music: Beethoven—the Fifth and the
Seventh Symphonies—and Chopin, and Gliick in whose ineffable
melodies passion and hope and despair are intensified to serenity; and
such music she made visible with "majeftic infancy."
Here were grace and sheer visual beauty in pulse-quickening love¬
liness; but it was not these that so moved us. There was something else.
It was that Isadora's art was great symbolic art. Her Stage was the wind-
drifted border between flowering meadow and sandy beach on the
margin of some nameless sea where the horn of Poseidon faintly echoes,
and Kypris, the World's Desire, might be born of any wandering wave.
The folded curtain became the ancient trees that guard the vaporous
cleft of the Pythoness in the forefts of Delphi, and the towering crags
of the Caucasus, at the end of the world, where Prometheus knows the
vulture and remembers the love of man and the vengeance of gods. And
she was the soul of man confronting nature and the enigma of life,
brave and troubled and terrified among the mysteries. This was not
drama. Others have given us dramatic dancing, and at times during
her later years, Isadora herself, in her endless experimenting, declined
into dramatic dancing. But I write of her art at its greatest—and no
33
artiSt ever kept to the very peak of achievement with more sustained
mastery. Dramatic art—in dance or play, music, painting, sculpture
or poetry—attempts to wring emotional or intellectual effe£ts from the
adual; builds from the surface; its gestures, at beSt, dignify the ob¬
vious. Symbolic art goes back through Time even to beginnings that
are forgotten; evades the ephemeral and twines like a tendril about the
essential, drawing sustenance from all great moments; penetrates be¬
low surfaces, through flesh and nerves to the quick core of being; taps
the very sources of joy and grief, and Startles from their slumber those
race-memories that live unnoted in the Still places of the soul. Let the
wise of future generations understand that more than any other of this
age, Isadora was the naive companion and messenger of the stars and
the sword, the rose and the rood, myStery, and wonder, and eternity.
That was why people wept when they watched her. People came
out of the brisk Stream of life flowing up Broadway, and sat in the
Metropolitan Opera House or Carnegie Hall, a few feet away from
the hard surfaces and pert hopes and immediate worries of that Stream,
and she tuned them like lutes and swept them with rhythms their for¬
bears had forgotten ages ago, and the beauty and wonder of it sum¬
moned tears as the rod of Moses wrung water from the rock. It was an
emotion as far removed from sentimentality as her art was distant from
prettiness. Any natural man, normally concerned with daily labor and
material affairs—truck-driver, lawyer, bank president—who might
have come into her presence, would, after a brief orientation, have felt
the power of her subtle and imperious magic, would have experienced
understanding and refreshment and release.
It was cuStomary to refer to Isadora's dancing as "Greek." But she
herself wrote that she went to nature as primitive man had done. She
wrote that the dance was the earlieSt of the arts, and that primitive man
had been inspired directly and immediately by the movements of wind
and wave and bird and beaSt. She found image and evidence of this in
34
DRAWING BY ANTOINE BOURDELLE
Greek sculpture and frescoes and the figures on vases. RationaliStically
she overlooked, but instinctively she understood, that many of these
were made in a time of sophisticated and urban civilization, and
pictured a dance that was not immediately from nature, but was part
of centuried ritual. But there are works of Greek art that are imme¬
diately from nature as the wave is from the sea. Such are many archaic
figures, and such are the Wingless Victory and the Victory of Samo-
thrace. It is of these that she was sifter. Raymond Duncan re-created
with more uncanny exactitude the measured, angular, clearly ritualistic
gestures of Greek dancing. He went to the vases and reliefs; but Isa¬
dora went to Nike Anapteros, to Nature; Greece was merely on the
way. It is not surprising to those who sensed how utterly from within
her great art came, that she traces the roots of it to her Irish and Scots
blood, to that American pioneering impulse which made her family a
part of the great covered-wagon trek across the prairies, to the majeSty
of the Rockies and the spell of the Pacific, and to the great winged
chants of Walt Whitman.
When I firSt wrote about Isadora I predicted, as others did and as
she did, that the dance as a great art participated in by multitudes, was
about to be re-established in the world. The heavy hand of disillusion¬
ment long since bruised the flower of that enthusiasm. Yet I think we
can see and say now that the seed of her hope has living roots. Certainly
the art of the dance is in very different State now, and directly because
of her, than before she came. Her example liberated the Russian ballet
and gave it creative power. Some of her own pupils are artiSts whose
Stature suffers only in comparison with her. Fundamentally today danc¬
ing is understood to be not a thing of mincing toes, but an aesthetic
exercise of the whole body; and that is a vindication of her courageous
intelligence. Bare-legged females cavorting on the lawns of women's
colleges and finishing-schools clad in "two yards of cheesecloth for self-
expression" are at times very trying, and from the hundreds of "class-
35
ical dancing schools" that now dot the land little may come forth, yet
this is better than the ballet tradition which cramped the mind and
spirit while it tortured the body; and it is well that soil is kept fallow
for the seed of genius that has its way of taking root suddenly and
always unpredictably. For it is individual genius that matters. Lesser
artists cloud the glory of the great. For the making of an Isadora there
is needed intelligence of the highest order. She had it. There is needed
a vital and brooding understanding of nature and life. She had it. There
is needed that autochthonous spark called genius. She had it—more
than any woman artiSt since Sappho.
36
DRAWING BY ANTOINE BOURDELLE
ISADORA DUNCAN IS DEAD
by max eastman
Isadora duncan was the last friend I saw when I left Europe this
spring. She stood in the little crowd on the platform at the Gare
Saint Lazare. I was standing at the car window, laughing and half
crying at the sadly funny excitement of people parting with their
friends, and suddenly I heard her voice calling my name and "Good¬
bye!" She raised her hand when I caught sight of her, and stood still
with it raised in the air and moving slowly in a serene and strong bene¬
diction. A great beam of that energetic and perfectly idealistic light
shone out of her eyes to me. She looked very great. She looked like a
Statue of real liberty.
It made me sad for a long time, because greatness in this little world
is sad. Greatness coming to an unhappy end is almost unendurable, and
I had felt that Isadora was coming to an unhappy end. I felt it under¬
neath all the delightful bubbling of her mirth when I saw her during
the winter in Cannes. It was at the house of our friend, Lucien Monod,
a Communist and an artiSt. She had juSt received a cablegram that
money would be forwarded for her memoirs, and she was full of laugh¬
ing joy—that wild, reckless, witty joy that all her friends remember.
Isadora could sprinkle the whole world with her wit and make it shine.
A lot of Stupid Americans—indeed almoSt all of Stupid America—
imagine that they laughed at Isadora. They are completely mistaken.
Isadora laughed at them. She laughed as Rabelais would laugh at them,
or Montaigne, or Shakespeare, or Aristophanes. Any great man or
37
woman would laugh at them. And Isadora Duncan was one of the
great men and women—more indubitably so, I think, than any other
artist who has lived in our time. They speak of Duse and Sarah Bern¬
hardt and Isadora as a trio of great women, but Isadora was incom¬
parably above the other two. She was not only a supreme artiSt as
they were—endowed by nature with momentous power and the per¬
fect gift of restraining it—but she was also a mind and a moral
force. She used her momentous power, as the giants of mankind have
always done, not only to entertain the world but to move it.
And she did move it. It is needless to tell how she changed the art
of dancing in our time. She was a revolution in that art, and so to some
extent in the whole art of the theatre. All the civilized world acclaimed
her, and recognized in that young brave girl's beautiful body, running
barefoot and half-naked, running and bending and pausing and float¬
ing in a Stream of music, as though the music had formed out of its own
passion a visible spirit to live for a moment and die when it died—all
the world recognized in that an artiStic revolution, an apparition of
creative genius, and not merely an achievement in the established art of
the dance.
But I think few people realized how far beyond the realm of art
—how far out and how deep into the moral and social life of our times
the influence of Isadora Duncan's dancing extended. All the bare¬
legged girls, and the poised and natural girls with strong muscles and
Strong free steps wherever they go—the girls that redeem America and
make it worth while to have founded a new world, no matter how
badly it was done—they all owe more to Isadora Duncan than to any
other person. And the boys, too, that have a chance to be unafraid of
beauty, to be unafraid of the natural life and free aspiration of an in¬
telligent animal walking on the earth—all who have in any measure
escaped from the rigidity and ritual of our national religion of nega¬
tion, all of them owe an immeasurable debt to Isadora Duncan's danc-
38
ing. She did not only go back into the paSt to Athens to find that volun¬
tary restraint in freedom that made her dancing an event in the history
of art. She went forward into the future—farther, I suppose, than
Athens—to a time when man shall be cured altogether of civilization,
and return, with immunity to that disease if with few other blessings,
to his natural home outdoors on the green surface of the earth. That
made her dancing an event in the history of life.
Isadora was exiled—banished by more than an accident of the
marriage law—from America. It was inevitable that she should be.
America had never seen a woman genius before, and could not think
of anything else to do with her. But nevertheless Isadora was very
American. The big way in which she conceived things, and un¬
dertook them, and the way she succeeded with them, was American.
Even her faults were American—her passion for "pulling off stunts"
—"gestures" is the way she would say it—was American. She made a
grand sport of her public position and character. She played with pub¬
licity like a humorous Barnum. Even her extravagant and really bad
irresponsibility, which went almost to the point of madness in late
years, was in the reverse sense an American trait. It was an exaggerated
reaction againSt America's "righteousness." Wrongtiousness is what
you would have to call it if you wished to appraise it with a sense
of its origin.
America fighting the battle against Americanism—that was Isa¬
dora. From that battle incomparable things are to come—things that
will Startle and teach the world. And Isadora led the way into the fight
all alone, with her naked and Strong body and her bold character,
vivid as an Amazon. If America triumphs over itself—over its
cheap greed and prudery, its intellectual and moral cowardice, its
prudent and prurient hypocrisy—if America triumphs over that, Isa¬
dora Duncan will be sculptured in bronze at the gate of the Temple
of Man in the new day that will dawn. She will stand there, poised in
39
terrible impatience, knee raised and arms tensely extended as in the
Marche Militaire or the Scythian warrior's dance—beautiful—a mili¬
tant and mighty woman, the symbol and the veritable leader of those
who put on their courage like armor and fought for the affirmation of
life in America.
40
ISADORA REMEMBERED
by eva le gallienne
Rather than dwell upon Isadora Duncan as a human-being, the
moSt vibrantly alive of human-beings, imbued with the vital-
- ity of the earth itself, generous, big, noble and pure with the
nobility and purity of great and simple things, I prefer to recall some
of her thoughts and ideals concerning the relation of her art with Life,
with growth, with the culture of the race.
Finding it impossible to think of Isadora as dead, I shall try and
imagine that tomorrow I shall hear her talk of all these things, so im¬
measurably dear to her, so integrally a part of her; that I shall see her
face light up and hear her voice, always even in the gravest moments
of her thought so full of an elfin humor.
Her greatest wish was to bring the dance close to the lives of the
people. The dance was not merely an art to her, but was part of her
very being; she was obliged to dance, as we are obliged to breathe.
There was to her no difference between dancing and living. She felt
that through the dance one became inseparably a part of the great
rhythm of the Universe, and that this harmony between Self and the
Centre of Being resulted as a matter of course in harmonious living.
Her ideas on education were not so much radical and revolutionary
as they were reactionary in the sense of travelling back over the years
to the ancient Greeks, to the time when physical, mental and spiritual
culture formed a balanced whole. She had a wonderfully clear vision
of the Tightness of this. She believed that through rhythm a child could
41
be given an understanding of beauty, of a poem, a philosophy or a
mathematical equation; that from a beautiful body perfectly poised
would spring a beautiful mind and spirit in absolute co-ordination.
This was surely the ancient ideal. We have travelled far from it, and
the arrogance of our modern civilization has made us narrow and fear¬
ful of anything that seems to upset our well-ordered scheme of things.
This is perhaps the reason why no country would allow Isadora Duncan
a free rein for experiment.
Communist Russia was the only country that even for a moment
entered into her thought and did not quite turn a deaf ear.
One of my moSt thrilling memories is hearing Isadora tell of the
thousand children whom she had trained, dancing through the Streets
of Moscow. She often said it was the happiest moment of her life; but
she would have set all the children of the world dancing, and through
this dance of natural rhythm have given them freedom of body and of
mind.
She felt so Strongly the cruelty and Stupidity of chaining a little
child to an ink-Stained desk, in a Stuffy room, confronted by thousands
of words, devoid of all meaning by the time they had been hammered
into that rebellious little head.
Isadora was above everything American. Her thoughts continually
turned toward this country that she loved above all others. But she could
not love blindly, and America is perhaps Still too young to endure criti¬
cism. Isadora saw the infinite possibilities, the wide horizons, the puls¬
ing vitality, the Strength, the joy of this country, and longed to throw
her vision and her wisdom at its feet. How Strange it is that a country
born and cradled in Revolution should so consistently turn its auStere
back on its greateSt and moSt typical children. The inevitable compari¬
son of Walt Whitman and Isadora at once springs to the mind.
Like all great geniuses Isadora was practical. The things she
visioned were true and right and therefore possible. But she had neither
42
From the Munich Jugend
PAINTING BY FRITZ AUGUST VON KAULBACII
the patience nor the ta£t to cope with circumstances as they existed here.
She was not a politician! Someone who understood fully her aims and
ideas should have Stood as interpreter between her and actual contact
with worldly things; then perhaps America would have been able to
profit by her vision.
Isadora's ideas about the Dance in relation to Drama were particu¬
larly interesting to me. She wanted to bring back the Dance to the
Drama. She felt that one was incomplete without the other. One won¬
ders what Wagner and Isadora together might not have accomplished.
One of her dreams was to produce some of the Greek Dramas in con¬
junction with a great director in the Theatre. MoSt often she spoke of
the Bacchae of Euripedes. She wanted to recreate the whole Bacchanale
in the spirit of the Greek conception. What a marvellous thing it would
have been; how terrible to think that life has been robbed of that, and
so many other things equally beautiful that she visioned.
Why, inStead of devoting millions to dead things had not someone
the Faith to devote those millions to something ecstatically alive?
But that kind of life cannot die.
There is no death for Isadora Duncan.
The spirit and essence of her prophetic Vision will become a part
of the Race itself. The world is different because she lived.
Those who saw her dance and had eyes to see, are different because
she danced.
In the generations to come we will, in spite of ourselves, fulfill her
prophecy.
"I see America dancing," she wrote, and by that she meant: "I see
America free, generous, compassionate, tender, brave, with head up,
looking toward the Stars."
43
ISADORA DUNCAN
by robert edmond jones
his great artiSt is no longer in our world. The sun has set: the
In her art and in her life Isadora Duncan seemed to be an
incarnation of all the energies of Nature. To see her dance was to
realize the essence and soul of art. To know her was to see into a life
that was varied and rich and vivid beyond all our imaginings of what
life could be. Her spirit moved always in the center of a flame of crea¬
tion, a flame that lifted up va£t multitudes into its own radiance.
When Isadora Duncan appeared in Carnegie Hall for the la£t time
she danced the Funeral March of Chopin, looking at us from beyond a
great purple veil which she held in her outstretched arms. Now another
veil, a veil of Stillness and silence, has descended over this image of
motion and music. We know that we shall never see her again. We are
left with our memories.
We have put together between the covers of this book some of the
words she set down from time to time about her work and her dreams.
There are not many of these essays, but, like the flowers in the garland
of Sappho, they are all roses.
cycle is finished.
44
THE ART OF THE DANCE
PHOTOGRAPH BY ARNOLD GENTHE
I SEE AMERICA DANCING
In one of his moments of prophetic love for America Walt Whit¬
man said,
"I hear America singing," and I can imagine the mighty
song that Walt heard, from the surge of the Pacific, over the plains,
the Voices rising of the vast Choral of children, youths, men and
women singing Democracy.
When I read this poem of Whitman's I, too, had a Vision: the
Vision of America dancing a dance that would be the worthy expres¬
sion of the song Walt heard when he heard America singing. This
music would have a rhythm as great as the undulation, the swing or
curves, of the Rocky Mountains. It would have nothing to do with the
sensual tilting of the Jazz rhythm: it would be the vibration of the
American soiil Striving upward through labour to Harmonious life.
No more would this dance that I visioned have any vestige of the Fox
Trot or the Charleston—rather would it be the living leap of the child
springing toward the heights, toward its future accomplishment,
toward a new great vision of life that would express America.
It has often caused me to smile, but somewhat bitterly, when people
have called my dancing Greek. For I count its origin in the Stories
which my Irish Grandmother often told us of crossing the plains with
Grandfather in '49 in a covered wagon—she eighteen, he twenty-one;
and how her firSt child was born in such a wagon, during a famous
battle with the Redskins. My grandfather, when the Indians were
47
finally frightened away, put his head in at the door of the wagon, with
smoking gun ftill in his hand, to greet his new-born child.
When they reached San Francisco, my grandfather built one of
the firft wooden houses; and I remember, when I was a little girl,
visiting this same house, and my grandmother, remembering Ireland,
used often to sing the Irish songs and dance the Irish jigs; only I fancy
that into these Irish jigs had crept some of the heroic spirit of the
Pioneer and the battles with the Redskins—probably some of the ges¬
tures of the Redskins themselves, and, again, a bit of Yankee Doodle
when Grandfather Colonel Thomas Gray came marching home from
the Civil War. All this Grandmother danced in the Irish Jig; and I
learnt it from her, and put into it my own aspiration of Young
America, and finally my great spiritual revelation of life from the lines
of Walt Whitman. And that is the origin of the so-called Greek dance
with which I have flooded the world.
That was the origin, the root. But afterwards, coming to Europe,
I had three great Masters, the three great precursors of the Dance of
our century—Beethoven, Nietzsche and Wagner. Beethoven created
the Dance in mighty rhythm, Wagner in sculptural form, Nietzsche
in Spirit. Nietzsche created the dancing philosopher.
I often wonder where is the American composer who will hear
Walt's America singing, and who will compose the true music for the
American Dance; which will contain no Jazz rhythm, no rhythm
from the waist down; but from the solar plexus, the temporal home of
the soul, upwards to the Star-Spangled Banner of the sky which arches
over that great Stretch of land from the Pacific, over the Plains, over
the Sierra Nevadas, over the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic.
I pray you, Young American Composer, create the music for the
dance that shall express the America of Walt Whitman, the America
of Abraham Lincoln.
It seems to me monstrous for anyone to believe that the Jazz
48
rhythm expresses America. Jazz rhythm expresses the South African
savage. America's music will be something different. It has yet to be
written. No composer has yet caught the rhythm of America—it is
too mighty for the ears of moSt. But some day it will gush forth from
the great stretches of earth, rain down from the vaSt sky spaces of Stars,
and the American will be expressed in some mighty music that will
shape its chaos to Harmony.
