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Isadora Duncan The founder of Modern dance (Course work)
CONTENT:
Introduction............................................................................3 CHAPTER I. Isadora Duncan the founder of modern dance 1.1 The history of dance.
Modern dance.................................5 1.2 Duncan is the founder of a new direction..........13 CHAPTER II.
Biography and creativity of Isadora 2.1 I started dancing before I was born..........................14 2.2 The great "sandal"...........................................16 Conclusion........................................................................27 References...............................................................30
Introduction:
As a child, Isadora was unhappy — her father, Joseph Duncan, went bankrupt and ran away before she was born, leaving her wife with four children in her arms without means of support.
Little Isadora, who, hiding her age, was sent to school at the age of 5, felt like a stranger among well off classmates.
This feeling is common to all Duncan children, and rallied them around their mother, forming the "Duncan clan", challenging the whole world.
At the age of 13, Isadora left school, which she considered completely useless, and seriously took up music and dance, continuing her self education.
At the age of 18, the young Duncan came to conquer Chicago and almost married her admirer.
It was a red haired, bearded forty five year old Pole Ivan Miroski.
The problem was that he was also poor.
And in addition, as it turned out later, he is also married.
This failed romance marked the beginning of a series of failures in her personal life that haunted the dancer all her life.
Duncan has never been absolutely, unconditionally happy.
^ The relevance of the topic.
Isadora insisted that dance should be a natural continuation of human movement, reflect the emotions and character of the performer, the impulse for the appearance of dance should be the language of the soul.
All these ideas, innovative in nature, naturally came into conflict with the ballet school of that time.
The harsh assessment of the ballet itself, however, did not prevent Duncan from admiring the grace and artistry of two Russian ballerinas — Kshesinskaya and Pavlova.
Moreover, with the latter, they later even became good friends who sincerely appreciated each other's talent.
The dancer's performances began with social parties, where she was presented as a piquant addition, an exotic curiosity: Isadora danced barefoot, which was a novelty and fairly shocked the audience.
The tour significantly improved the financial situation of Duncan, and in 1903 she and her family made a pilgrimage to Greece.
Dressed in tunics and sandals, the eccentric foreigners caused a real stir on the streets of modern Athens.
The travelers did not limit themselves to simply studying the culture of their beloved country, they decided to make their contribution by building a temple on Kapanos Hill.
In addition, Isadora selected 10 boys for the choir, which accompanied her performances with singing.
The purpose of the work: to consider the work of Isadora Duncan.
Tasks:
1. Show Isadora Duncan as the founder of modern dance;
2. Describe the biography and work of Isadora.
CHAPTER I. Isadora Duncan is the founder of modern dance
1.1 The history of dance.
Modern dance
Perhaps the history of dance is no shorter than the history of mankind.
We can only guess what dancing looked like in the early eras.
Natya Shastra is an early manuscript describing the dance.
It is based on a modern interpretation of the classical Indian dance Bharathanatyam.
In European culture, one of the first mentions of dance is made by Homer in his "Iliad" - he describes chorea (Greek. round dance, dance).
The early Greeks turned the art of dancing into a system that expresses a variety of passions.
For example, the dance of the Furies terrified everyone who turned out to be its audience.
The Greek philosopher Aristotle equated dance with poetry and argued that dancers, thanks to body movements in a certain rhythm, can convey manners, passions and actions.
Outstanding Greek sculptors studied the poses of dancers imitating certain states.
Before the history of dance
Historically, the dance was used by people as part of religious rituals and public holidays.
Evidence of this is found in many documents of the prehistoric era.
Probably, court dances have existed for as long as kings and queens.
The variety of dance forms included folk, social, ballroom, religious and experimental and other forms.
A major branch of this art was Theatrical Dance, which originated in the Western World.
The roots of modern ballet, the dance that we all know, go back to France of the sixteenth century the Renaissance.