Long-legged Strong boys and girls will dance to this music—not
the tottering, ape-like convulsions of the Charleston, but a Striking
upward tremendous mounting, powerful mounting above the pyra¬
mids of Egypt, beyond the Parthenon of Greece, an expression of
Beauty and Strength such as no civilization has ever known. That will
be America dancing.
And this dance will have nothing in it either of the servile coquetry
of the ballet or the sensual convulsion of the South African negro. It
will be clean. I see America dancing, beautiful, Strong, with one foot
poised on the higheSt point of the Rockies, her two hands Stretched
out from the Atlantic to the Pacific, her fine head tossed to the sky,
her forehead shining with a crown of a million Stars.
How grotesque that they have encouraged in America schools of
so-called bodily culture, of Swedish gymnaStics, Dalcroze and the
ballet. The real American type can never be a ballet dancer. The legs
are too long, the body too supple and the spirit too free for this school
of affected grace and toe-walking. It is noteworthy that all great ballet
dancers have been very short women with small frames. A tall finely
made woman could never dance the ballet. The type which expresses
America at its fineSt could never dance the ballet. With the wildeSt
turn of the imagination, you cannot picture the Goddess of Liberty
dancing the ballet.
Then why accept this school in America ?
Henry Ford has expressed the wish that all the children of Ford
49
City should dance. He also does not approve of the modern dances, but
says let them dance the old-fashioned Waltz, Mazurka and Minuet.
But the old-fashioned Waltz and Mazurka are an expression of sickly
sentimentality and romance, which our youth has grown out of; and
the Minuet is the expression of the unctuous servility of courtiers of
the time of Louis XIV and of crinoline. What have these movements
to do with the free youth of America? Doesn't Mr. Ford know that
movements are as eloquent as words ?
Why should our children bend the knee in that fastidious and
servile dance, the Minuet, or twirl in the mazes of the false sentimen¬
tality of the Waltz? Rather let them come forth with great Strides,
leaps and bounds, with lifted forehead and far-spread arms, dancing
the language of our pioneers, the fortitude of our heroes, the justice,
kindness, purity of our women, and through it all the inspired love and
tenderness of our mothers.
When the American children dance in this way, it will make of
them Beautiful Beings worthy of the name of Democracy.
That will be America dancing.
© 1927.
5°
THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE OF DANCING
In music there are three sorts of composers: fir ft, those who think
out a scholarly music, who seek about and arrange, through their
brains, a skillful and subtly effective score which appeals through
the mind to the senses. Second, there are those who know how to trans¬
late their own emotions into the medium of sound, the joys and sor¬
rows of their own hearts creating a music that appeals directly to the
listener's heart, and brings tears by the memories it evokes of joys and
sorrows, by the remembrance of happiness gone by. Third, there are
those who, subconsciously, hear with their souls some melody of
another world, and are able to express this in terms comprehensible
and joyous to human ears.
There are likewise three kinds of dancers: fir£t, those who con¬
sider dancing as a sort of gymnastic drill, made up of impersonal and
graceful arabesques; second, those who, by concentrating their minds,
lead the body into the rhythm of a desired emotion, expressing a
remembered feeling or experience. And finally, there are those who
convert the body into a luminous fluidity, surrendering it to the inspira¬
tion of the soul. This third sort of dancer understands that the body, by
force of the soul, can in fa<5t be converted to a luminous fluid. The
flesh becomes light and transparent, as shown through the X-ray—but
with the difference that the human soul is lighter than these rays.
When, in its divine power, it completely possesses the body, it converts
that into a luminous moving cloud and thus can manifest itself in the
51
whole of its divinity. This is the explanation of the miracle of St.
Francis walking on the sea. His body no longer weighed like ours, so
light had it become through the soul.
Imagine then a dancer who, after long Study, prayer and inspira¬
tion, has attained such a degree of understanding that his body is
simply the luminous manifestation of his soul; whose body dances
in accordance with a music heard inwardly, in an expression of some¬
thing out of another, a profounder world. This is the truly creative
dancer, natural but not imitative, speaking in movement out of himself
and out of something greater than all selves.
So confident am I that the soul can be awakened, can completely
possess the body, that when I have taken children into my schools I
have aimed above all else to bring to them a consciousness of this
power within themselves, of their relationship to the universal rhythm,
to evoke from them the ecStasy, the beauty of this realization. The
means to this awakening may be in part a revelation of the beauty of
nature, and it may be in part that sort of music that the third group of
composers gives us, that arises from and speaks to the soul.
There are perhaps grown people who have forgotten the language
of the soul. But children understand. It is only necessary to say to
them: "LiSten to the music with your soul. Now, while you are listen¬
ing, do you not feel an inner self awakening deep within you—that it
is by its Strength that your head is lifted, that your arms are raised, that
you are walking slowly toward the light?"
This awakening is the firSt Step in dancing, as I understand it.
When I began to dance with the movements and geStures my
enraptured soul knew how to communicate to my body, others began
to imitate me, not understanding that it was necessary to go back to a
beginning, to find something in themselves firSt. In many theatres and
schools I have seen these dancers, who comprehended only with the
brain, who loaded down their dances with geStures; and their move-
52
PHOTOGRAPH BY ARNOLD GENTHE
ments seemed empty, dull and devoid of meaning. What they trans¬
lated through the mind lacked all inspiration, all life. So, too, do those
systems of dancing that are only arranged gymnastics, only too logi¬
cally understood (Dalcroze, etc.). It seems to me criminal to entrust
children, who cannot defend themselves, to this injurious training; for
it is a crime to teach the child to guide his growing body by the ftern
power of the brain, while deadening impulse and inspiration.
The only power that can satisfactorily guide the child's body is
the inspiration of the soul.
1920.
53
THE DANCE OF THE FUTURE
'oman once asked me why I dance with bare feet and I replied,
"Madam, I believe in the religion of the beauty of the human
foot." The lady replied, "But I do not," and I said, "Yet you
muft, Madam, for the expression and intelligence of the human foot
is one of the greatest triumphs of the evolution of man." "But," said
the lady, "I do not believe in the evolution of man"; at this said I,
"My task is at an end. I refer you to my moft revered teachers, Mr.
Charles Darwin and Mr. Ernft Haeckel." "But," said the lady, "I
do not believe in Darwin and Haeckel." At this point I could think of
nothing more to say. So you see that to convince people, I am of little
value and ought not to speak. But I am brought from the seclusion
of my Study, trembling and hammering before a public and told to
lecture on the dance of the future.
If we seek the real source of the dance, if we go to nature, we find
that the dance of the future is the dance of the pa£t, the dance of
eternity, and has been and will always be the same.
The movement of waves, of winds, of the earth is ever in the same
lasting harmony. We do not Stand on the beach and inquire of the
ocean what was its movement in the pa£t and what will be its move¬
ment in the future. We realize that the movement peculiar to its nature
is eternal to its nature. The movement of the free animals and birds
remains always in correspondence to their nature, the necessities and
wants of that nature, and its correspondence to the earth nature. It is
54
only when you put free animals under false restrictions that they lose
the power of moving in harmony with nature, and adopt a movement
expressive of the restrictions placed about them.
So it has been with civilized man. The movements of the savage,
who lived in freedom in constant touch with Nature, were unrestricted,
natural and beautiful. Only the movements of the naked body can be
perfectly natural. Man, arrived at the end of civilization, will have to
return to nakedness, not to the unconscious nakedness of the savage,
but to the conscious and acknowledged nakedness of the mature Man,
whose body will be the harmonious expression of his spiritual being.
And the movements of this Man will be natural and beautiful like
those of the free animals.
The movement of the universe concentrating in an individual
becomes what is termed the will; for example, the movement of the
earth, being the concentration of surrounding forces, gives to the earth
its individuality, its will of movement. So creatures of the earth, receiv¬
ing in turn these concentrating forces in their different relations, as
transmitted to them through their ancestors and to those by the earth,
in themselves evolve the movement of individuals which is termed the
will.
The dance should simply be, then, the natural gravitation of this
will of the individual, which in the end is no more nor less than a
human translation of the gravitation of the universe.
The school of the ballet of today, vainly Striving againSt the natural
laws of gravitation or the natural will of the individual, and working
in discord in its form and movement with the form and movement of
nature, produces a Sterile movement which gives no birth to future
movements, but dies as it is made.
The expression of the modern school of ballet, wherein each aCtion
is an end, and no movement, pose or rhythm is successive or can be
55
made to evolve succeeding adion, is an expression o£ degeneration, of
living death. All the movements of our modern ballet school are Sterile
movements because they are unnatural: their purpose is to create the
delusion that the law of gravitation does not exiSt for them.
The primary or fundamental movements of the new school of the
dance muft have within them the seeds from which will evolve all
other movements, each in turn to give birth to others in unending
sequence of Still higher and greater expression, thoughts and ideas.
To those who nevertheless Still enjoy the movements, for historical
or choreographic or whatever other reasons, to those I answer: They
see no farther than the skirts and tricots. But look—under the skirts,
under the tricots are dancing deformed muscles. Look Still farther—
underneath the muscles are deformed bones. A deformed skeleton is
dancing before you. This deformation through incorrect dress and
incorrect movement is the result of the training necessary to the ballet.
The ballet condemns itself by enforcing the deformation of the
beautiful woman's body! No historical, no choreographic reasons can
prevail againSt that!
It is the mission of all art to express the higheSt and moSt beautiful
ideals of man. What ideal does the ballet express ?
No, the dance was once the moSt noble of all arts; and it shall be
again. From the great depth to which it has fallen, it shall be raised.
The dancer of the future shall attain so great a height that all other arts
shall be helped thereby.
To express what is the moSt moral, healthful and beautiful in art
—this is the mission of the dancer, and to this I dedicate my life.
These flowers before me contain the dream of a dance; it could be
named "The light falling on white flowers." A dance that would be a
subtle translation of the light and the whiteness. So pure, so Strong,
56
that people would say: it is a soul we see moving, a soul that has
reached the light and found the whiteness. We are glad it should move
so. Through its human medium we have a satisfying sense of move¬
ment, of light and glad things. Through this human medium, the
movement of all nature runs also through us, is transmitted to us from
the dancer. We feel the movement of light intermingled with the
thought of whiteness. It is a prayer, this dance; each movement reaches
in long undulations to the heavens and becomes a part of the eternal
rhythm of the spheres.
To find those primary movements for the human body from
which shall evolve the movements of the future dance in ever-varying,
natural, unending sequences, that is the duty of the new dancer of
today.
As an example of this, we might take the pose of the Hermes of
the Greeks. He is represented as flying on the wind. If the artiSt had
pleased to pose his foot in a vertical position, he might have done so,
as the God, flying on the wind, is not touching the earth; but realizing
that no movement is true unless suggesting sequence of movements,
the sculptor placed the Hermes with the ball of his foot reeling on the
wind, giving the movement an eternal quality.
In the same way I might make an example of each pose and
gesture in the thousands of figures we have left to us on the Greek
vases and bas-reliefs; there is not one which in its movement does not
presuppose another movement.
This is because the Greeks were the greatest Students of the laws
of nature, wherein all is the expression of unending, ever-increasing
evolution, wherein are no ends and no Stops.
Such movements will always have to depend on and correspond to
the form that is moving. The movements of a beetle correspond to its
form. So do those of the horse. Even so the movements of the human
57
body muSt correspond to its form. The dances of no two persons should
be alike.
People have thought that so long as one danced in rhythm, the
form and design did not matter; but no, one muSt perfectly correspond
to the other. The Greeks understood this very well. There is a Statuette
that shows a dancing cupid. It is a child's dance. The movements of
the plump little feet and arms are perfectly suited to its form. The sole
of the foot reSts flat on the ground, a position which might be ugly in a
more developed person, but is natural in a child trying to keep its
balance. One of the legs is half raised; if it were outstretched it would
irritate us, because the movement would be unnatural. There is also a
Statue of a satyr in a dance that is quite different from that of the
cupid. His movements are those of a ripe and muscular man. They
are in perfect harmony with the Structure of his body.
The Greeks in all their painting, sculpture, architecture, literature,
dance and tragedy evolved their movements from the movement of
nature, as we plainly see expressed in all representations of the Greek
gods, who, being no other than the representatives of natural forces,
are always designed in a pose expressing the concentration and evolu¬
tion of these forces. This is why the art of the Greeks is not a national
or characteristic art but has been and will be the art of all humanity for
all time.
Therefore dancing naked upon the earth I naturally fall into Greek
positions, for Greek positions are only earth positions.
The nobleSt in art is the nude. This truth is recognized by all,
and followed by painters, sculptors and poets; only the dancer has for¬
gotten it, who should moSt remember it, as the instrument of her art is
the human body itself.
Man's firSt conception of beauty is gained from the form and
symmetry of the human body. The new school of the dance should
58
PHOTOGRAPH BY ARNOLD GENTHE
begin with that movement which is in harmony with and will develop
the highest form of the human body.
I intend to work for this dance of the future. I do not know
whether I have the necessary qualities: I may have neither genius nor
talent nor temperament. But I know that I have a Will; and will and
energy sometimes prove greater than either genius or talent or tem¬
perament.
Let me anticipate all that can be said againSt my qualification for
my work, in the following little fable:
The Gods looked down through the glass roof of my studio and
Athene said, "She is not wise, she is not wise, in fact, she is remarkably
Stupid."
And Demeter looked and said, "She is a weakling; a little thing
—not like my deep-brea£ted daughters who play in the fields of
Eleusis; one can see each rib; she is not worthy to dance on my broad-
wayed Earth." And Iris looked down and said, "See how heavily she
moves—does she guess nothing of the swift and gracious movement
of a winged being?" And Pan looked and said, "What? Does she think
she knows aught of the movements of my satyrs, splendid ivy-horned
fellows who have within them all the fragrant life of the woods and
waters?" And then Terpsichore gave one scornful glance; "And she
calls that dancing! Why, her feet move more like the lazy steps of a
deranged turtle."
And all the Gods laughed; but I looked bravely up through the
glass roof and said: "O ye immortal Gods, who dwell in high Olympus
and live on Ambrosia and Honey-cakes, and pay no Studio rent nor
bakers' bills thereof, do not judge me so scornfully. It is true, O
Athene, that I am not wise, and my head is a rattled institution; but
I do occasionally read the word of those who have gazed into the
infinite blue of thine eyes, and I bow my empty gourd head very
59
humbly before thine altars. And, O Demeter of the Holy Garland,"
I continued, "it is true that the beautiful maidens of your broad-wayed
earth would not admit me of their company; ftill I have thrown aside
my sandals that my feet may touch your life-giving earth more rever¬
ently, and I have had your sacred Hymn sung before the present day
Barbarians, and I have made them to listen and to find it good.
"And, O Iris of the golden wings, it is true that mine is but a
sluggish movement; others of my profession have luted more violently
against the laws of gravitation, from which laws, O glorious one, you
are alone exempt. Yet the wind from your wings has swept through
my poor earthy spirit, and I have often brought prayers to your
courage-inspiring image.
"And, O Pan, you who were pitiful and gentle to simple Psyche in
her wanderings, think more kindly of my little attempts to dance in
your woody places.
"And you mo£t exquisite one, Terpsichore, send to me a little
comfort and Strength that I may proclaim your power on Earth during
my life; and afterwards, in the shadowy Hades, my wistful spirit shall
dance dances better yet in thine honour."
Then came the voice of Zeus, the Thunderer:
"Continue your way and rely upon the eternal justice of the im¬
mortal Gods; if you work well they shall know of it and be pleased
thereof."
In this sense, then, I intend to work, and if I could find in my
dance a few or even one single position that the sculptor could transfer
into marble so that it might be preserved, my work would not have
been in vain; this one form would be a gain; it would be a firft Step
for the future. My intention is, in due time, to found a school, to build
a theatre where a hundred little girls shall be trained in my art, which
60
they, in their turn, will better. In this school I shall not teach the
children to imitate my movements, but to make their own. I shall not
force them to Study certain definite movements; I shall help them to
develop those movements which are natural to them. Whosoever sees
the movements of an untaught little child cannot deny that its move¬
ments are beautiful. They are beautiful because they are natural to the
child. Even so the movements of the human body may be beautiful in
every Stage of development so long as they are in harmony with that
Stage and degree of maturity which the body has attained. There will
always be movements which are the perfect expression of that indi¬
vidual body and that individual soul; so we muft not force it to make
movements which are not natural to it but which belong to a school.
An intelligent child muSt be astonished to find that in the ballet
school it is taught movements contrary to all those movements which
it would make of its own accord.
This may seem a question of little importance, a question of differ¬
ing opinions on the ballet and the new dance. But it is a great question.
It is not only a question of true art, it is a question of race, of the
development of the female sex to beauty and health, of the return to
the original Strength and to natural movements of woman's body. It
is a question of the development of perfect mothers and the birth of
healthy and beautiful children. The dancing school of the future is
to develop and to show the ideal form of woman. It will be, as it were,
a museum of the living beauty of the period.
Travellers coming into a country and seeing the dancers should
find in them that country's ideal of the beauty of form and movement.
But Strangers who today come to any country, and there see the
dancers of the ballet school, would get a Strange notion indeed of the
ideal of beauty in that country. More than this, dancing like any art of
any time should refled the higheSt point the spirit of mankind has
61
reached in that special period. Does anybody think that the present
day ballet school expresses this?
Why are its positions in such contract to the beautiful positions
of the antique sculptures which we preserve in our museums and which
are constantly presented to us as perfect models of ideal beauty? Or
have our museums been founded only out of historical and archae¬
ological interest, and not for the sake of the beauty of the objects which
they contain ?
The ideal of beauty of the human body cannot change with fashion
but only with evolution. Remember the Story of the beautiful sculpture
of a Roman girl which was discovered under the reign of Pope
Innocent VIII, and which by its beauty created such a sensation that
the men thronged to see it and made pilgrimages to it as to a holy
shrine, so that the Pope, troubled by the movement which it originated,
finally had it buried again.
And here I want to avoid a misunderstanding that might easily
arise. From what I have said you might conclude that my intention is
to return to the dances of the old Greeks, or that I think that the dance
of the future will be a revival of the antique dances or even of those of
the primitive tribes. No, the dance of the future will be a new move¬
ment, a consequence of the entire evolution which mankind has passed
through. To return to the dances of the Greeks would be as impossible
as it is unnecessary. We are not Greeks and therefore cannot dance
Greek dances.
But the dance of the future will have to become again a high
religious art as it was with the Greeks. For art which is not religious is
not art, is mere merchandise.
The dancer of the future will be one whose body and soul have
grown so harmoniously together that the natural language of that soul
will have become the movement of the body. The dancer will not
belong to a nation but to all humanity. She will dance not in the form
62
PHOTOGRAPH BY ARNOLD GENTHE
of nymph, nor fairy, nor coquette, but in the form of woman in her
greatest and purest expression. She will realize the mission of woman's
body and the holiness of all its parts. She will dance the changing life
of nature, showing how each part is transformed into the other. From
all parts of her body shall shine radiant intelligence, bringing to the
world the message of the thoughts and aspirations of thousands of
women. She shall dance the freedom of woman.
Oh, what a field is here awaiting her! Do you not feel that she is
near, that she is coming, this dancer of the future! She will help
womankind to a new knowledge of the possible Strength and beauty
of their bodies, and the relation of their bodies to the earth nature and
to the children of the future. She will dance the body emerging again
from centuries of civilized forgetfulness, emerging not in the nudity of
primitive man, but in a new nakedness, no longer at war with spiritu¬
ality and intelligence, but joining with them in a glorious harmony.
This is the mission of the dancer of the future. Oh, do you not feel
that she is near, do you not long for her coming as I do? Let us prepare
the place for her. I would build for her a temple to await her. Perhaps
she is yet unborn, perhaps she is now a little child. Perhaps, oh bliss¬
ful ! it may be my holy mission to guide her firft Steps, to watch the
progress of her movements day by day until, far outgrowing my poor
teaching, her movements will become godlike, mirroring in them¬
selves the waves, the winds, the movements of growing things, the
flight of birds, the passing of clouds, and finally the thought of man in
his relation to the universe.
Oh, she is coming, the dancer of the future: the free spirit, who
will inhabit the body of new woman; more glorious than any woman
that has yet been; more beautiful than the Egyptian, than the Greek,
the early Italian, than all women of paSt centuries—the highest intelli¬
gence in the freest body!
1902 or 1903. © 1909.
63
THE PARTHENON
a nyone who, arriving at the foot of the Acropolis, has mounted
l\ with prayerful feet toward the Parthenon, and at length
Jl JL Standing before this monument of the one immortal Beauty,
feeling his soul lifting towards this glorious form, realizing that he has
gained that secret middle place from which radiate in vaSt circles all
knowledge and all Beauty—and that he has arrived at the core and
root of this beauty—who, lifting his eyes to the rhythmical succession
of Doric columns, has felt "form" in its finest and nobleSt sense fulfill
the spirit's highest want of form, that one will understand for what I
am Striving in my firSt dance tonight. It is my effort to express the
feeling of the human body in relation to the Doric column.
For the laSt four months, each day I have Stood before this miracle
of perfection wrought of human hands. I have seen around it sloping
the Hills, in many forms, but in dired: contraSt to them the Parthenon,
expressing their fundamental idea. Not in imitation of the outside
forms of nature, but in understanding of nature's great secret rules, rise
the Doric columns.
The firSt days as I Stood there my body was as nothing and my
soul was scattered; but gradually called by the great inner voice of the
Temple, came back the parts of my self to worship it: firSt came my
soul and looked upon the Doric columns, and then came my body and
looked—but in both were silence and Stillness, and I did not dare to
move, for I realized that of all the movements my body had made none
64
was worthy to be made before a Doric Temple. And as I Stood thus I
realized that I muSt find a dance whose effort was to be worthy of this
Temple—or never dance again.
Neither Satyr nor Nymph had entered here, neither Shadows nor
Bacchantes. All that I had danced was forbidden this Temple—
neither love nor hate nor fear, nor joy nor sorrow—only a rhythmic
cadence, those Doric columns—only in perfect harmony this glorious
Temple, calm through all the ages.
For many days no movement came to me. And then one day came
the thought: These columns which seem so Straight and Still are not
really Straight, each one is curving gently from the base to the height,
each one is in flowing movement, never reSting, and the movement
of each is in harmony with the others. And as I thought this my arms
rose slowly toward the Temple and I leaned forward—and then I
knew I had found my dance, and it was a Prayer.
1903 or 1904.
65
THE DANCER AND NATURE
In no country is the soul made so sensible of Beauty and of Wisdom
as in Greece. Gazing at the sky one knows why Athene, the
Goddess of Wisdom, was called "the Blue-Eyed One," and why
learning and beauty are always joined in her service. And one feels
also why Greece has been the land of great philosophers, lovers of
wisdom, and why the greatest of these has called the highest beauty the
highest wisdom. . . .
Does the recognition of Beauty as the highest Idea belong wholly
to the province of Man's Intellect? ... Or do you think that a
woman might also attain to a knowledge of the highest beauty ? Con¬
sidering women in our country as they are today, does it not seem that
very few among them have a true feeling and love for beauty as an
Idea ? Does it not seem they have recognition of that which is trifling
and pretty only, but are blind to true beauty ?
At the words "true beauty" there comes before my eyes a proces¬
sion of figures, women's figures, draped lightly in noble draperies.
They go two and two, and the harmony of their bodies swaying to
their Steps is like music. . . .
One might well be led to believe that women are incapable of
knowing beauty as an Idea, but I think this only seems so, not because
they are incapable of perceiving but only because they are at present
blind to the chief means in their power of understanding True Beauty.
Through the eyes beauty moSt readily finds a way to the soul, but
66
there is another way for women—perhaps an easier way—and that is
through the knowledge of their own bodies.
The human body has through all ages itself been the symbol of
highest beauty. I see a young goatherd sitting surrounded by his flock,
and before him, rose-tipped of the sun, Stands the Goddess of Cyprus,
and she smiles as she reaches her hand for the prize which she knows
to be hers. That exquisitely poised head, those shoulders gently slop¬
ing, those breasts firm and round, the ample waiSt with its free lines,
curving to the hips, down to the knees and feet—all one perfect whole.
The artift without this fir£t consciousness of proportion and line of
the human form could have had no consciousness of the beauty sur¬
rounding him. When his ideal of the human form is a noble one, then
his conception of all line and form in Nature is nobleft: the knowledge
of sky and earth forms—and from this the conception of line and form
of architecture, painting and sculpture. All art—does it not come orig¬
inally from the fir£t human consciousness of the nobility of the lines of
the human body ?
How shall woman attain a knowledge of this beauty? Shall she
find this knowledge in the gymnasium examining her muscles, in the
museum regarding the sculptured forms, or by the continual contem¬
plation of beautiful objects, and the reflection of them in the mind?
These are all ways, but the chief thing is, she must live this beauty, and
her body mu£t be the living exponent of it.
Not by the thought or contemplation of beauty only, but by the
living of it, will woman learn. And as form and movement are insepa¬
rable, I might say that she will learn by that movement which is in
accordance with the beautiful form.
And how shall one name that movement which is in accord with
the moft beautiful human form? There is a name, the name of one of
the oldest of the arts—time-honored as one of the nine Muses—but it
is a name that has fallen into such disrepute in our day that it has come
67
to mean ju£t the opposite of this definition. I would name it the Dance.
Woman is to learn beauty of form and movement through the dance.
I believe here is a wonderful undiscovered inheritance for coming
womanhood, the old dance which is to become the new. She shall be
sculpture not in clay or marble but in her own body which she shall
endeavor to bring to the highest State of plaStic beauty; she shall be
painter, but, as part of a great pidure, she shall mingle in many
groups of new changing light and color. With the movement of her
body she shall find the secret of perfect proportion of line and curve.
The art of the dance she will hold as a great well-spring of new life for
sculpture, painting and architecture.
Before woman can reach high things in the art of the dance,
dancing muSt exiSt as an art for her to practice, which at the present
day in our country it certainly does not.
Where are we to look for the great fountain-head of movement?
Woman is not a thing apart and separate from all other life organic
and inorganic. She is but a link in the chain, and her movement mu£t
be one with the great movement which runs through the universe; and
therefore the fountain-head for the art of the dance will be the Study of
the movements of Nature.
With the Strengthening of the breeze over the seas, the waters form
in long undulations. Of all movement which gives us delight and
satisfies the soul's sense of movement, that of the waves of the sea
seems to me the finest. This great wave movement runs through all
Nature, for when we look over the waters to the long line of hills on
the shore, they seem also to have the great undulating movement of the
sea; and all movements in Nature seem to me to have as their ground-
plan the law of wave movement.
Yesterday we were speaking of the movement in Nature, saying
that the wave movement was the great foundation. The idea continu-
68
PHOTOGRAPH BY ARNOLD GENTHE
ally presents itself to me, and I see waves rising through all things.
Looking through the trees they seem also to be a pattern conforming to
lines of waves. We might think of them from another Standpoint: that
all energy expresses itself through this wave movement. For does not
sound travel in waves, and light also? And when we come to the
movements of organic nature, it would seem that all free natural move¬
ments conform to the law of wave movement: the flight of birds, for
inftance, or the bounding of animals. It is the alternate attraction and
resistance of the law of gravity that causes this wave movement.
I see dance motifs in all things about me. All true dance move¬
ments possible to the human body exiSt primarily in Nature. What is
"true dance" in opposition to what might be named the false dance?
The true dance is appropriate to the moSt beautiful human form; the
false dance is the opposite of this definition—that is, that movement
which conforms to a deformed human body. FirSt draw me the form
of a woman as it is in Nature. And now draw me the form of a woman
in a modern corset and the satin slippers used by our modern dancers.
Now do you not see that the movement that would conform to one
figure would be perfectly impossible for the other? To the firSt all
the rhythmic movements that run through Nature would be possible.
They would find this form their natural medium for movement. To
the second figure these movements would be impossible on account of
the rhythm being broken, and Stopped at the extremities.
We cannot take movements for the second figure from Nature, but
muSt on the contrary go according to set geometrical figures based on
Straight lines; and that is exactly what the school of dance of our day
has done. They have invented a movement which conforms admirably
to the human figure of the second illustration, but which would be
impossible to the figure as drawn in our firSt sketch. Therefore it is
only those movements which would be natural to the firSt figure that
I call the true dance.
69
What I name as "deformed" is by many people held to be an
evolution in form to something higher, and the dance which would be
appropriate to woman's natural form would be held by them as primi¬
tive and uncultivated. Whereas they would name the dance which is
appropriate to the form much improved, compressed in corsets and
shoes, as the dance appropriate to the culture of the present day. How
would one answer these people?
That man's culture is the making use of Nature's forces in chan¬
nels harmonious to those forces, and never the going directly against
Nature and all art intimately connected with Nature at its roots; that
the painter, the poet, the sculptor and the dramatist do but fix for us
through their work according to their ability to observe in Nature;
that Nature always has been and mu£t be the great source of all art;
and that there is a complete separation of the dancer's movement from
the movement of Nature. . . .
Probably 1905.
70
WHAT DANCING SHOULD BE
I was sitting in my Study this afternoon, regarding by the light of
the dying day some little figures on my book-shelf, a Satyr, a
Nymph, an Amazon, an Eros; and the movement of each was
different, and the movement of each was beautiful. Why beautiful?
Because the movement of each was in direct correspondence with the
form and symmetry of each; therefore the form and the movement
were one. I was regarding these figures in turn, and my enjoyment of
the harmonies in their lines was like that of listening to music, when
the door opened, and quite unannounced a little girl came in. She ran
to me, and throwing her arms about me, cried, "Dear sweet Miss
Duncan, I liked your dance so much, I muft come and see you."
I regarded the glowing life in the face of the child. Something
there seemed familiar to me. What was it? Unconsciously I raised my
eyes to the shelf where danced my fauns and nymphs. Was it not
there, the resemblance? The eternal childhood of the world? The
Golden Age, does it not live again, in all ages in all children ?
"And why do you find my dance beautiful, little one?" I asked.
"Because it is so natural," answered the child.
"And," I said, "are all natural things beautiful?" for I would
learn from the child a definition of beauty; and the child answered
gladly, "Yes!"
O wise little philosopher, who answers from the sureness of in-
ftind, without need of consideration! Yes, for Beauty is the soul and
71
the laws of the Universe, and all that is in accordance with this soul
and these laws is Beauty. And ugliness is only that which is againSt the
harmony of these laws. . . .
The dance and sculpture are the two arts moSt closely united, and
the foundation of both is Nature. The sculptor and the dancer both
have to seek in Nature the moSt beautiful forms, and the movements
which inevitably express the spirit of those forms. So the teaching of
sculpture and of the dance ought to go hand in hand. The sculptor
may interpret the movements and the forms imaginatively, but only
the Study of Nature can serve as a foundation. The Study of living
figures that dance spontaneously, each an expression of an individual
soul, of its deepest understanding and personal power, is what the
school should offer the sculptor, and what I wish to bring about. . . .
MuSt the sculptor draw all from his imagination, or from the
memory of what is left to us from Greek art? I say that is not sufficient
for inspiration—for a great living work. Now where shall the sculptor
of today find beautiful living forms in rhythmic movement? Let him
leave his Studio and his model and go to the opera, to see the school of
the dance as represented by the national ballet: let him go pencil and
paper in hand, and then let him tell us whether he has found one pose,
one movement, one suggestion for the beauty of free woman's body
in the expression of the higheSt beauty, one feeling which would
inspire an art work of purity and holiness.
So I say that the relation of the new school of the dance to sculpture
is to be a very close one. From its earlieSt Stages, when the little ones
begin their firSt childish movements, we will have days when every
sculptor who asks shall be admitted to Study the free unconscious
movements of the children without clothes. And as gradually the
movements of the little girls develop and become full, rhythmical and
beautiful, they will be more and more a source of light for sculptors.
72
*"V
V;.
\
\
CRAYON DRAWING BY VAN DEERING PERRINE
Have you ever seen the little girls who are Studying in the ballet of
today? The little girls sweet, bright and graceful—but their feet are
being tortured into deformed shapes. Their tender little bodies already
are being forced into tight bodices and baby corsets, while their natural
graceful movements are being tormented into unnatural Straight kick-
ings of the legs, toe walking, and all sorts of awkward contortions
which are direcftly contrary to what a child's natural movement would
be if developed in the line of reason and beauty.
I witnessed such a children's ballet once at the Berlin Opera House,
and I say it is a shame and a disgrace to the intelligence of the German
nation. Now whence does this Style of dancing come? It comes from
France, from the time of the moSt polluted of courts, and I say it
suited the falseness and shallowness of those courts perfectly, but it
does not suit our time, and it does not find itself at home in a nation in
which Schiller and Goethe and Richard Wagner and many other great
and beautiful souls have written what real dancing should be.
What dancing should be—how many poets, how many philoso¬
phers, how many scientists of Germany have written beautiful lines on
this subject! And they have moStly written of little children dancing,
or of maidens dancing, or of one woman dancing. And when one
reads such lines, it is like a call from the depths of their poet-souls:
"O Woman, come before us, before our eyes longing for beauty, and
tired of the ugliness of this civilization, come in simple tunics, letting
us see the line and harmony of the body beneath, and dance for us.
Dance us the sweetness of life and its meanings, dance for us the
movements of birds, the waters, waving trees, floating clouds, dance
for us the holiness and beauty of woman's body."
Like a call it has come from the souls of these great ones to women:
"Give us again the sweetness and beauty of the true dance, give us
again the joy of seeing the simple unconscious pure body of woman."
Like a great call it has come, and women muSt hear and answer it.
73
A CHILD DANCING
Seated on the beach at Noordwijk, I look on while my little niece,
who has come to visit me, from the Griinewald School, dances
here before the waves. I gaze across the va£t expanse of surging
water—wave after wave Streaming endlessly paft, throwing up the
white foam. And in front of it all the dainty little figure in her white
fluttering dress, dancing before the monstrous sea! And I feel as
though the heart-beat of her little life were sounding in unison with
the mighty life of the water, as though it possessed something of the
same rhythm, something of the same life, and my heart rejoices at her
dancing.
For a long time I am loft in contemplation, and her dance by the
sea seems to me to contain in little the whole problem on which I am
working. It seems to reflect the naturally beautiful motions of the
human body, in the dance. She dances because she is full of the joy of
life. She dances because the waves are dancing before her eyes, because
the winds are dancing, because she can feel the rhythm of the dance
throughout the whole of nature. To her it is a joy to dance; to me it is
a joy to watch her. It is summer now, here by the sea, and life is filled
with joy; but I think of winter, in the towns, in the streets, in the
houses, of life in the towns in the gloomy winter. How can the life of
nature, the joy of summer, of sunshine, the joy of a child dancing by
the sea, how can all this beauty be drawn into life, into the towns?
Can the dancer suggest all this and remind men of it in the winter
74
time, in the cities ? Can she call up within me the same delight which
she is giving me now as I sit here on the beach and watch her dancing?
I look more closely and Study her movements. What is this dance
she is dancing? I see that the simple movements and Steps are those she
has learnt in our school during the paSt two years. But she invents them
with her own spontaneous child-like feelings, her own child-like happi¬
ness. She is only dancing what she has been taught, but the movements
taught her are so completely in harmony with her child-like nature
that they seem to spring direct from her inmost being.
In the memoranda for my method of instruction I have laid it
down that:—
"The child muSt not be taught to make movements, but her soul,
as it grows to maturity muSt be guided and instructed; in other words,
the body muSt be taught to express itself by means of the motions
which are natural to it. We do not allow the child to make a single move¬
ment unless it knows why it makes it. I do not mean to say that the
meaning of every motion muSt be explained to the child in words, but
that the motion muSt be of such a nature that the child feels the reason
for it in every fibre. In this way the child will become versed in the
simple language of geStures."
These firSt memoranda in my notebook come back to my memory
as I sit here watching Temple dancing on the beach. Her dancing is,
in a sense, an epitome of all the hopes and all the efforts I have ex¬
pended on my school since its foundation.
I can picture to myself the smile of amusement with which some
learned professor of the history of dancing will read these simple lines.
He will doubtless begin with a long dissertation on the hiStory of
dancing in every country and age. He will prove conclusively that the
art of dancing cannot be acquired either in the woods, or by the sea¬
shore, and that it would be madness to found a school in the belief
75
that it was possible. But if we are to bring about a renaissance of the
art of dancing, it will not spring from the head of any learned pro¬
fessor, but will rather bud forth from the joyous movements of chil¬
dren's bodies, guided by the flute of the great god Pan himself.
1906.
76
MOVEMENT IS LIFE
Study the movement of the earth, the movement of plants and
trees, of animals, the movement of winds and waves—and then
ftudy the movements of a child. You will find that the move¬
ment of all natural things works within harmonious expression. And
this is true in the firft years of a child's life; but very soon the move¬
ment is imposed from without by wrong theories of education, and
the child soon loses its natural spontaneous life, and its power of
expressing that in movement.
I notice that a baby of three or four coming to my school is respon¬
sive to the exaltation of beautiful music, whereas a child of eight or
nine is already under the influence of a conventional and mechanical
conception of life imposed upon it by the pedagogues. The child of
nine has already entered into the prison of conventional and me¬
chanical movement, in which it will remain and suffer its entire life,
until advancing age brings on paralysis of bodily expression.
When asked for the pedagogic program of my school, I reply:
"Let us first teach little children to breathe, to vibrate, to feel, and to
become one with the general harmony and movement of nature. Let
us fir ft produce a beautiful human being, a dancing child." Nietzsche
has said that he cannot believe in a god that cannot dance. He has also
said, "Let that day be considered loft on which we have not danced."
But he did not mean the execution of pirouettes. He meant the
exaltation of life in movement.
77
The harmony of music exists equally with the harmony of move¬
ment in nature.