XVI and XVII centuries: court dance
The prerequisite for the appearance of ballet was a new way of thinking and the philosophy of Enlightenment: now a person became the center of the universe and could control his being with the help of arts and sciences.
"Using music that exactly imitated the proportional harmony of the planets, a man of the sixteenth century believed that he could attract planetary influences to himself.
The dance itself was an imitation of the movement of the heavens" (Designing for the Dancer, Elron Press, London, 1981).
By the end of the XVI century, the court ballet had reached its heyday: it was fully funded by the French monarchy, which used it to extol its own greatness.
The ballets became part of the luxurious, huge festive extravaganzas that lasted for several days in a row and included all kinds of entertainment.
In fact, all these holidays were a way of self aggrandizement of the French Court.
XVIII and XIX centuries: from court dancing to Romanticism
By the beginning of the XVIII century, ballet migrated from the French Court to the Paris Opera to the versatile theatrical figure Jean Baptiste Lully, who " preserved the basic concept of ballet – the complexity of the form in which dance is an integral and significant element."
During this century, the ballet has spread in Europe and the sophisticated way of movement during large view turned into a self sufficient art, performance art, ballet d'action ("effective ballet", a ballet with a story – Ave.).
This new form almost completely destroyed the artificiality inherent in the court dance, and installed the new law: "art should imitate nature, to nature".
As a result, costumes and choreography have become more free and contribute to a greater disclosure of the expressive talents of the body.
The door opened to the world of naturalistic costumes and loose shoes pointe shoes, which provided the dancer with great opportunities when climbing half toes.
The era of Romanticism at the beginning of the XIX century with ballets focusing on emotions, with fantasy and rich spiritual worlds marked the beginning of real work on pointe shoes.
Now the ideal ballerina (whose qualities were embodied then in the legendary Marie Taglioni) in her shoes seemed to barely touch the surface of the stage and her disembodied spirit seemed not to know what the earth was.
At this time, the rising stars of female dance completely eclipsed the presence of poor male dancers, who in many cases were dubbed simply moving statues that exist only for ballerinas to lean on them.
This situation was slightly corrected at the beginning of the twentieth century by the ascent of the star of Nijinsky from the Russian Ballet.
By this time, traditional ballet costumes, choreography, scenery, props had already developed for us, in short, everything became almost as it is now.
The beginning of the twentieth century: from ballet to modern dance
The Russian ballet, which started a revolution in the art of ballet, tried to break the outdated forms of classical ballet.
At present, the artistic possibilities of ballet technique and the accompanying music, scenery and multimedia are more global than ever before.
The boundaries that define classical ballet are constantly being pushed and blurred, and everything that appears in their place now only barely resembles traditional ballet terms such as "rotation".
A new thinking burst out.
The dance artists began to take into account the personality qualities, ritual and religious aspects, primitiveness, expressiveness and emotionality.
In this atmosphere, there was a boom in modern dance.
Suddenly there was a new freedom in what was now considered acceptable, which was called recognized art, in which many people now wanted to create.
All the attributes of the new art have become as valuable as ballet costumes – or even more valuable than them.[9;130]
Most choreographers and dancers of the early XX century treated ballet extremely negatively.
Isidora Duncan considered it an ugly senseless gymnastics.
Martha Graham (Graham) saw in him Europeanism and imperialism, which have nothing in common with the Americans.
Merce Cunningham, despite the fact that he used some basics of ballet technique in teaching, approached choreography and performance from positions directly opposite to traditional ballet.
The twentieth century was definitely a time of separation from everything that ballet relied on.
A time of unprecedented creative growth of dancers and choreographers.
A time of shock, surprise and spectators who have changed their idea of dance.
The time of the revolution in the full sense of the word.
The end of the twentieth century: the development of modern dance
The sixties marked the development of postmodernism, which changed the course to simplicity, the beauty of small things, untrained bodies and artless, simple movements.