Man has not invented the harmony of music. It is one of the under¬
lying principles of life. Neither could the harmony of movement be
invented: it is essential to draw one's conception of it from Nature her¬
self, and to seek the rhythm of human movement from the rhythm of
water in motion, from the blowing of the winds on the world, in all
the earth's movements, in the motions of animals, fish, birds, reptiles,
and even in primitive man, whose body Still moved in harmony with
nature.
With the firft conception of a conscience, man became self-
conscious, loft the natural movements of the body; today in the light of
intelligence gained through years of civilization, it is essential that he
consciously seek what he has unconsciously loft.
All the movements of the earth follow the lines of wave motion.
Both sound and light travel in waves. The motion of water, winds,
trees and plants progresses in waves. The flight of a bird and the
movements of all animals follow lines like undulating waves. If then
one seeks a point of physical beginning for the movement of the
human body, there is a clue in the undulating motion of the wave. It
is one of the elemental facts of nature, and out of such elementals the
child, the dancer, absorbs something basic to dancing.
The human being too is a source. Dancing expresses in a different
language, different from nature, the beauty of the body; and the body
grows more beautiful with dancing. All the conscious art of mankind
has grown out of the discovery of the natural beauty of the human
body. Men tried to reproduce it in sand or on a wall, and painting thus
was born. From our underftanding of the harmonies and proportions
of the members of the body sprang architecture. From the wish to
glorify the body sculpture was created.
The beauty of the human form is not chance. One cannot change
78
it by dress. The Chinese women deformed their feet with tiny shoes;
women of the time of Louis XIV deformed their bodies with corsets;
but the ideal of the human body muft forever remain the same. The
Venus of Milo stands on her pedestal in the Louvre for an ideal;
women pass before her, hurt and deformed by the dress of ridiculous
fashions; she remains forever the same, for she is beauty, life, truth.
It is because the human form is not and cannot be at the mercy of
fashion or the tafte of an epoch that the beauty of woman is eternal.
It is the guide of human evolution toward the goal of the human race,
toward the ideal of the future which dreams of becoming God.
The architect, the sculptor, the painter, the musician, the poet, all
understand how the idealization of the human form and the con¬
sciousness of its divinity are at the root of all art created by man. A
single artift has loft this divinity, an artift who above all should be the
fir ft to desire it—the dancer.
Dancing, indeed, through a long era lacked all sense of elemental
natural movement. It tried to afford the sense of gravity overcome—a
denial of nature. Its movements were not living, flowing, undulating,
giving rise inevitably to other movements. All freedom and spontaneity
were loft in a maze of intricate artifice. The dancer had to be dressed
up artificially to be in keeping with its unnatural character.
Then when I opened the door to nature again, revealing a dif¬
ferent kind of dance, some people explained it all by saying, "See, it is
natural dancing." But with its freedom, its accordance with natural
movement, there was always design too—even in nature you find sure,
even rigid design. "Natural" dancing should mean only that the
dance never goes againft nature, not that anything is left to chance.
Nature muft be the source of all art, and dance muft make use of
nature's forces in harmony and rhythm, but the dancer's movement
will always be separate from any movement in nature.
Probably 1909.
79
BEAUTY AND EXERCISE
Many years ago the idea came to me that it might be possible to
bring up young girls in such an atmosphere of beauty that,
in setting continually before their eyes an ideal figure, their
own bodies would grow to be the personification of this figure; and
that through continual emulation of it and by the perpetual practice of
beautiful movements, they would become perfect in form and gesture.
This has long appeared to me to be the type of the ideal school of
dancing.
Having in mind, as I have said before, that form and movement
are one, I thought it necessary for the culture of beautiful movement
to tend as carefully the growing figures of my pupils as a gardener
tends the shapes of his fruit and flowers.
With this aim I placed in my schools different ideal representa¬
tions of the female form, taking even those of the very firft years—
bas-reliefs and sculptures of dancing children, books and paintings
showing the child form as it was dreamed of by the painters and
sculptors of every age; paintings of dancing children on Greek vases;
little Tanagra and Boeotian figures; Donatello's group of dancing chil¬
dren, which is a radiant childish melody; Gainsborough's Dancing
Children.
All these figures have a certain fraternity in the naive grace of
their form and movement, as if the children of every age met and
joined hands through the centuries. The real children of the schools,
80
DRAWING BY ANDRE DUNOYER DE SEGONZAC
moving and dancing amidSt them, muSt resemble them, muSt refle<5t
unconsciously, in their forms and movements, a little of this infantile
joy and grace. And that is a firSt Step towards growth in beauty, the
firSt Step of the new dance.
I also place in my schools figures of young girls dancing, running,
jumping, those young Spartan girls who, in the gymnasiums, were
trained to hard exercises, so that they might become the mothers of
heroic warriors, those light runners who took part in the annual
games, exquisite terra-cotta figures with flying veils and floating gar¬
ments; young girls dancing hand-in-hand at the Panatheneas. They
represent the aim to be attained by the pupils of my schools, who soon
learn to feel an intimate love for these figures, and in trying each day
to resemble them are permeated with the secret of their harmony. For
I believe that it is only by awakening a Strong wish for beauty that
beauty can be obtained.
To attain this harmony they muSt every day do special exercises
chosen for the purpose. But these exercises are chosen so as to coincide
with their own will, so that they are accomplished with good humor
and eagerness. Each one of them is not only a means to an end, but an
end in itself, and this end is to make perfect and happy each day
of life.
The purpose of these daily exercises is to make of the body at each
period of its development an instrument as perfect as possible, an in¬
strument for the expression of that harmony which, permeating every¬
thing, is ready to flow into bodies which have been prepared for it.
The exercises begin by a simple gymnaStic preparation of the muscles
to make them Strong and flexible; the firSt dancing Steps only begin
after these gymnaStic exercises are completed. They consist at firSt of
a simple rhythmic walk, learning to walk slowly to the sounds of a
simple rhythm, then to walk quicker to the sound of more complicated
81
rhythms, then to run, at firSt slowly, then to jump lightly at a certain
moment of the rhythm.
By means of these exercises the pupils learn to read the notes on the
scale of movement as the notes of music are learnt on the scale of
sound. Later, these notes can be made to harmonize with the moSt
various and subtle compositions. But these daily exercises are only one
part of the Studies. The pupils, always dressed in free and graceful
draperies during their sports, in the playing fields, during their walks
or in the woods, run and jump naturally until they have learned to
express themselves by movement as easily as others can express them¬
selves by word or song.
Their Studies and observations are not limited to the forms of art,
but are specially directed towards the movements of nature. The move¬
ments of the clouds in the wind, the waving of trees, the flight of birds,
the whirling of leaves, all have a special signification for them. They
learn to observe the special quality of each movement. They develop
a secret sympathy in their souls, unknown to others, which makes them
comprehend these movements as moSt people cannot. For every fiber
of their bodies, sensitive and alert, responds to the melody of Nature
and sings with her.
How often, returning from these Studies, coming to the dance
room, have these pupils felt in their bodies an irresistible impulse to
dance out one or another movement which they had juSt observed!
A Dionysian emotion possesses them.
And thus in time, I think, some of them will come to the com¬
position of their own dances. But even when they are dancing together,
each one, while forming part of a whole, under group inspiration, will
preserve a creative individuality. And all the parts together will com¬
pose a unified harmony that will bring a new birth to the world: will
make live again the flaming beauty of the dramatic Chorus, the Chorus
of tragedy, the eternal hymn of the Struggle between man and DeStiny.
82
The culture of the form and movement of the body is practised
today in two ways: by gymnastics and by dancing. Both should go
together, for without gymnastics, without the healthy and methodical
development of the body, the real dance is unattainable. Gymnastics
should form the basis of all physical education; the body muSt be given
plenty of light and air; its development muSt be carried out methodi¬
cally ; the whole vital Strength of the body muSt be brought to its full
expansion. This is the business of the professor of gymnaStics. Then
comes dancing. Into a body that has been harmoniously developed and
brought to its higheSt degree of energy, the spirit of dancing enters.
Movement and culture of his body form the aim of the gymnaSt; for
the dancer they are only the means. Thus, the body itself muSt be for¬
gotten, for it is only a harmonious and well adapted instrument whose
movements express not only the movements of the body, as in gym¬
naStics, but also the thoughts and feelings of a soul.
83
THE DANCE IN RELATION TO TRAGEDY
The dance of the paSt reached its highest point when it formed
the Chorus of Greek tragedy. At the sublime moment of the
tragedy, when sorrow and suffering were moSt acute, the
Chorus would appear. Then the soul of the audience, harrowed to the
point of agony, was restored to harmony by the elemental rhythms
of song and movement. The Chorus gave to the audience the fortitude
to support those moments that otherwise would have been too terrible
for human endurance.
This is the highest aim and objed: of dancing. To take its legiti¬
mate place in tragedy with music and poetry, to be the intermediary
between the tragedy and the audience, creating complete harmony
between them.
My work for the dance has always had this end in view, this light
has always been before me: to reStore the dance to its true place as
Chorus, the very soul of tragedy. Up to a very short time ago dancing
in the modern theatre was conceived as a sort of interlude, a pleasant
filler, far removed from a living rapprochement with drama. It was in
1898, while Studying Gliick's music, that I seemed to have discovered
the bridge that would restore the dance to its true sphere. Gliick better
than anyone else understood the Greek Chorus, its rhythm, the grave
beauty of its movements, the great impersonality of its soul, Stirred, but
never despairing.
I Studied the movements for choruses and dances in the works of
84
ISADORA DUNCAN DANCING GLUCK'S ORPHEE
CHALK DRAWING BY GRANDJOUAN
Gliick with the desire to draw the movements of dancing nearer to the
intent of the Chorus in a tragedy. It has been objected that this was
never Gliick's intention. I differ from that opinion. Gliick often spoke
in passionate terms of sincere movements, of true gesture. He pleaded
for nature, and though he wrote for the ballets of his day, I am sure it
was the gracious image of bodies moving freely, of garments blown
about by the wind, that inspired him. He knew the Greek vases: he
muft have been influenced by their running, leaping figures. And so,
in dancing the choruses and dances of Orpheus, I do not try to repre¬
sent Orpheus or Eurydice, but the plastic movements of the Chorus,
the tragic Chorus.
85
THE GREEK THEATRE
he Greek theatre was built not for the audience, but for the
artift, with whom the audience was only too pleased to collabo¬
rate. The Greek theatre, moreover, represented a collaboration
between the architect, the dramatist and the theatre artists.
The architect said to the dramatist, "What form of theatre do you
wish for your work?" and the dramatist replied, "That form in which
the greatest number of people can see, hear and feel at the same mo¬
ment with the same intensity and equal proportions."
The architect said to the dancer, "What form?" and the dancer,
spreading his arms in a great circle, replied "That form which enables
me to take a va£t audience into my arms—the form of theatre in which
all the people sitting there will feel the significance of a simple gesture
in equal vision of form and proportion—a form of theatre in which
my magnetic force can go forth from me covering the people in un¬
interrupted rays as the sun's light covers the earth."
And to the a£tor: "What form of theatre?" The a<5tor replied:
"That form in which a simple tone of my voice, going on the natural
currents of its sound waves, will Stir the hearts of a vaSt multitude sit¬
ting before me in places one not more fortunate than the others; in
which the emotion I give will flow from one to another—infectious,
all-compelling waves of emotion going from me to them and returning
to me."
And so was the Greek theatre built. There were no "boxes," no
86
gallery, no balconies, no parquette. The Greek was essentially a demo¬
cratic theatre. As artists are the priests of a religion, so all people before
a great art manifestation should be equal.
Greek tragedy sprang from the dancing and singing of the firft
Greek Chorus. Dancing has gone a long way astray. She mu£t return
to her original place—hand in hand with the Muses encircling Apollo.
She mu£t become again the primitive Chorus, and the drama will be
reborn from her inspiration. Then she will again take her place as the
sifter art of tragedy, she will spring from music—the great, imper¬
sonal, eternal and divine wellspring of art.
I9I5-
8 7
EDUCATION AND THE DANCE
The school of the dance should have two aims or visions. One of
these is of the earth and the other is of production. In forming
my school I had primarily in mind the aim to contribute this
mo£t important discovery to the education of the child—not to a par¬
ticular group of children but to all the children in the world: the dance
is the moSt natural and beautiful aid to the development of the grow¬
ing child in its constant movement. And only that education is right
which includes the dance.
When I founded my fir ft school in 1905 I was only twenty-two
years old. The basic reason for my putting in my whole capital, the
firSt fruits of my success, and of sacrificing my personal career at that
time, was a feeling of compassion for the misunderstanding and the
torture that the average child goes through in the name of modern
education. My primary reason for founding this school was not, as
people seem to think, to train children for the theatre. Instead, while
I myself was Still almost a child, I was dreaming of educating and
forming around me young disciples who would be inspired by my idea,
living with me day by day and later helping to give to every child in
the world the art that I had given them. For every child that is born
in civilization has the right to a heritage of beauty.
My theories soon bore fruit. Within two years the school transformed
insignificant, sickly and badly formed children into frescoes that out-
rivalled the loveliness of Donatello or Luca della Robbia. There is no
88
vcMtvr t ScHv&GKT
ISADORA DUNCAN DANCING A SCHUBERT MOMENT MUSICALE
CHALK DRAWING BY GRANDJOUAN
more simple and dired: means to give art to the people—to give a
conception of art to the working man—than to transform his own
children into living works of art. The children of my school at an early
age learned to sing the chorals of Mendelssohn, Mozart, Bach and the
songs of Schubert; for every child, no matter of what class, if he sings
and moves to this music will penetrate the spiritual message of the
great masters.
And so the firft great aim of my school was social and educational.
But I succeeded so well in giving this expression to the children that
the bourgeois hailed them as phenomena, and were willing to pay
large sums to put them on the ftage and ftare at them through opera
glasses. How many times have I come out after a performance and
explained: "These dancing children whom I have formed in my school
are not performing as theatre artists. I bring them before you simply
to show what can be accomplished with every child. Now give me the
means to work this experiment in a greater field, and I will further
prove that the beauty which you applaud to-night can be the natural
expression of every child in the world."
But in order to carry out such a vast project it was necessary to
have the supervision and aid of a government. Having appealed in
vain to all the governments of Europe and America, I accepted an in¬
vitation from the Soviet Government to found a school in Moscow.
89
TERPSICHORE
What muft we do to bring Terpsichore back amongSt us
again? We muSt recover: i. the ideal beauty of the human
form; and 2. the movement which is the expression of
this form.
All my research and Study in the field of the dance have been
founded on these two principles.
Always the lines of a form truly beautiful suggest movement, even
in repose. And always the lines that are truly beautiful in movement
suggest repose, even in the swifteSt flight. It is this quality of repose in
movement that gives to movements their eternal element.
All movement on earth is governed by the law of gravitation, by
attraction and repulsion, resistance and yielding; it is that which makes
up the rhythm of the dance.
To discover this rhythm, we muSt listen to the pulsations of the
earth. The great composers—Bach, Beethoven, Wagner—have in
their works combined with absolute perfection terrestrial and human
rhythm. And that is why I have taken as a guide the rhythms of the
great Masters; not because I thought I could express the beauty of
their works, but because, in surrendering my body unresistingly to
their rhythms I have hoped to recover the natural cadences of human
movements which have been loSt for centuries.
There are documents wherein the two beauties are fixed in a
perfect State—the ideal beauty of the human form and the ideal beauty
of movement; these are the Greek vases collected in museums.
90
In the thousands and thousands of figures which I have Studied on
these vases, I have always found an undulating line as the point of
departure. Every movement, even in repose, contains the quality of
fecundity, possesses the power to give birth to another movement.
With the exception of some grotesque figures, or those dating from
a poorer era, I have not found, for example, a single drawing in which
the foot is raised to a line perpendicular to the body. Even on the vases
with figures expressing Bacchic frenzy, this movement is unknown.
That is because it expresses a "Stop"; one knows that it cannot con¬
tinue, that it can only be its own end.
On the other hand, in the leaping figures with bent knees, one
senses that the movement goes on: there is in this movement an eternal
element—one which follows the undulating line of the great forces of
Nature, on which I have based all the movements of my dance. That
is but one example, but one finds in thousands of figures the same
principle.
One of the commonest figures in the Bacchic dances is that with
the head turned backward. In this movement one senses immediately
the Bacchic frenzy possessing the entire body. The motive underlying
this gesture is in all nature. The animals, in Bacchic movement, turn
back the head: in tropic countries, at night, the elephants turn their
heads; dogs baying at the moon, lions, tigers. It is the universal
Dionysiac movement. The waves of the ocean form this line under a
Storm, the trees in a tempeSt.
9i
THE DANCE OF THE GREEKS
The only way to accomplish a re-birth of the dance is to restore
it to its original place. To know the true place of the dance it
is necessary to Study history.
The oldest of the dances that were an art were those of Asia, and
of Egypt—which influenced the Greek dance. But those earlier dances
were not of our race; it is to Greece that we mu£t turn, because all our
dancing goes back to Greece. What, then, was the Greek dance?
For centuries before Aeschylus the people danced. They danced
together and expressed thus their collective emotion, joyous, warlike,
or sorrowing. It was out of this dance of the people that the Chorus
developed, and the Chorus was the real beginning of tragedy.
There was later added to the Chorus the firft afior. This a£tor
recounted the incident, expressed the special feeling which the drama
aroused in him; while the Chorus danced and sang as before, remain¬
ing on a plane above the drama.
Aeschylus added to this spectacle one or two actors. But the Chorus
remained, for him, the soul of the tragedy. The a<5tors represented
only an incidental recital, details of the action, while the Chorus soared
far above men's actions. Entering at the mo£t poignant moment of
emotional tension, it brought a lyric exaltation, the eternal and divine
point of view. Deepest soul of Tragedy: the Chorus was Wisdom or
Reason or Joy or Sorrow eternal.
But Sophocles, by increasing the number of actors lessened the role
92
played by the Chorus. Euripides in turn increased the number of
characters and thus further decreased the importance of the Chorus.
Still, in the Bacchae, at the highest point touched in tragedy, it is Still
the Chorus which, with the God Dionysus, is the Bacchic expression;
whereas the characters are not the intoxication itself but only beings
under the influence of that intoxication, moved by an emotion of
which they cannot attain the essence.
After Euripides the decadence came quickly. The value of the
Chorus was no longer recognized. The end came in Rome, when the
Chorus was replaced by mere mimes. They even undertook to mime
Oedipus! Tragedy was dead.
Later, much later, efforts were made to revive tragedy: efforts
admirable for the sincerity and the spirit of those who made them; but
certain fundamental errors gave false direction to them, and made the
realizations imperfect. The moSt serious of these errors was the failure
to understand this truth: Tragedy is incomplete without the Chorus.
It was the ancient tragedy that Monteverde and other artiSts of
his time wished to re-create. Monteverde had no intention of compos¬
ing operas. "Opera" is a meaningless word. He intended to accom¬
plish a renaissance of tragedy. But he made the error of giving the
actors the task of expressing the soul of the music—a role reserved
by the Greeks for the Chorus. This error was more firmly established
by the followers of Monteverde. Thus the firSt Steps in the Renaissance
followed a path that led away from the true form of tragedy.
Gliick, finally, revolted. One may say that he found again the
Chorus. He made it sing. But the opposition he met with cramped his
genius. He lived in an artificial and affected era. In tragedy he forgot
the drama and the aCtor.
Richard Wagner re-found the drama, but he mistook the role of
the Chorus; or at leaSt he transferred it to the characters. The drama
lives in the fortunes of the characters: it is the weaknesses or the
93
grandeur in the soul of Oedipus, and what happens to him, that inter¬
ests us. Drama develops out of the reactions of the characters toward
each other and under the action of Fate. But Wagner thought to lift
the characters above the drama, to give them the role of the Chorus.
Thus in the second aCt of Triflan and Isolde, Brangane, with her song
that is too slow to be that of a protagonist in the drama, represents the
Chorus. Tristan and Isolde, in their duet of love, become their own
Chorus; because whenever two characters speak together even one
word, they cease being the characters of the drama and become inter¬
preters of the abStraCt, become the Chorus.
That brings us to modern times. We can understand now what we
have loSt and what we muSt find again.
How, today, shall we give back to the dance its original place? By
identifying it again with the Chorus. It is necessary to give back the
tragic Chorus to the dance, and to give back the dance to the other
arts. The Chorus of tragedy is the true place of the dance. It is there
that it muSt be, associated with tragedy and with the other arts. All
the reSt is decadence.
In the time of Sophocles dancing, poetry, music, dramaturgy and
architecture formed one harmonious unity, as a single art manifested
in different ways, truly one and the same thing. The association of
tragic art and architecture was intimate, almoSt a fusion. All that went
to complete a performance seemed shaped by the same law—that is, in
the image of the ideal man or the man-god.
The characters and the Chorus, center of the drama, were the
center of a harmonious ensemble, like the solar plexus at the center of
the man. Toward them everything converged; from them everything
went out like rays from a light.
Often at an hour when Athens was scarcely yet awake, I have
danced in the Theatre of Dionysus. I have sensed how everything there
was shaped in accordance with this same harmony. My place in the
94
theatre was the center of the orchestra, and the gestures of my arms,
before me, traced the lines following the natural horizon once formed
by the top of the rings of seats. Today this harmony is destroyed.
The arts that were then grouped around tragedy have become
separated. Architecture has turned aside: the builders of modern the¬
atres have followed personal plans, obedient to the commercial idea,
and have put up buildings inconvenient for both public and aCtors.
The dance thought that it could live separately, by itself—and it
has arrived at that anomalous thing, the ballet. In either theatre or
music hall the ballet is without true significance, without any accord
with art. Even if all the world danced, the ballet ftill would be a false
thing, for in the ballet the dance aspires to be everything, to take the
place of poetry and drama.
The proof that the dance cannot exift alone is that it finds recourse
to pantomime. The pantomimifts pretend to speak with gestures; they
try to imitate language. Art is more natural; it does not imitate, it does
not seek out equivalents, it does not pretend to speak—it has its own
language.
The Greek music is loft, so that the poetic text of the Choruses is
no more than an indication out of which the harmony is lacking. In
our own times we have no music created for the dance. It is thought
that the dance is unworthy of beautiful music, and it is therefore de¬
prived of it. The great geniuses of music alone have had rhythm in
their work. That is why I have danced to the rhythms of Bach and of
Gliick, of Beethoven and of Chopin, of Schubert and of Wagner,
because practically they alone have understood and have expressed the
rhythm of the human body.
Wagner is the closest approach to a musician for the dance. But
with him music absorbs everything. Certainly it is an offense artis¬
tically to dance to such music, but I have done it by necessity, because
95
this music is awakening the dance that was dead, awakening rhythm.
I have danced to it, driven by it as a leaf is driven before the wind.
After many years of Study I have arrived at this conclusion: the
natural rhythm of the human body and the rhythm of contemporary
music are in complete disaccord; the simplest gesture fails to find in
these notes a line which it can follow. But to the rhythm of the words
of a Greek Chorus one dances easily. JuSt in hearing them one sees
unfolding a frieze of sculptured figures in movement. The music of
the Greeks muft have accorded with the rhythms of these words. Ah,
if it only could be recovered!
Today the theatre is divided into two halves, each ignoring and
scornful of the other: the theatre of music and the theatre of the spoken
word. Everything muft be undone. The moft beautiful dream is that
of finding again the Greek theatre that is ideal for both spectators and
a<5tors. To bring to life again the ancient ideal! I do not mean to say,
copy it, imitate it; but to breathe its life, to recreate it in one s self,
with personal inspiration: to Start from its beauty and then go toward
the future. The subjects of the dramas can be modern. But to find
again the ancient idea, and, by a miracle of love and devotion, to unite
anew the arts and the artiSts!
To unite the arts around the Chorus, to give back to the dance its
place as the Chorus, that is the ideal. When I have danced I have tried
always to be the Chorus: I have been the Chorus of young girls hailing
the return of the fleet, I have been the Chorus dancing the Pyrrhic
Dance, or the Bacchic; I have never once danced a solo. The dance,
again joined with poetry and with music, muSt become once more the
tragic Chorus. That is its only and its true end. That is the only way
for it to become again an art.
May the artiSts unite and accomplish this miracle of love!
9 6
DRAWING BY GRANDJOUAN SUGGESTED BY ISADORA DUNCAN
DANCING CESAR FRANCK's REDEMPTION
YOUTH AND THE DANCE
he child is gloriously full of life. He leaps endlessly, filled with
the intoxication of movement. He is a young animal, growing
in the midSt of a joyous exaltation, drawing in with the inten¬
sity of all his being the forces for his future life.
The growing of the child, and all his movements, bear witness to
a harmonious rhythm expressing all growing life. To "train" the child
it is only necessary to understand that the surest road, and the moSt
beautiful, is to surround his living with an atmosphere of graceful
movement. From this early environment a deep love of beauty will
naturally develop.
For an understanding of the dance, the activities of the child
should be directed into the channels natural to the taStes and capacities
of childhood. It is not necessary to ask of him great effort: let him
breathe joyously, give free rein to his natural animation, having care
only for the harmonious growth of his body. Above all do not force
on him movements toward which his nature rebels, but only lead his
spirit and his body into accord with the moSt noble movements and
the moSt spiritual expressions of mankind. Then the body becomes a
spirit whose gestures are its language, and the young soul opens out to
light, beauty and everlasting love.
Let the child thrill to this quiet training, as to those artiSts whose
human existence has ended but who have left an immortal music.
Let the child dance as a child: don't impose on him the attitudes
97
and the gestures of an epoch which had nothing in common with
simple living and true humanity—of the ballets of Louis XIV.
Let his dances express the soul of the child, at firSt in the beauty
and the lack of self-consciousness that belong to babyhood, then in
accord with youthfulness, then with adolescence. Don't teach young
girls to imitate either nymphs or houris or courtesans, but make them
dance like the veStals^of ancient times, who consecrated themselves two
thousand years ago.
Conserve to the adolescents their Strength and their full-lived
youth. Do not dress them in fantastic costumes, which make them look
like clowns or languishing lovers. Rather let their dance be the reflec¬
tion of the eternal ideal of glorious youth—youth's dreams and aspira¬
tions made living. Let their dance be born of joyousness and strength
and courage. Let it breathe the holy spirit of sacrifice of the young
soldier!
And when they become embodiments of the modern vestals, they
will be transformed: women in love with love and with the joy of
motherhood. At this moment their dance, completed and distinctive,
will be the mo£t beautiful of all.
Yes, let us admire the natural dance of the young women and the
young men, their transformation, under their pulsating rhythm—in
their dance that is perfect and complete, containing all life and bring¬
ing the dancers close to the gods. The crowd will follow their Steps,
will watch their attitudes, becoming one with them in a perfect har¬
mony, combining, on their side, the moSt noble expression of human
life and the clear call of divinity.
When that day dawns, that day of final happiness, we shall know
the fulfillment of the sublime rhythms of Beethoven's Symphonies.
98
DEPTH
he true dance is an expression of serenity; it is controlled by
the profound rhythm of inner emotion. Emotion does not
reach the moment of frenzy out of a spurt of a&ion; it broods
firSt, it sleeps like the life in the seed, and it unfolds with a gentle
slowness. The Greeks understood the continuing beauty of a move¬
ment that mounted, that spread, that ended with a promise of re-birth.
The Dance—it is the rhythm of all that dies in order to live again;
it is the eternal rising of the sun.
It is not for us to arrive at knowledge; we know, as we love, by
inStind, faith, emotion.
Emotion works like a motor. It muSt be warmed up to run well,
and the heat does not develop immediately; it is progressive. The
dance follows the same law of development, of progression. The true
dancer, like every true artiSt, Stands before Beauty in a State of com¬
plete suspense; he opens the way to his soul and his "genius," and he
lets himself be swayed by them as the trees abandon themselves to the
winds. He Starts with one slow movement and mounts from that
gradually, following the rising curve of his inspiration, up to those
geStures that exteriorize his fullness of feeling, spreading ever wider
the impulse that has swayed him, fixing it in another expression.
The movements should follow the rhythm of the waves: the
rhythm that rises, penetrates, holding in itself the impulse and the
after-movement; call and response, bound endlessly in one cadence.
99
Our modern dances know nothing of this firSt law of harmony.
Their movements are choppy, end-Stopped, abrupt. They lack the
continuing beauty of the curve. They are satisfied with being the points
of angles which spur on the nerves. The music of today, too, only
makes the nerves dance. Deep emotion, spiritual gravity, are entirely
lacking. We dance with the jerky gestures of puppets. We do not
know how to get down to the depths, to lose ourselves in an inner self,
how to develop our visions into the harmonies that attend our dreams.
We are always in paroxysms. We walk angularly. We Strain our¬
selves always to hold a balance between points. We are ignorant of the
repose of a descent, and the comfort of breathing, of mounting again,
skimming, returning, like a bird, to rest. The bird never struggles.
The dancer ought to be light as a flame. Even violence is the greater
when it is restrained: one geSture that has grown slowly out of that
reserve is worth many thousands that Struggle and cut each other off.
ioo
V.
P
\>
1
- y ^
/ ' i :\
Vvt 1 ?
/;
h
1/
/
v.s
i"va
:/>
\L,
\Y
•? ! \
;;!
* '
VI
1 X
(r) L'Ocuvre, Paris
DRAWING BY AUGUSTE RODIN
Reproduced from La Revue de L'Ocuvre
THE GREAT SOURCE
There was a time when I filled many notebooks with notes and
observations, when I burned with apoStolic fire for my art, and
gave myself up to deep convictions and naive daring. At that
time I wanted to make over human life, down to its least details of
costume, of morals, of way of living. But that was ten years ago. I have
had, since, the leisure to discover the vanity of those noble ambitions,
and I am satisfied now with the joys of my work, preoccupied by my
art itself.
One explains the dance better by dancing than by publishing com¬
mentaries and treatises. An art should be able to do without all that,
moreover; its truth will blaze forth spontaneously if it is really
beautiful.
And so, I do not wish to spin theories or put down a set of prin¬
ciples. But I may perhaps say, without being accused of preaching,
what has always been my underlying thought about the dance.
For me the dance is not only the art that gives expression to the
human soul through movement, but also the foundation of a complete
conception of life, more free, more harmonious, more natural. It is not,
as is too generally believed, a composition of Steps, arbitrary and grow¬
ing out of mechanical combinations—which even if they serve well as
technical exercises cannot pretend that they constitute an art. This is
the means, not the end.
I have studied thoroughly the represented figures of all ages and
101
of all the great master-artists, and I have never yet seen one shown
walking on the points of the toes or raising the leg to the height of the
head. These ugly and false positions do not at all express that state of
Dionysiac abandon which the dancer mu£t know. True movements,
moreover, are not invented; they are discovered—juSt as in music one
does not invent harmonies but only discovers them.
The great and the only principle on which I feel myself justified
in leaning, is a constant, absolute and universal unity between form
and movement; a rhythmic unity which runs through all the mani¬
festations of Nature. The waters, the winds, the plants, living crea¬
tures, the particles of matter itself obey this controlling rhythm of
which the characteristic line is the wave. In nothing does Nature sug¬
gest jumps and breaks; there is between all the conditions of life a
continuity or flow which the dancer muSt resped: in his art, or else
become a mannequin—outside Nature and without true beauty.
To seek in Nature the mo£t beautiful forms and to discover the
movement which expresses the soul of those forms, that is the task of
the dancer. Like the sculptor, with whom he has so much in common,
the dancer should draw his inspiration from Nature alone. Rodin
wrote: "In sculpture it is not necessary to copy the works of antiquity.
One muft rather observe the works of Nature firSt, and then see in the
works of the ancient sculptors only the way in which Nature has been
interpreted."
Rodin is right; and in my art I have not at all copied, as is believed,
figures from Greek vases, friezes or paintings. I have learned from
them how to study Nature, and when certain of my movements recall
gestures seen on the works of art, it is only because they likewise are
taken from the great natural source.
I am inspired by the movement of the trees, the waves, the snows,
by the connection between passion and the Storm, between the breeze
and gentleness, and so on. And I always put into my movements a little
102
of that divine continuity which gives to all of Nature its beauty and
life.
That is not saying that it is enough juSt to wave the arms and legs,
in order to have a natural dance. In art the simplest works are those
which have coSt the moSt in the effort for synthesis, of observation and
of creation; and all the greatest masters know what is the co£t of true
accord with the great and unrivalled model that is Nature.
Since I was a child I have spent twenty years of incessant labor in
the service of my art, a large part of that time being devoted to techni¬
cal training—which I am sometimes accused of lacking. That is be¬
cause, I repeat, technique is not an end but only a means.
The dance, in my opinion, has for its purpose the expression of
the moft noble and the moft profound feelings of the human soul:
those which rise from the gods in us, Apollo, Pan, Bacchus, Aphrodite.
The dance mu£t implant in our lives a harmony that is glowing and
pulsing. To see in the dance only a frivolous or pleasant diversion is
to degrade it.
There are continual reactions of the body and the spirit which the
ancients did not negled:, but which we too often have misunderstood.
Plato danced, as did the magistrates and the officers in the ancient
republics; this custom gave to their thoughts a grace and a balance
which have immortalized them. That is only natural: the attitude we
assume affects our soul; a simple turning backward of the head, made
with passion, sends a Bacchic frenzy running through us, of joy 01^
heroism or desire. All gestures thus give rise to an inner response, and
similarly they have the power to express directly every possible State
of the feelings or thought.
Every movement that can be danced on the seashore, without
being in harmony with the rhythm of the waves, every movement that
can be danced in the foreSt without being in harmony with the sway¬
ing of the branches, every movement that one can dance nude, in the
103
sunshine, in the open country, without being in harmony with the life
and the solitude of the landscape—every such movement is false, in
that it is out of tune in the midft of Nature's harmonious lines. That
is why the dancer should above all else choose movements that express
the Strength, health, nobility, ease and serenity of living things.
104
/X
i ^
X),:.
"\\
I V
Wl
\' ■;
/ !')/
' i k'/
| |
• I /
, i H //
t i ,f-i
l//
t ■
. '</ '
iV 1
i X
X
\
IajA
SI
(QL'Ocuvrc, Paris
DRAWING BY AUGUSTE RODIN
Reproduced from La Revue de L'Oeuvre
RICHARD WAGNER
It seems to me that the compositions of Wagner cannot be consid¬
ered as the work of one artift or as the expression of one country.
They are rather the entire revolt and all the feeling of an epoch,
expressed through the medium of Richard Wagner.
That is why it seems so petty to have wished to abandon this music
during the war; for the work of Wagner flows through every drop of
blood in every artist of the world, and his mighty rhythm has become
part of every heart-beat of each one of us. For Wagner is more than an
artist: he is the glorious far-seeing prophet, liberator of the art of the
future. It is he who will give birth to the new union of the arts, the re¬
birth of the theatre, tragedy and the dance as one.
He was the fir ft to conceive of the dance as born of music. This is
my conception of the dance also, and for it I Strive in the work of my
school. For in the depths of every musical theme of Wagner, dances
will be found: monumental sculpture, movement which only demands
release and life.
It is of this music that critics are wont to say, "It is not written for
the dance"; but it is from this music that the dance, so long lifeless in
the embryo, is being born again. In comparison with this new-born
dance, the posed attitudes of the dancers of the Opera appear to us
like the figures in the wax-works museums.
The theatre will live again in all its glory only when the dance
once more takes its true place, as an integral and inevitable part of
105
tragedy. It is because I believe this that I have dared to dance to the
music of Wagner—yes, that I have raised my hands, vibrant with
ecstasy, to the harmonious chords of Parsifal.
Do you understand the gigantic task that is imposed on us, before
we can wrench from this music the torrential movement that muft
come—the glorious child-birth of the Dance?
1921.
106
A LETTER TO THE PUPILS
Please don't let any one persuade you to try to dance to Debussy.
It is only the music of the Senses and has no message to the
Spirit. And then the gesture of Debussy is all inward—and has
no outward or upward. I want you to dance only that music which
goes from the soul in mounting circles. Why not Study the Suite in Re
of Bach? Do you remember my dancing it? Please also continue
always your Studies of the Beethoven Seventh and the Schubert Sev¬
enth, and why not dance with Copeland the seven Minuets of Bee¬
thoven that we Studied in Fourth Avenue? And the Symphony in G
of Mozart. And there is a whole world of Mozart that you might
Study.
Plunge your soul in divine unconscious Giving deep within it,
until it gives to your soul its Secret. That is how I have always tried to
express music. My soul should become one with it, and the dance born
from that embrace. Music has been in all my life the great Inspiration
and will be perhaps some day the Consolation, for I have gone through
such terrible years. No one has understood since I loSt Deirdre and
Patrick how pain has caused me at times to live almoSt in a delirium.
In fact my poor brain has more often been crazed than any one can
know. Sometimes quite recently I feel as if I were awakening from
a long fever. When you think of these years, think of the Funeral
March of Schubert, the Ave Maria, the Redemption, and forget the
times when my poor diStradted soul trying to escape from suffering
may well have given you all the appearance of madness.
107
I have reached such high peaks flooded with light, but my soul
had no Strength to live there—and no one has realized the horrible
torture from which I have tried to escape. Some day if you understand
sorrow you will underhand too all I have lived through, and then you
will only think of the light towards which I have pointed and you will
know the real Isadora is there. In the meantime work and create
Beauty and Harmony. The poor world has need of it, and with your
six spirits going with one will, you can create Beauty and Inspiration
for a new Life.
I am so happy that you are working and that you love it. Nourish
your spirits from Plato and Dante, from Goethe and Schiller, Shakes¬
peare and Nietzsche (don't forget that the Birth of Tragedy and the
Spirit of Music are my Bible), and with these to guide you, and the
greatest music, you may go far.