The famous manifesto "No", rejecting all costumes, plots and" show off " for the sake of raw, raw movement – this is probably the brightest extreme of this wave of new thought.
Unfortunately, the lack of costumes, plots and props do not contribute to the success of the dance show – and after a short time, "scenery", "artistic design" and "shock level" again appeared in the lexicon of modern dance choreographers.
By the eighties, classical dance returned to its starting point, and modern dance (or, by this time, contemporary dance) became a highly technical weapon of professionals, not far from politics.
Two forms of dance, contemporary dance and classical ballet, peacefully coexist side by side, experiencing only a tiny fraction of the former dislike for each other and almost without entering into competition.
Today, the dance art is permeated with creative competition and choreographers often strive to ensure that their work is called the most shocking.
However, there is still beauty in art, and the dance of modernity shakes with such professionalism, strength and flexibility that has never been before.
To understand what modern dance is today, it is necessary to turn to its history, starting from the reason for the emergence of a new direction.
So, at the beginning of the 20th century, a new dance direction appeared in America and Europe (called modern by Americans and contemporary dance by Europeans), as an alternative to the existing classical ballet, as one of the ways to express new feelings and thoughts characteristic of the art of that time, boldly rejecting the conventions of ballet forms, differing from it by greater freedom and expressiveness of means. [4;23]
There were several large figures at the origins.
The ideas of the French teacher, composer F. had a huge influence on the new vision of dance.
Delsarte (1881-1971), who argued that only a natural gesture, freed from conventions and stylization, is able to convey human feelings.
The Swiss teacher, composer Jacques Dalcroze (1865-1950) associated music education with the movement.
Music should be "physically experienced".
In the 20s, the Institute of Rhythm worked on the ideas of Dalcroze in Leningrad, whose employees sought to create "dancing music".
If Delsarte and Jacques Dalcroze are theorists, the authors of the concept of a new dance, then the famous American dancer Isadora Duncan (1877-1927) is considered the direct founder of modernism, who embodied the idea in motion.
Accusing classical ballet of soullessness and artificiality, Duncan sought to reproduce the free plastic, the plastic of Ancient Greece, danced barefoot in light transparent tunics.
It is difficult to describe modern dance more accurately than Duncan herself did in her autobiography "My Confession": "Freedom of the body and spirit gives rise to creative thought, body movements should be an expression of an internal impulse.
The dancer must get used to moving as if the movement never ends, it is always the result of internal reflection.
The body in the dance should be forgotten, it is only an instrument, well tuned and harmonious.
In gymnastics, only the body is expressed by movements, in dance, feelings and thoughts are expressed through the body. ""
Isadora made us consider the art of dance important and noble.
She made me think of it as art" (Agnes de Mille).
It should be noted that the time itself – the beginning of the 20th century was a fruitful ground for the emergence and development of ideas that reflected a new perception of oneself and the world by a person.
The language of ballet dance, so familiar and predictable, no longer corresponded to the changed life, as it depicted a person whose faith was lost.
Ballet has remained a classic, and emerging trends in art, such as expressionism and Surrealism, have found expression in the productions of modernist choreographers in Europe and America. [2;29]
MODERN DANCE is one of the directions of modern foreign choreography, which originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the USA and Germany.
The term "modern dance" appeared in the United States to refer to stage choreography that rejects traditional ballet forms.
Having come into use, it replaced other terms (free dance, duncanism, the dance of sandals, rhythmoplastic dance, expressive, expressionist, absolute, new artistic) that arose in the process of developing this direction.
The common thing for the representatives of modern dance, regardless of what trend they belonged to and in what period they proclaimed their aesthetic programs, was the intention to create a new choreography that, in their opinion, met the spiritual needs of a person of the 20th century.
Its main principles are the rejection of canons, the embodiment of new themes and plots by original dance and plastic means.
In an effort to be completely independent of traditions, the representatives of modern dance finally came to the adoption of certain technical techniques, in the confrontation with which a new direction was born.