Dear children, I take you all in my arms. And here is a kiss for
Anna, and here one for Therese, and one for Irma, and here is a kiss
for Gretel and one for little Erika—and a kiss for you, deareSt Lisel.
Let us pray that this separation will only bring us nearer and closer in
a higher communion—and soon we will all dance together a Reigen.
All my love.
108
MOSCOW IMPRESSIONS
(These letters about her attempt to found a school of the dance under
the CommuniSt State in Russia are grouped to indicate I. D.'s enthusiasm,
her planning, her methods of teaching, and the final discouragements she
met. The firSt is an open letter to the English press; it exifts in her own
handwriting—so that no one need be tempted to think that it was put out
by the Soviet publicity offices. The second is unaddressed; the third a letter
in French beginning Cher Camarade; the fourth to AuguStin Duncan; the
others apparendy to Soviet officials.)
This coming to Russia is a tremendous experience, and I would
not have missed it for anything. Here at last is a frame mighty
enough to work in, and for the firSt time in my life I feel that I
can Wretch out my arms and breathe. Here one feels that perhaps for
the second time in the world's history a great force has arisen to give
capitalism, which stands for monStrous greed and villainy, one great
blow. The dragon, man-eating, labor exploiting, has here received his
death Stroke. What matters it that in his final throes he has caSt destruc¬
tion about him? The valiant hero who smote him Still lives, though
enfeebled from the deadly Struggle, and from him will be born a new
world.
A new world, a newly created mankind; the destruction of the
old world of class injustice, and the creation of the new world of equal
opportunity. That is the work one is viewing here, and for this work
it fills my soul with joy and pride that I am called upon to assiSt in its
firSt Steps, in the teaching of the children. A great school of new beings
who will be worthy the ideals of the new world. A community of boys
109
and girls to live in a great school, to form the future men and maidens
who will be the upholders of Communism—future idealists.
Relegated to the pa£t is the old ideal of youth, with its limited
prize of monogamiftic love and its narrow ideal of family life as the
goal of existence. The future love will be not "my family" but "all
humanity," not "my children" but "all children," not "my country"
but "all peoples."
I salute the birth of the future community of International love.
Moscow is certainly one of the mo£t interesting if not the mo£t
interesting center of the world today. Yes, despite the hardship and
suffering, here is a source. I would rather be here today than in any
so-called prosperous city, and the suffering I observe seems to me at
leaSl a more beautiful expression than the new-rich and the munition-
proprietors, smug and overfed, riding about in automobiles in search
of pleasure, which they seldom find. Let them come here to feed the
Volga diftrid:—they might find happiness by reflection.
I predid: that Moscow will soon be the mo£t sought out city, a sort
of spiritual Klondike. Tired artifts, idealists, searchers after truth, will
all be flocking here to this great well-spring of spiritual enlightenment
for mankind. For my part, that art with which I was born and which
I know all the children of the world are in need of, I hope to give
here, to these children who are suffering from the want of all material
things. I will give them this great Spiritual treasure of my art, not
served up in copies and caricatures that have been made of it, paralysed
by theories and killed by systems—Dalcroze and others—but this art
spontaneous and true, as God gave it to me, as Walt Whitman said,
"for reasons."
The magnificent idea of giving music for the people—are we
going to see that dropped? I have seen the people here listening to
no
music only in the churches, and there the music is very beautiful, but
mixed with such a large portion of shallow superstition that it is more
harmful than good. Why not have a great theatre where the people
can enter freely, as in a church, without tickets, at leaSt on Sunday
afternoons and evenings; where one could give successively the sym¬
phonies of Beethoven, the music of Wagner, Bach, Schubert, etc., and
where all the children can dance ?
I am hard at work here at present, all day, selecting talented
children from the hundreds and hundreds that apply. It looks as if all
the children in Russia wanted to come to this school, and it is very
touching to see the eagerness of these children, and their desire to
learn something beautiful. I think that at laSt we have the promised
school. I am giving a performance on the 7th of November, at the
Grand Opera House, for an audience of Communists: Tchaikowsky's
Sixth Symphony and Marche Slav. Conditions have changed here; all
places in the theatres are now paid for. Mine will be the only perfor¬
mance that is given this winter free for the people. I have been here
three months; we have already a school with two studios, a rose-
colored one and a blue one—the curtains of which I brought from
Paris. We have beds for a hundred children, and in the neighborhood
a great salle where I will teach five hundred children each day. . . .
The Streets of Moscow are the picture of the song of the "Open
Road" of Walt Whitman. He was the firSt Bolshevik. I am never
tired of the crowds in the streets. A painter would find great oppor¬
tunities here—life and color on a big scale. Steichen would be wild
with joy. You should tell him to come here. . . .
The theatre life in Moscow is moSt progressive and intense. There
are two or three Art theatres, with such futuristic ideas that Stanis¬
lavsky seems quite old-fashioned, but he is Still the greatest artiSt of
all. Thursday night we saw Oscar Wilde's Salome in the Kamerny
hi
Theatre, where they believe that every actor should be dancer, singer,
pantomimic. They have a symphony orchestra, and dance, sing, de¬
claim, all in one. The effedt is somewhat Chinese, only without the
Chinese imagination. Fine color, form, wonderful light effects, some
beautiful bodies; the only criticism I could make is a lack of subtlety
and imagination, and everything coming more from the outside than
within. Also a contradiction between symbolic gesture and at other mo¬
ments a complete realism—as when Salome wipes the floor with the
head of John the BaptiSt. I decided that they did not quite know
whether they were symbolists or realists, but I admired the tremendous
amount of work and care they evidently put into it. It is a wonderful
architectural theatre, built on the same scale as Bayreuth. . . . But I
do not approve of the custom here of non-applauding public; it makes
too great a division between the actors and public. I think, on the con¬
trary, one should work toward a theatre in which the public would
take part more and more in the performance, even in eventual re¬
sponses, singing of choruses, etc. The public here seems quite dead,
and in the different concerts I have gone to, I look in vain for the great
enthusiastic public of before the war. Enthusiasm of the public is neces¬
sary to give life to the artist. . . .
We have already six American pupils, three English and two
French, so you see the school is international.
This summer the children of my school who have lived and
Studied here for three years, under the moSt difficult circumstances,
enduring cheerfully a life of hardship, held a meeting together and
decided that in spite of the fa<5t that they had no material wealth of any
sort, they felt the need to give their art to others. They decided that
they would call a meeting of a thousand children of workers and teach
them the Art which had given themselves a new life of beauty.
A meeting took place in the Great Sports Ground of the Red
112
0 L'Ocui rc, Paris
DRAWING BY AUGUSTE RODIN
Reproduced from La Revue de L'Ocuvre
Stadium, at whose head is the Comrade Podvoisky. With the help of
Comrade Podvoisky classes were organized and every afternoon of the
last three months of this summer our brave little class of forty have
taught hundreds of children to dance.
Children who came to the firft meeting pale and weak, who could
at firft hardly walk or skip or raise their arms to the sky, have become
transformed under the influence of the air, the sunshine, the music and
the joy of dancing taught them by our young pioneers. Their coftume
is a simple tunic without sleeves and reaching only to the knees.
Movement is a language as powerful and expressive as words. I
could not explain my lessons in words to these children, but I spoke
to them by the language of movements, and they, by their responsive
movement, showed me that they understood.
"Children, place your hands here, as I do, on your breast, feel the
life within you; this movement means MAN—and the children an¬
swered in chorus, 'Chelove1(\ and now, raise the arms slowly upwards
and outwards towards the heavens, this movement means UNI¬
VERSE;—the children chorused, 'VselennayaLet your hands fall
slowly downwards to the EARTH—and the chorus responded 'Zem-
lia.' Now, ftretch your hands towards me in love, this means COM¬
RADE—chorus, 'Tovarisch.' "
I watched these hundreds of children dancing. Sometimes they
resembled a field of red poppies swaying in the wind, at other times,
seeing them rushing forward together, one perceived that they were a
horde of young warriors and Amazons, ready to do battle for the ideals
of the New World.
But the beft of all was the enthusiasm and happiness of the chil¬
dren themselves—how they loved to throw themselves heart and soul
into beautiful movement; and when song was added to the dancing, it
seemed that their entire being was lifted in exaltation of the complete
and joyous rhythms of youth.
"3
I would respectfully call to your notice that my school is the only
artistic effort formed during Communism that has constantly, through
me and through my pupils, awakened in all the towns of Russia the
heartfelt, genuine enthusiasm of the Workers, of their wives and of
their children. I danced alone, and afterwards with my pupils, for the
miners in Baku in their own theatres and for their children; for Com¬
munists throughout all the theatres of Russia, and for the children of
Lenn Staat outside of Kief, not once but many times, gratuitously; and
during that time I was paying my own expenses from my private bank
account, drawn from the sale of my property in France.
I was forced to leave this School from lack of any support whatever
from the Soviet Government, while I saw other schools that had raised
no enthusiasm among the workers and whose tendencies were frankly
unhealthy and decadent, supported by the same Government that had
refused me aid for my work.
When the children of my School danced before the Workers, they
arose and shouted with joy, and why? Because they themselves were
the children of workers and because I had taught them to express, in
simple and natural movements, the heroic struggles and ideals which
were nascent in their blood. Therefore every worker could understand
their Art, and the proof is that my school, now dancing in China, is at
once understood and acclaimed by the Chinese workers. They have
expressed a wish to have this dancing taught to their children.
The letter about this is the firSt word I have heard from the school
for six months, and the first knowledge I have had that they are in
China. I wish to proteSt that this School which I formed at the sacrifice
of my fortune and person, and for which I had become naturally boy¬
cotted by all my former friends and audiences in Europe, should be
allowed to pass from my control and into the hands of private specula¬
tion. Those sacrifices that I made, I made gladly for the cause of the
people; but when it comes to the exploitation of my work by private
IJ4
organization without so much as asking my advice—I must protect!
This is an exploitation of my art which I would not have expected, con¬
sidering the primary object of my visit to Russia was to escape from
juft such exploitation of Art, which Soviet Russia condemned Europe
for in 1921.
The Camerade Lunacharsky wrote of my school:
"Isadora Duncan wanted to give a natural and beautiful education
to every child. The Bourgeois society, however, did not understand
this and put her pupils on the ftage to exploit them for money. We will
know how to a<5t differently."
I ask when?
1921-1927.
"5
REFLECTIONS, AFTER MOSCOW
You ask me to give my impressions of Soviet Russia. You will
readily understand that not all the people living in Russia see
alike the events there taking place. The avowed Communists,
those who go to the extreme of wanting to see equal opportunity and
happiness for all, actually do see the door open to the workers of the
future; whereas the bourgeois, having in the paSt lived in a selfish
security and comfort, can see and only want to see in these same
changes what they call "the end of Russia."
Always great artifts have had this dream: to create their art for all
humanity, for the people. Unfortunately, for those of our time this
dream cannot become reality, because in every country where it might
be realized, they have before them always the same public—that which
is able to pay the demanded price for good seats. All the students and
the poorer people—those whose spirit urges them toward the beauti¬
ful—are deprived almost entirely of the artist's work; or else, if occa¬
sionally they do enjoy it, they are obliged to sit in "nigger heaven,"
where usually the acoustics are very bad and the view of the stage
distorted.
I have always worried over this condition. That is why, hoping to
see my dream finally become reality, I turned toward Russia, when the
Soviet Government announced that it was going to open the theatre
to all the people.
In 1905 in Berlin I had already tried the experiment of giving
116
Courtesy Musee Rodin, Paris
DRAWING BY AUGUSTE RODIN
recitals for the workingmen. These occasions had been quite successful.
I had found among those simple people a touching appreciation, which
proved that I had brought into their lives a fresh experience of light
and beauty.
It was then that I founded in Berlin a school, free to the children
of working people. My plan was to develop a small group who would
later become the teachers of the boys and girls of the working class.
No government recognized the value of my school, or the beauty of
my idea. Even my pupils after a while were so transformed by the
training I gave them that they came to consider themselves talented
artifts, so that they forgot their mission and left the group, to follow
impresarios who were ready to exploit them and to take them on
recital tours through all the world.
After fifteen years of work and care, I found that I muft begin my
task all over again. One young girl only was faithful to me, preferring
to be true to the truft I had put in her. She followed me to Moscow,
where she is now, directing my workers' school.
People have never understood my true aim. They have thought
that I wished to form a troupe of dancers to perform in the theatre.
Certainly nothing was farther from my thoughts. Far from wishing to
develop theatre dancers, I have only hoped to train in my school num¬
bers of children who through dance, music, poetry and song would
express the feelings of the people, with grace and beauty.
Alas! It took only too short a time to learn that I could not carry
out this work unaided; I muft find a government enlightened enough
to support it. I went successively to America, to France, to England,
to Greece—and no one of these countries would give me aid. It was
only natural that I should turn to the Soviets, when they announced
the plan of making the theatre free to all. Was not that my only way,
my unique opportunity to bring my school into existence?
In 1921 I believed that my dream had actually taken form, for on
117
arriving in Moscow I found the theatres really open to all, and filled
with workers at every performance. On my part, I gave several recitals
before thousands of poor people. I had the joy of absolute expression.
For the firft time in my artistic career, it seemed to me that the horizon
was widened.
This hope did not la£t long, since in 1922, with the change in
political control, all the artifts' dreams of giving art without charge to
the workers faded away. The theatre became again a commercial enter¬
prise. While the concerts had been free, many artifts complained that
the workers did not understand the works of Beethoven, and that not
understanding them they were incapable of listening to them quietly.
This was caused entirely by the too abrupt change from a life of hard
labor to the highest summits of art. To develop the taSte of the working
people, it is necessary to begin at the beginning—that is, with the
children.
The children of my school, four or five years old, in learning to
move in harmony with the rhythms of Schubert or of Mozart, or in the
minuets of Beethoven, acquire gradually and without effort a tafte for
this music; and with natural in£tin£t they learn to discern the differ¬
ence between superior music and poor music.
They are taken often, moreover, to visit the museums, and helped
by explanations they underhand very quickly the nobility of Egyptian,
Greek or modern sculpture. Invariably, upon their return to the school,
they try to re-create the different movements of the sculptured figures,
and often they find something very beautiful in this way. Thanks to
this daily training, the humble children of the workers become them¬
selves works of art which their parents can understand, and through
whom they may come to know and to love what is beauty and grace—
in a word, the experience of art.
Education of the young is the only way to bring tafte and under¬
standing to the working class. It is one of the great truths that what it
118
SKETCHES OF ISADORA DUNCAN DANCING, BY MAURICE DENIS
is impossible to teach the child through words will be learned easily
through the language of movement. The pedagogues have rarely un¬
derstood the necessity of training the body of the child. German and
Swedish gymnastics have in view only the development of the muscles;
they neglect the proper correlation of spirit and body. I have taken as
a foundation for my teaching that a child should never be given a
movement that would not at the same time be an expression of the soul.
A child ought to dance as naturally as a plant grows. An inner force
ought to come to the surface and find expression. But in modern gym¬
nastics it is the other way round: a force from the outside directs the
movements under control of the will. Every animal in nature moves in
harmony with the universal rhythm. It is only the child of man that
finds itself controlled by unnatural movements.
Since the founding of my school in 1905, there have been formed,
all over the world, thousands of schools which have copied—or
thought they copied—my system. They all have made one fundamen¬
tal mistake: I have no system. My only purpose and my only effort have
been to lead the child each day to grow and to move according to an
inner impulse; that is, in accordance with Nature. But all these schools
have made the same mistake of dissecting the child's movements, and
laying them out in geometric patterns, instead of letting all the natural
grace and loveliness come to expression.
No art antique or modern has been able to reveal all that man can
be when inspired by his highest aspirations, in terms of movement.
William Blake alone has given an indication of it. Nietzsche had a
vision of it, for he called on all humanity in the strophes of Beethoven's
Fifth Symphony. Nevertheless, this vision is not impossible to realize,
for I have seen the little children of my school, under the spell of
music, drop all materiality and move with a beauty so pure that they
attained the highest expression of human living. But to attain that
height, the dance cannot be thought of as an amusement or as an ex-
119
hibition on a Stage before an audience avid of sensations. Until that day
when the dance becomes the expression and the perfection of the
crowd, it will be only a sort of gymnastic, a revelation of mediocrity.
At Moscow I worked during a whole summer with hundreds of
workers' children. Their lessons were given in the open air. At the end
of the season the results of the course were truly marvelous. From all
parts of the city people came to see the children dance and sing. Alas,
when winter came I was obliged to abandon the work, having no ftudio
large enough, and above all having no way of providing adequate heat.
It was sad to see the disappointment and despair of the children who
had commenced to live a new and finer life in their dancing. Still, that
which I did for Russia I am ready to begin doing again, for any other
country whose government will give me the necessary aid.
The day is coming when a grand international school of children,
where there will be a fairer conception of life, will open the doors of
the future to a new humanity. This school that I have wanted to found
for twenty years, I hope for with a confidence ever increasing.
I927-
120
DANCING IN RELATION TO RELIGION AND LOVE
Since the earlieSt days of man's civilization, since the firSt temple
that he conStrudted, there has always been a God, a central figure
in the temple. The pose of this God is also an expression of his
being and might be called a dance.
In 1899 I firSt saw Eleonora Duse in London, playing in a third-
rate play called The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. The play goes through
two acts of utter vulgarity and banality and I was shocked to see the
divine Duse lending herself to such commonplace characterization. At
the end of the third a£t, where Mrs. Tanqueray is driven to the wall by
her enemies and, overcome with ennui, resolves to commit suicide,
there was a moment when the Duse stood quite still, alone on the stage.
Suddenly, without any special outward movement, she seemed to
grow and grow until her head appeared to touch the roof of the
theatre, like the moment when Demeter appeared before the house of
Metaneira and disclosed herself as a Goddess. In that supreme gesture
Duse was no longer the second Mrs. Tanqueray, but some wonderful
goddess of all ages, and her growth before the eyes of the audience
into that divine presence was one of the greatest artistic achievements I
have ever witnessed. I remember that I went home dazed with the
wonder of it. I said to myself, when I can come on the Stage and Stand
as Still as Eleonora Duse did tonight, and, at the same time, create that
tremendous force of dynamic movement, then I shall be the greatest
dancer in the world. At that point in The Second Mrs. Tanqueray,
121
Duse's spirit rose to such exalted heights that she became a part of
the movement of the spheres. This is the highest expression of religion
in the dance: that a human being should no longer seem human but
become transmuted into the movements of the Stars.
In ioo a. d. there Stood on one of the hills of Rome a school which
was known as the Seminary of Dancing Priests of Rome. The boys
were chosen from the moSt aristocratic families. More than that, they
had to possess lineage which dated back many hundreds of years and
upon which no stain had ever fallen. Although they were taught all
the arts and philosophies, dancing was their chief expression. They
would dance in the theatre at the four different seasons of the year,
Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. On these occasions they de¬
scended from their hill to Rome, where they took part in ceremonies
and danced before the people for die purification of those who beheld
them. These boys danced with such happy ardor and such purity that
their dance influenced and elevated their audience, acting like medi¬
cine upon sick souls. It is of such expression that I have dreamed.
It must always be kept in mind that there are two classes of danc¬
ing: the sacred and the profane. By profane, I do not mean sinful, but
simply that dancing which expresses the physical being and the joy of
the senses, whereas sacred dancing expresses the aspirations of the spirit
to transform itself into a higher sphere than the terrestrial. Very little is
known in our day of the magic which resides in movement, and the
potency of certain gestures. The number of physical movements that
moSt people make through life is extremely limited. Having Stifled and
disciplined their movements in the firSt States of childhood, they resort
to a set of habits seldom varied. So, too, their mental activities respond
to set formulas, often repeated. With this repetition of physical and
mental movements, they limit their expression until they become like
a&ors who each night play the same role. With these few stereotyped
122
SKETCHES OF ISADORA DUNCAN DANCING, BY MAURICE DENIS
gestures, their whole lives are passed without once suspecting the world
of the dance which they are missing.
Nietzsche said, "Let that day be called loft on which I have not
danced." The entire Zarathustra is filled with phrases about man in his
dancing being.
I have always deplored the fact that I was forced to dance in a
theatre where people paid for their seats; a theatre with its Stupid box¬
like Stage handed down from the days of the Italian Guignol; and
where the spectators' attitude is that of people who sit Still and look but
do not participate. Of course, in moments of great enthusiasm when
the audience arises and applauds, they manifest a degree of dance par¬
ticipation. But I have dreamed of a more complete dance expression on
the part of the audience, at a theatre in the form of an amphitheatre,
where there would be no reason why, at certain times, the public
should not arise and, by different gestures of dance, participate in my
invocation. Something of this must have existed in the ancient cults of
Apollo and Dionysus. Something of this Still exiSts in the rituals of the
Catholic church and also in the Greek church, where the congregation
alternately rises, kneels and bows, in response to the invocations of the
priest. I had always hoped that the day would come when we could
have such a temple where the public, participating in different ways
with me in my dance, would arrive at a much fuller enjoyment than
they ever will experience by simply sitting as spectators.
Scriabine, the Russian composer, whose premature death saddened
the musical world, was one of the world's greatest poets and geniuses.
He not only was a great composer, but had the vision of complete
musical expression in form, color and movement. When I had the joy
of meeting him in Moscow in 1912 and telling him my ideas for a
school and temple, he told me that the ideal of his life was to build such
a temple in India, where at the same time, with full orchestral har¬
monies, the audience would be bathed in colors. His ideas were so in
123
accord with my visions that we confidently looked forward to going to
India together and participating in the creation of this temple. Alas,
the war and his early death cut this short. I do not know whether
Scriabine has ever written anything definite about his plans for uniting
color, light and movement in an apotheosis of beauty, but I am con¬
vinced that one day his genius will find its expression through some
medium.
In childhood we feel the religious sense of movement poignantly,
for the mind is not yet clouded with dogmas or creeds. Children give
themselves up entirely to the celebration and worship of the unknown
God, "Whatever gods may be." In fact a child can understand many
things through the movement of its body which would be impossible
for it to comprehend by the medium of the written or spoken word.
Many profound secrets of the outer and inner meanings of Nature and
natural forces can be given to the child through the dance. One of the
fir SI to understand this was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who in his book
Emile, or the Education of the Child, even went so far as to say that a
child should not be taught to read or write until its twelfth year. Up to
that time all of its knowledge should be gained through music and
dancing. It is curious that although this, one of the greatest discourses
upon the education of the child, was written over a hundred years ago,
the moSt modern schools have not awakened to it yet and still torment
the bodies of children, vainly Striving to appeal to their immature
intelligence through the medium of words which mean very little to
children.
I have often had an example of this in teaching a child the mean¬
ing of a poem. A simple poem which I thought any child would under¬
stand, the child would learn by heart, but when I would queStion it on
the meaning of the different verses, the response would be a jumble of
words of which it was incapable of comprehending the real signifi¬
cance. Then I would take the same poem and teach the child to dance
124
it in gesture and emotional translation of movement, and I would have
the pleasure of seeing the face of the child light up with understanding,
and would know that he had adlually learned through the movement
of this poem what he was quite incapable of understanding from the
words.
People have an entirely false conception of the importance of words
in comparison with other modes of expression, juSt as potent as words.
An entire audience of so called respe<5table people, who would leave
the theatre if anyone appeared to blaspheme or to use indecent words,
will sit through a performance in which someone makes indecent
movements which, if translated into words, would make the audience
rush from the theatre. A seemingly modest young girl would not think
of addressing a young man in lines or spoken phrases which were
indecent and yet the same girl will arise and dance these phrases with
him in such dances as the Charleston and Black Bottom, while a negro
orchestra is playing Shake that thing!
It is because of this that theatre censors have descended upon plays
in New York and threatened to put their caSts in jail for immoral
propaganda, while in the music hall next door the movements of the
dancers, if put into words, would be of such filth and immorality that
it would be closed at once by the police. This is true because people
have not learned that the expression of movement and of musical
sounds is quite as clear to those who understand it as words are. To
anyone who is as sensitive to movements as I am, nine-tenths of the
movements that are made in the ordinary drawing room would be
shocking, not because of their indecency but because of their indecent
Sterility. Therefore, I condemn the modern dances not so much for the
indecency of their expression as because they are essentially Sterile and
futile. Young people who practice them for any length of time gen¬
erally become as futile and frivolous as the movements they have been
practicing, juSt as their minds would become if they were fed con-
I25
tinually on a diet of penny novels and bad poems. I say it is of the
utmost importance to a nation to train its children to the understanding
and execution of movements of great heroic and spiritual beauty; to
raise their many bans on the realization of sex, which is a fine thing in
itself, and to put these same prohibitions on the frivolous caricatures
and symbols of sex which are found in such dances as the fox trot and
Black Bottom.
If, twenty years ago, when I firSt pleaded with America to adopt
my school and my theories of dancing in all the public schools, they
had acceded to my requeSt, this deplorable modern dancing, which has
its roots in the ceremonies of African primitives, could never have
become dominant. It is extraordinary that mothers who would be in¬
tensely shocked if their daughters should indulge in a real orgy (which,
after all, might not be so hurtful to them—since a real orgy might, like
a real Storm, clear the atmosphere for purer things)—these mothers
will look on with smiling complacency at their daughters indulging
in licentious contortions upon a dance floor, before their very eyes.
When I was fifteen years old and I realized that there was no
teacher in the world who could give me any help in my desire to be a
dancer, because at that time the only school that existed was the ballet,
I turned, as I had noticed all other artiSts except dancers do, to the
Study of nature. Is anything more marvellous or beautiful in nature
than the Study of the delicate love movements of plants ? My imagina¬
tion was firSt captured by Shelley's wonderful poem The Sensitive
Plant, and for my dances I Studied the movements of the opening of
flowers, and the flight of bees and the charming graces of pigeons and
other birds. All of these seemed to be expressions of nature and of the
love dance that runs through all life. I had read of the dance of the
elephants in the moonlight and the dinosauric lifting of their trunks.
The sudden reversal of the heads of the lions and tigers came to be
associated in my mind with the tossing of the heads of the Bacchante.
126
DRAWING BY JOSE CLARA
These are the nobleft love motions in Nature, juft as the wriggling
from the waift downwards of such dancing as the Charleston is the
moft ignoble. In the practicing of the dance in its relation to love, we
should practice those movements which are ennobling rather than
those which defile the divine image of the naked human being. Often
when people have questioned my morals, I have answered that I con¬
sider myself extremely moral because in all my relations I have only
made movements which seem beautiful to me.
In the old Greek myths there was always the transformation of
the god into some element to express his love-making. Zeus appeared
to Semele as the lightning; to Danae in the form of a golden mi£t; to
Europa in the form of a bull; to Leda as a white swan. These are really
only symbols of the beautiful form and movement of all love. This is
the real dance of love—that element which takes on all parts of nature
and becomes, in turn, a cloud, a miSt, a fire, a bull or a white swan. All
lovers who glory in the real beauty of love know these forms. And
what a mockery that it should have come about in our epoch that one
of the mo6t beautiful expressions of Bacchic and sensuous love that has
ever been written (I refer to the Bacchanal of Wagner's Tannhauser)
should be portrayed by three ballet dancers, in ftiff skirts, Standing on
the tips of their toes in pink ballet slippers! I saw this when I arrived
in Bayreuth in 1905.
People ask me, do you consider love-making an art and I would
answer that not only love but every part of life should be practiced as
an art. For we are no longer in the State of the primitive savage, but the
whole expression of our life muft be created through culture and the
transformation of intuition and inftindt into art.
1927.
I27
FRAGMENTS AND THOUGHTS
I speak to you this afternoon as an egotiSt and a person of one idea,
an idea to which I have devoted my entire life, which I have so
lived, so loved, so thought of, that I may be able to interpret its
interest and beauty to you.
I asked the Hon. C. D. [Chauncey Depew] laSt summer in New¬
port what was the object of this society and he replied "enjoyment."
Then I looked about me. I saw beautiful women, lovely girls, great
men, and I said to myself if the object of this society is enjoyment, it
muSt be the highest, moSt exquisite enjoyment possible, an enjoyment
that while being a delight for the time is also unconscious progression
—as, listening to beautiful music, while your body is happy in the
rhythm of sound your mind is progressing with the thought of the
masters. I believe I have found for society a new method of translating
this happy progression. As the musician uses his violin to tell of the
highest thought, the singer the voice, I would use that greatest of all
instruments, the human body, and its language would be movement.
The idea firSt came to me when a little girl, gazing at the repro¬
duction of Botticelli's "Spring Time" which hung over our book case.
It came to me what a wonderful movement there was in that picture,
and how each figure through that movement told the Story of its new
life. And then as Mother played Mendelssohn's Spring Song, as if by
the impulse of a gentle wind, the daisies in the grass would sway and
128
the figures in the picture would move, and the Three Graces, arms
twining together. . . .
(The earliest exiting fragment of I. D.'s writings, this is from a sheet of notes, un-
punifluated, for a ledure in New York, 1898 or 1899, before the fir£t trip to Europe.)
i i i i
... If the dance is not to come to life again as an art, then far
better that its name should reft in the duft of antiquity. ... I am not
at all interested in reforming anything. I am deeply interested in the
question: Is the dance a sifter art or no; and if so, how shall it be
brought to life as an art? And I put this queftion quite apart from
myself or of my dance, which may be nothing—or something—simply
as a queftion which muft be of intereft to moft people.
My dancing is to me an inftindtive thing born with me. I danced
when a little girl, because I had a passion for it, and since a very early
age I have danced before the public. You call me a barefoot dancer. To
me you might as well say a bare-headed or bare-handed dancer. I took
off my clothes to dance because I felt the rhythm and freedom of my
body better that way. In all ages when the dance was an art, the feet
were left free as well as the reft of the body; also, whenever the dance
has had an influence on the other arts—as in the beautiful bas-reliefs
of dancing figures of the Greeks, and the lovely dancing figures of the
Italians. Even when a painter or sculptor draws or models a dancing
figure today, he generally portrays it with light draperies and without
shoes.
If you would think of this a bit you would see that the conception
of a dancing figure as being in light drapery and without shoes is not
mine especially, but simply the ideal dancing figure as thought of by
all artifts of all times. Then you would cease to use the title ''barefoot
dancer," which I confess I deteft; and you would see that in endeavor¬
ing to found a school for the renewing of the dance as an art, it is quite
129
natural that the pupils should follow in their dress the hint given them
by the Great Masters in portraying the dancing figure—insomuch as
one takes as foundation principle that the dance is the body expressing
itself in rhythmic movement.
I have danced before the public continuously since I was a little
girl; in all these years, although certainly there has been much blame
and discussion, there has been on the whole a general feeling of joyous
acclaim and encouragement coming toward me from the public. It is
this sort of joyous encouragement that has upborne me on my way, for
I felt it was a sort of voice from the people that such a dance was
wanted, needed. There seemed to be a longing for the rhythm of move¬
ment among them; and always along the route I have received thou¬
sands of letters from young girls. All these letters read in the same
way: "All our lives we have felt a longing to dance, now we think you
have found the right way; won't you teach us?"
Now I could not think that I could teach another what had been a
gradual evolution of my own being and a work of all my life, but I felt
I muSt give some response to all these questionings. And so the idea
gradually came to me—ripening to a resolution which formed itself in
my mind about ten years ago—to endeavor to found a school, whose
obje6t would be the finding of the true dancing. Not in any way a
copy of my dance, but the Study of the dance as an Art. I explained this
purpose to my audiences in quite a simple way and they seemed to
think it a good idea. Audiences in cities all over America, Germany,
Austria, Hungary, France, wherever I told about it, replied, that is a
good idea. I spoke always after I danced, and all those voices replied,
we want that school. It was with the encouragement of these voices and
the money earned from each representation that I at length founded
the school in the year 1904. . . .
(From a handwritten draft of a letter to a Cologne newspaper editor, answering an
article about an exhibition of the work of the school girls, December, 1906.)
130
DRAWING BY JOSE CLARA
That exa<5t knowledge and feeling which the ancient Greeks
possessed for human form and proportion is nowhere better realized
than when one stands in the circular orchestra of the Theatre of
Dionysus on the south side of the Acropolis. Putting one's self in the
place of the a<5tor, and facing the thirty thousand seats which rise in
gradual sequence on the side of the hill, one feels how perfectly the
soul of one man might control the spirit of the spectators so placed. . . .
i i i i
This figure is the be£t example I could give of an emotion taking
entire possession of the body. The head is turned backward—but the
movement of the head is not calculated; it is the result of the over¬
whelming feeling of Dionysiac ecstasy which is portrayed in the entire
body. The chord from the lyre is Still reverberating through all the
members. If you had before you a dancer inspired with this feeling, it
would be contagious. You would forget the dancer himself. You would
only feel, as he feels, the chord of Dionysiac ecstasy.
(As an example of the notebook descriptions of works of art, mentioned in Essay
XVII, this paragraph indicates the care with which the dancer Studied out the figures
in vase drawings, sculptures and paintings in the chief museums of Europe. Often there
is hardly more than a reference to the subjed: of the art work, and a notation about its
relation to the dance; at other times full descriptions like this.)
i i i i
I have noticed that when I introduce any innovation into my art,
the music critics insult me in the same terms which they employ ten
years later to honor my imitators.
i i i i
During the la£t ten years of my work I have Steadily intended to
found a school which should, if possible, restore dancing to its former
J31
eminence, to the eminence of an art. Many things have led me to
believe that the art of dancing is in process of awakening. The con¬
templation of rhythmical movement is, and has ever been, a source of
high pleasure to humanity. (It has been in every age a mo£t important
feature of religious ceremonies.) And the younger generation of artists
and students are, at the present time, showing themselves eagerly de¬
sirous of some more perfe<5t realization of the body in motion. The
recognition accorded by the public to my efforts shows that I am not
mistaken. Being convinced, therefore, that all that was needed was
some one with a strong purpose who should come forward and induce
others to assist and co-operate in the inauguration of a work which
may lead to great developments in the future, I opened my new School
of Dancing in December, 1904.
To rediscover the beautiful, rhythmical motions of the human
body, to call back to life again that ideal movement which should be in
harmony with the highest physical type, and to awaken once more
an art which has slept for two thousand years—these are the serious
aims of the school.
(Foreword for Griinewald School prospectus, "The Dance of the Future." 1906.)
i i i i
(The following three items are from the press files concerning the
American tours of 1911 and 1915. They should be read, perhaps, as an after¬
piece to I See America Dancing. The first paragraph is written in Isadora
Duncan's hand at the end of a discarded bit of press agent's "copy," as a
substitute for the polite, optimistic, and complimentary phrases of a well-
meaning publicity writer. The second item is from an interview given in
London in 1921, copyrighted under that date by the Public Ledger Company,
and published in several American papers. Although in general I have dis¬
carded interviews as unreliable, this accords so closely with notes and letters
of the time, that I have no doubt that it was either dictated by Miss Duncan,
or adually written out in answer to a requeit for an interview. The third
item is from Miss Duncan's curtain speech at Carnegie Hall, as reported in
The New Yor\ Evening World of April 1, 1911. To these is added a fourth
item, from a London press interview of 1921.)
*32
I call my dance American rather than classic. By American I mean
belonging to this country essentially. Ju£t as the poetry of Walt Whit¬
man springs from the womb of America, and the sculpture of George
Grey Barnard, so my dance, having its origin in the very life sources of
this country, is the dance which belongs to America. It will, I believe,
be the foundation of a great school of dancing, joined with a new school
of music, which will make this land joyous in the future. The school
of the Ballet, having its birth in the epoch of Louis XIII, expresses in
its movements and dress all the artificial culture of that time. It can
never mean anything to the American people but a curious and won¬
derful gymnastic. The meaning of this dance in all its essentials is
hidden from us. There will never be a school of the dance in America
founded on the Ballet.
i i i i
America, when will you give me some response for what I might
be to you? In 1898 you can read in the New York newspapers of my
firSt druggies to give you my art. You will see some pictures of me
then, a little girl seeking the firSt gesture and rhythm that would
liberate the dance and teach the children and the youth to find the
expression of their own free souls in movement. At that time your
answer was to Starve me almost to death and to cause me to fly from
the country, coming to Europe on a cattle ship.
Only afterward, when all the great artists and publics of Europe
had approved my work, you allowed my return in 1909 and gave me
what is called in America a "great success," a success of a caprice of the
moment, without heart or will power to understand what I had
brought you and which led to a thousand or two copies and caricatures
of my idea, spreading over the entire continent like a sickness.
Then after years of work I brought you my school in 1915 as a
refuge from the war. You allowed these little pupils whom I had
*33
educated by the sacrifice of my entire fortune to be treated as outcaSts,
to suffer for lack of funds to keep them and finally to be turned out of
the Century Theatre by the sheriff.
Finally, when forced to borrow the boat fare to return to France
and friends, I left you my six eldest pupils, all the treasure of my six¬
teen years' effort and Struggle; girls I had taught since they were six
and eight years old, hoping to bring them up as true daughters of Walt
Whitman, young goddesses of great, true movements, to teach hun¬
dreds of little children in the future.
You gave them also what you called a "great success"; that is, you
allowed them to be exploited by managers from New York to San
Francisco in what is called a theatrical tournee—one-night Stands, and
every day on the railway, until they were sent back to me this year,
nervous and physical wrecks, victims of this cruel egotism of your
managers and your sensation-loving public; those girls who might
have been a source of light and beauty to all the children of America.
Do you wonder I am tired and discouraged ? I know you will put
up a monument to me fifty years after my death, but what good will
that be? I will then be far away from the agony and Struggle and
unable to give you a great school and a great idea that you cannot
understand or appreciate.
Still I send you my love and my hope.