The idea of a complete departure from traditional ballet forms could not be fully implemented in practice. [9;50]
The ideas of modern dance were anticipated by the famous French teacher and theorist of the stage movement F. Delsarte, who argued that only a gesture freed from convention and stylization (including musical) is able to truthfully convey all the nuances of human experiences.
His ideas became widespread in the early 20th century after they were artistically implemented by two American dancers who toured in Europe.
L. Fuller performed in Paris in 1892.
Her dance "Serpentine" was based on a spectacular combination of free movements, spontaneously generated by music, and a costume - huge fluttering bedspreads illuminated by multicolored spotlights.
1.2 Duncan is the founder of a new direction
However, A. Duncan became the founder of a new direction in choreography.
Her preaching of the renewed antiquity, the "dance of the future", returned to natural forms, free not only from theatrical conventions, but also from historical and everyday ones, had a great influence on many artists who sought to free themselves from academic dogmas.
Duncan considered nature to be a source of inspiration.
Expressing personal feelings, her art had no common features with any choreographic system.
It appealed to heroic and romantic images generated by music of the same nature.
The technique was not complicated, but the dancer conveyed the most subtle shades of emotions with a relatively limited set of movements and poses, filling the simplest gestures with deep poetic content.
Duncan did not create a finished school, although she opened the way to new choreographic art.
Improvisation, barefoot dance, rejection of traditional ballet costume, appeal to symphonic and chamber music — all these fundamental innovations of Duncan predetermined the ways of modern dance[12; 36]
CHAPTER II.
Biography and creativity of Isadora
2.1 I started dancing before I was born
If she had been born not on May 26, 1878, but in Ancient Hellas, the priests would have seen in her gift an earthly incarnation and the revived "practice" of the muse Terpsichore.
If she had not lived in the agitated Europe of the beginning of the bloody XX century, modern feminists would have made her their tribune and role model.
If she were not mortal, people would never have known that even the violent grief of loss cannot extinguish in the heart of a woman who has devoted herself to art, the desire to find her god man, the god of inspiration Apollo.
Well, the most surprising thing about her romantic fate was that a rare biographer did not feel a sense of confusion from a huge number of mystical details, the cloying and concentration of which for a fictional literary image could become a reason for criticism to accuse the writer of promoting fatalism and of the contrived plot.
Are you a vessel in which there is emptiness, or a fire flickering in a vessel?
This was not said about her, but one day a bright spark of divine fire broke out for her, illuminating the path in art, in one of the Greek vases depicting ancient dance, which made the famous Isadora Duncan out of an aspiring American ballerina. [13;89]
On that May day, when Isadora Angela Duncan was born, the mother of the future star of European scenes suffered two disappointments at once: the first sounds she heard, barely recovered from childbirth, were the furious screams from the street of her husband's bank depositors, who had fled the day before with their savings to nowhere; the first thing the unfortunate woman saw was that the newborn was almost convulsively beating the air with her feet.
"I knew that a monster would be born –" she told the midwife – "this child canot be normal, he jumped and jumped in my womb, this is all punishment for the sins of her father, the scoundrel Joseph..."
She did not see in the first movements of the baby a mirror reflection of her future fate.
However, despite the complete lack of the gift of foresight, the music teacher managed to put her daughter and three older children on their feet without the help of a crooked father, and even give them a good education.
However, these efforts were of little use to Isadora: at the age of 13, she left school and became seriously interested in music and dance.
Nevertheless, the attempt to conquer Chicago ended in nothing for her, except for the first stormy romance with a fiery red seducer a married Pole Ivan Miroski, who burned her soul to such an extent that the dancer preferred to escape from bitter happiness to Europe, not disdaining even the only mode of transport that she could afford at that time – a hold on a cattle ship.
Foggy London breathed on her with the primness and intimacy of secular salons, which could only be conquered by something stunning in the conditions of fierce competition.