In London when I danced they said my dances were taken from
the Greek. It is not true. They are American. I am an American, born
in California. My ancestors have lived in America for two hundred
years. My dances are of the woods, the lakes, the rivers, the mountains
and the prairies of my native land—aren't they? Some of the critics
say my primitive art is monotonous, but if it has given a little joy to
this great audience I am glad.
i i i i
*34
In dancing simply as dancing I am not interested. To me dancing
muSt be the expression of life, not merely a series of gymnaStic tricks
or pretty movements. That is why I dislike the ordinary ballet dancing,
which constrains people to adopt unnatural attitudes and cramps the
free expression of their emotions.
To English people, with their fine athletic bodies, their wide, free
movements, their natural grace of bearing, the ballet seems essentially
unfitted. Perhaps that is why in the paSt there have been no great
English ballet dancers.
English people have, I think, the wrong idea of beauty. To the
majority it means something suave, softly pretty. To the artiSt beauty
has a Sterner meaning. Beauty to him is expression. Rodin's head of
Balzac is ugly according to everyday Standards, but artiSts know that
because it is completely expressive it is the perfection of beauty. So
with my new Slav dance, while I think it is the beSt thing I have done,
many may think it ugly.
I want music, art, and drama to come together. The spoken word
is essential; it is the heart and brains of the theatre. The other two are
its lyric ecStasy. Then with these three and architecture and painting
combined our theatres will become temples. All drama should have its
foundation in religion, for without that it becomes ignoble.
What do I think of ballroom dancing? Chiefly I am amazed at the
great restraint shown by the dancers, who, clasped in one another's
arms, and moving to the moSt lascivious music, Still continue to behave
in the moSt orthodox manner.
i i i i
The dance is of the theatre at its most exalted moment. We muSt
bring dancing again into the world for that purpose. With that ideal in
mind I have again and again given up my personal career, as I did in
1905 when I adopted forty children to give them this art. It would have
J35
been simpler, easier, to go my own way prosperously. But I knew that
some day the drama of the future would utilize dance as nobly as did
that of the Greeks. Or that out of the dance the new drama might
grow. But the world is impatient in these modern times. It is not
willing to wait; it wants "results." It could not wait for a new thing
to grow up naturally and beautifully. It begrudged the means, it
tempted the individual dancers to go out to win personal successes in
the market places. It has destroyed each successive school that I have
founded.
But the dance will return as I have visioned it. Mankind will not
always expect those with vision to put a seed in the ground and bring
it to flowering in a single night. Even now I am planning again for
my long cherished school. In Moscow a school I have Parted promises
perhaps to bring the ideal to fruition—not this year or next, but when
children have grown up with nature, with beauty, with the thought of
the dance in music and in tragedy.
(Added to earlier articles, to close an essay for Theatre Arts Monthly, 1927.)
i i i i
I spent long days and nights in the Studio seeking that dance which
might be the divine expression of the human spirit through the
medium of the body's movement. For hours I would Stand quite Still,
my two hands folded between my breads, covering the solar plexus.
... I was seeking and finally discovered the central spring of all
movement, the crater of motor power, the unity from which all diver¬
sities of movement are born, the mirror of vision for the creation of the
dance. It was from this discovery that was born the theory on which
I founded my school. The ballet school taught the pupils that this
spring was found in the center of the back at the base of the spine.
From this axis, says the ballet maSter, arms, legs and trunk muSt move
*36
DRAWING BY JOSE CLARA
freely, giving the result of an articulated puppet. This method pro¬
duces an artificial mechanical movement not worthy of the soul.
I on the contrary sought the source of spiritual expression, from
which would flow into the channels of the body, filling it with vibrat-
ing light, the centrifugal force reflecting the spirit's vision. After many
months, when I had learned to concentrate all my force in this one
center, I found that thereafter when I listened to music the rays and
vibrations of the music streamed to this one fount of light within me,
where they reflected themselves in Spiritual Vision, not the mirror of
the brain but of the soul; and from this vision I could express them in
Dance. . . .
The peculiar environment of my childhood and youth had de¬
veloped this power in me to a very great degree, and in different epochs
of my life I have been enabled to shut out all outside influences and to
live in this force alone. . . .
I also then dreamed of finding a first movement from which would
be born a series of movements without my volition, but as the uncon¬
scious re-action of the primary movement. I had developed this move¬
ment in a series of different variations on several themes, such as the
firSt movement of fear, followed by the natural re-actions born of the
primary emotion, or Sorrow, from which would flow a dance of
lamentation, or a love movement from the unfolding of which like
the petals of a flower the dancer would Stream as a perfume. . . .
(This and the following two excerpts are from My Life.)
i i i i
I felt such sympathy with Walter Damrosch that it seemed to me
when I Stood in the center of the Stage to dance, I was connected by
every nerve in my body with the orcheStra and with the great con¬
ductor.
*37
How can I describe the joy of dancing with this orchestra? It is
there before me—Walter Damrosch raises his baton—I watch it, and,
at the firSt stroke there surges within me the combined symphonic
chord of all the instruments in one. The mighty reverberation rushes
over me and I become the medium to condense in unified expression the
joy of Briinnhilde awakened by Siegfried, or the soul of Isolde seeking
in Death her realization. Voluminous, vaSt, swelling like sails in the
wind, the movements of my dance carry me onward—onward and
upward; and I feel the presence of a mighty power within me which
listens to the music and then reaches out through all my body, trying
to find an outlet for this listening. Sometimes this power grew furious,
sometimes it raged and shook me until my heart nearly burSt from its
passion, and I thought my laSt moments on earth had surely arrived.
At other times it brooded heavily, and I would suddenly feel such
anguish that, through my arms Stretched to the Heavens, I implored
help from where no help came. Often I thought to myself, what a
mistake to call me a dancer—I am the magnetic center to convey the
emotional expression of the Orchestra. From my soul sprang fiery rays
to conned; me with my trembling vibrating OrcheStra.
There was a flutiSt who played so divinely the solo of the Happy
Spirits in Orpheus that I often found myself immobile on the Stage,
with the tears flowing from my eyes, juSt from the ecStasy of listening
to him, and the singing of the violins and the whole orcheStra soaring
upwards, inspired by the wonderful conductor.
There was a marvelous sympathy between Damrosch and me, and
to each one of his geStures I inStantly felt the answering vibration. As
he augmented the crescendo in volume, so the life in me mounted and
overflowed in geSture—for each musical phrase translated into a
musical movement, my whole being vibrated in harmony with his.
i i i i
138
PHOTOGRAPH BY STEICHEN
Man muSt speak, then sing, then dance. But the speaking is the
brain, the thinking man. The singing is the emotion. The dancing is
the Dionysian ecstasy which carries away all.
i i i i
I have read in your issue of September 27th an article in which it
is stated that I "will appear soon in some antique Greek dances," and
"with sumptuous costumes." It would be impossible to give a descrip¬
tion of my art more completely false.
Certainly, like every artiSt of our time, I have been inspired by
Greek art, since it is the foundation of all our Western culture. Cer¬
tainly it is true that in a period of sixteen years I have gone eight times
to Greece, and that I remained there each time as long as my economic
circumstances permitted—for to live in Greece is to know the very
source of Beauty, the inspiration of my art. But that is far from saying
that I wish to revive the ancient dances.
To revive the antique dances would be a task as impossible as it
would be useless. The dance, to be an art for us, muSt be born out of
ourselves, out of the emotions and the life of our times, juSt as the old
dances were born of the life and the emotions of the ancient Greeks.
To be sure, in my youth I spent long hours of enthusiastic admiration
before the Parthenon, before the friezes, the frescos, the vases, the
Tanagra figures.
But that was not as a Step toward copying either the attitudes or
the excellencies of those masterpieces. On the contrary, I Studied them
so long in order to Steep myself in the spirit underlying them, in order
to discover the secret of the ecStasy in them, putting myself into touch
with the feelings that their gestures symbolized. Thus, in taking my
soul back to the myStic sources of their rapture, I have, on my own
part, found again the secret of Beauty that resides in that Holy of
*39
Holies. Out of that has come my dancing, neither Greek nor antique,
but the spontaneous expression of my soul lifted up by beauty.
For me Dionysus is not dead. He is the eternal God, all-powerful,
who under many names and in many forms inspires every creative
artift: Krishna, Osiris, Dionysus—and let us remember that Nietzsche
signed his la£t message "Dionysus Crucified."
As to the second part of your article, which speaks of the sumptu-
ousness of my costumes, I have never worn antique costumes or rich
ones, because the dance is for me the expression of the body reflecting
the soul in ecstasy.
Neither by gestures and attitudes nor by costumes and cunning
draperies, but only in terms of the human body can the dance convey
its message to humanity: the double message of Apollo and Dionysus
—to the divine music of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner, the
great myotics and prophets of our era.
(From a letter published in the Progres d'Athenes, in 1920. Here translated from the
French—as are all of the next six items.)
i i i i
It is possible to dance in two ways:
One can throw oneself into the spirit of the dance, and dance the
thing itself: Dionysus.
Or one can contemplate the spirit of the dance—and dance as one
who relates a story: Apollo.
i i i i
All promise for the future I see in a great school where children
will learn to dance, to sing, to live for the Wisdom and the Beauty of
the world.
Rodin has written: "When Nature is understood, then Progress
has begun."
140
That the child should underhand Nature, it muft dance according
to Nature's rhythm. The great event of this era will be the awakening
of the Dance as a noble art, sifter to Music. The dance for two thou¬
sand years has been an art imprisoned. All my life I have been trying
to break its chains, to open the gates and give it back its freedom. Once
liberated, the dance will be the great inspirational force among the
arts: sculpture, painting, architecture will find new wings, and tragedy
will live again.
When the dance died tragedy died, for the dance is the Dionysian
spirit in tragedy, and without the dance tragedy has loft its reason for
being.
Before I danced, all dancers were imprisoned in tight clothes, re¬
peating year after year some mechanical geftures; since I began thou¬
sands of people have begun dancing, in all the countries of the world,
clothed only in light tunics, and knowing for the fir ft time the free
rhythm of the human body, and its accordance with the harmonious
movements of Nature; thousands are seeking spontaneous movement,
and the relationship of this to great music. Schools have been estab¬
lished, in accordance with my ideas, in every country, from Finland to
South America. Unfortunately these schools have adopted the letter of
my teaching but not its spirit.
They copy the movements—but ignore the secret of the inner
impulse.
(From a letter to a French Government official, appealing for a school.)
i i i i
To dance is to live. What I want is a school of life, for man's
greateft riches are in his soul, in his imagination. There may be a life
after this one, but I know not what we shall have there. This is what
I do know: our riches here on earth are in our will, our inner life.
i i i i
I4I
What is the firft law for all art? What answer would a great
sculptor or a great painter make? I think simply this: "Look at
Nature, Study Nature, understand Nature—and then try to express
Nature."
The dance is an art like these others, and it also muft find its
beginning in this great firft principle: ftudy Nature.
You answer, "How can a dancer ftudy fir ft in the realm of Nature,
when the dance consifts of hundreds of fteps, and these fteps are set
down in the books on the art of the dance, and when there are all the
rules and teachings of the ballet mafters ? If you wish to be dancers you
muft find a teacher of the dance."
And I would reply: "The dance does not consift of all that: the
dance is the movements of the human body in harmony with the
movements of the earth; and if it does not accord with those move¬
ments, it is false."
That is the firft law for the ftudy of the dance: ftudy the move¬
ments of Nature.
i i i i
The dance is not a diversion but a religion, an expression of life.
I teach that to the young children in my school; I know nothing about
those who make a mere amusement of the dance. Life is the root and
art is the flower.
How do these things concern me? One does not ask Rodin to
watch the young girls of the world playing at sculpture. Why should
I watch them dance?
(From an interview given to a French newspaper, in French, in answer to a question
about her attitude toward the fashionable dances.)
i i i i
True art comes from within and has no need for exterior decora¬
tions. In my school we have neither rich coftumes nor ornaments, but
142
N3HDI3XS A9 HcIVSDOIOHd
only the beauty that rises out of the soul with the coming of inspira¬
tion, and out of the body which is its symbol.
If my art has been able to teach anything, I hope it is that beauty
can be found in the play of children and in the artlessness of their open
hands.
You have seen them today, forming a circle or crossing the Stage
—surely they are more lovely than any necklace of pearls! These are
my jewels, and I do not desire any others.
Give beauty, give freedom, give health to the children; give art to
the people who ask for it. Great music ought not to serve only for the
pleasure of those who are specially privileged; it should be given free
to the masses. Art and music are as necessary to the people as the air
or bread, because art is the spiritual bread of mankind.
i i i i
I believe in each life is a spiritual line, an upward curve. And all
that adheres to or Strengthens this line is our real life; the reft is but as
chaff falling from one's progress. Such a spiritual line is my Art.
i i i i
My life has known but two motives—Love and Art. And often
Love destroyed Art—and often the imperious call of Art put a tragic
end to Love—for these two have known no accord but constant battle.
i i i i
Memory, Memory—what is Memory?
A cracked tankard from which the wine has all leaked out, leaving
it dry and to quench no thirSt.
When I try to remember events that were so marvelous, so vibrant
—like an apple orchard bursting with ripe apples—and when I put
this in these words, a medium I don't understand, they seem like dead
leaves, dry, parched, no juice or interest left—but that is because I am
not a writer. When I dance it is different.
*43
On the temple-crowned summit
Breaks again the rising day,
Streaming with its dawning brightness
Down the waters of the bay!
See, the centuried mift is breaking!
Lo, the free Hellenic shore!
Marathon—Plataea tells us
Greece is living Greece once more.
('Two verses from "INTAGLIO: Lines on a Beau¬
tiful Gree\ Antique," by Joseph Charles Dun¬
can, father of Isadora. From " Outcrop pingsa
selection of California verse edited by Bret Harte.)
PHOTOGRAPH BY STEICHEN
EDITOR'S NOTES
1. page 47. I See America Dancing. Because there are several different versions, I
have gone back to the original handwritten ms. It is in two parts, as indicated here by the
break after the paragraph ending "the America of Abraham Lincoln." There is latitude
for variant readings, but Isadora Duncan did not write "the kindness and purity of our
Statesmen," as in the other published versions. One transcriber or editor also changed
"worthy of the name of Democracy" to "worthy of the name of the greateil Democracy"
—prettily localizing the sentiment for home consumption. First published in the New
York Herald-Tribune, October 2, 1927. Re-printed in My Life, and copyrighted, 1927, by
Boni & Liveright, Inc.
2. page 51. The Philosopher's Stone of Dancing. Probably first written as a program
note, this has been widely published. Several mss. also exi£t, with wide variations. There
are two different English versions, but the one I have discarded seems quite obviously a
re-translation back into English from a French translation. One version is dated 1920, but
parts may have been written very much earlier.
3. page 54. The Dance of the Future. Delivered as a lecture in Berlin, 1903. Pub¬
lished in Leipzig by Eugen Diederichs in that year. First published in America under the
title "The Dance," in a souvenir program. There copyrighted, 1909, by Charles Douville
Coburn, Miss Duncan's American representative.
4. page 64. The Parthenon. A fragment handwritten in a notebook of the firft
Athens period—in the same book that has the rules for conduct at Kopanos (see My Life,
pages 126-7).
5. page 66. The Dancer and Nature. This essay was originally written as a dialogue
between two people floating "in a little bark becalmed" off the shores of Greece; but in a
less sentimental moment I. D. or another blue-pencilled all but the lines carrying the
main thought, without adding transitional sentences between the remaining fragments—
which explains a certain jerkiness. The one fairly complete ms., moreover, is badly typed
and probably lacks several pages. Still it has seemed worth while to reconstruct the
essay, as a reflection of the dancer's thoughts in those days when she was deeply in love
with Greek art and German philosophy, and le&uring to Berlin women about the free
woman's body. Necessarily this is the moit edited and lea£t finished of all the essays—
with even the expressive capital letters left just as they were.
*45
6. page 71. What Dancing Should Be. Another incomplete ms., with one page miss¬
ing, and evidently typed by a German secretary little acquainted with English. From
marginal notations I judge the essay to have been written in Berlin in 1905 or 1906.
Where the page is missing I have set in, as indicated, a fragment which seems to carry on
the thought—though it may be a later work and now exists in French only.
7. page 74. A Child Dancing. Dated "Noordwijk aan Zee, 22nd August, 1906."
First published, in German translation, in the Frankfurter Zeitung four days later. I
have restored the original firSt paragraph, in place of a version added in 1925 or 1926.
8. page 77. Movement Is Life. The firSt part is from a typed ms. The balance
exists in two versions each with parts not in the other, and with many variations in word¬
ing. Probably fir£t published in English in 1909, in a New York recital program.
9. page 80. Beauty and Exercise. I have suspedted that this only discovered English
version is a translation, none too carefully worded; but in the absence of decisive evidence
I have admitted it here practically without change. Probably first appeared in French in
I9I4-
10. page 84. The Dance in Relation to Tragedy. An older article, rewritten in 1927
for Theatre Arts Monthly.
11. page 86. The Gree\ Theatre. Probably firSt printed in Dionysion, published by
"the Committee for the Furtherance of Isadora Duncan's work in America," New York,
1915. Copyright by Isadora Duncan, 1915.
12. page 88. Education and the Dance. An older article or program note, made over
in 1927, and added to two earlier works to complete an article for Theatre Arts Monthly.
13. page 90. Terpsichore. The mss. and published versions vary greatly. To complete
the English text I have had to translate several paragraphs from the French (see next
note). One version is dated 1909.
14. page 92. The Dance of the Gree\s. This and the following three essays, 14 to
17, and also 22, are translations into English from French mss., program notes, etc.,
made since Isadora Duncan's death. Some she undoubtedly wrote in French (the
handwritten mss. exift), but others are patently French translations from English texts
now missing. Some of the originals will perhaps be found again—the dancer's papers
were scattered literally to the ends of the earth, from California to Russia; but it is prob¬
able that no one will ever know whether others were originally written in French or Eng¬
lish. Those readers who may care to go back to the available French texts will find a
considerable colledtion in a pamphlet entitled La Danse, par Isadora Duncan, printed for
the dancer by Raymond Duncan in Paris, 1927; and about the same amount of material,
with important additions and equally important omissions, in Ecrits sur la Danse, par
Isadora Duncan, Paris, Editions du Grenier [1928]. Each of these collections contains
about one-third of the writings on the art of the dance as they appear in the present
volume.
18. page 105. Richard Wagner. Written in French in the form of a letter to La
Herse, and published there in 1921.
146
19- page 107. A letter to the group of six pupils who were dancing in America.
1918 or 1919.
21. page 116. Reflections, after Moscow. Written in the form of a letter, in French,
and here translated from a ms. draft.
22. page 121. Dancing in Relation to Religion and Love. One of the last essays,
written in 1927 for Theatre Arts Monthly. Reprinted without change, except for two
paragraphs dropped because taken from The Dance of the Future.
M7
limited edition
YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
3 9002 02230 1
650