On the other side of the English Channel, her main rival Mata Hari had already found her credo in dance, risking to undress in front of the audience, and bewitched her with oriental steps.
2.2 The Great"sandal"
In deep thought, Isadora wandered through the halls of the British Museum and searched, searched...
The grace and artistry of the outstanding Russian ballerinas Kshesinskaya and Pavlova were too academic and assumed a long and exhausting drill with lessons, enslavement by a finely verified dogma.
The greedy American woman had neither time nor mental strength for all this – she breathed a thirst for freedom in art and in life...
A huge red figure antique vase, taken from Athens, caught her eye.
A slight tilt of the head, the fluttering folds of the tunic, a hand flying above the head in an elegant gesture.
A bearded warrior was sitting at the dancer's feet, raising a cup of wine.
There is nothing more beautiful than a galloping horse, a floating ship and a dancing woman.
Through the centuries, the artist was able to convey a man's deep admiration for the dance of the hetaera, a representative of the most seductive, the most free from humiliating life and the most educated female caste of the ancient world, performing at the artistic banquet of the classical era the symposium.
Who was this dancer, and who was her audience?
She is Thais, Aspasia, or Terpsichore herself; he is Pericles, a companion of the great Alexander Ptolemy... or one of the Greek gods in earthly form?
A flame of insight flashed in front of Isadora...
Within a few days, she found a patroness in the person of the famous actress Campbell, whom she infected with her the idea is that the dance should be a symbol of freedom, a continuation of natural grace, speak the language of emotions, and not once and for all rehearsed gestures.
The calculating queen of salons arranged her protégé's debut at one of the private receptions, where she presented her almost as an "exotic snack".
And she did not lose – the daring Isadora, who performed barefoot and in a tunic instead of a tutu, having managed to copy ancient Greek plastic in many ways, saw admiration in the eyes of the audience.
Success rushed ahead of her in Hephaestus sandals – already in 1903, Isadora was able to go on tour to the coveted Greece, where she honed her skills of plastic improvisation.
She was applauded by the best stage venues in Europe, everywhere her performances were sold out.
And the newspapermen, like hounds on a blood trail, rushed to investigate the details of the amazing woman's personal life.
And they also ran into a gold mine. [11;67]
Finally, Duncan's luck smiled: she was engaged for a small role in the New York theater by the famous Augustine Daly.
It was a chance.
Ivan Mirotsky fell into despair at the thought of separation.
They swore eternal love.
The girl promised that as soon as she achieved success in New York, they would immediately get married.
At that time, Isadora was not yet an ardent supporter of free love, for which she later fought.
In New York, she was accepted into the troupe.
A year later, she went on tour with the theater to Chicago.
Isadora was looking forward to meeting her betrothed.
It was a hot summer, and every day, free from rehearsals, they went to the forest and took long walks.
Before leaving for New York, Isadora's brother found out that Mirotsky has a wife in London.
The bride's mother was horrified by this news and insisted on separation-
The unique style that distinguished Isadora Duncan's dance numbers arose after her study of the dance art of Greece and Italy and was based on some elements of the rhythmic gymnastics system developed by Francois Delsarte.
In 1898, Isadora's entire wardrobe was destroyed by a terrible fire at the Windsor Hotel in New York, so during her next performance, she went out to the public in an improvised costume that she had invented herself.
The audience was shocked - Isadora appeared on the stage almost naked.
The strong, slender body of the young dancer from that time began to fit the famous flowing clothes, caught under the chest and on the shoulders in an antique image.
She did not recognize pointe shoes and danced like Aphrodite on her fingers.
Her bare feet were beautiful, strong and light. [9;136]
Isadora went on a big tour of Europe and soon became a favorite of the whole continent.
She signed a contract with the impresario Alexander Gross, who organized her solo performances in Budapest, Berlin, Vienna and other European cities.
Shocked, but excited, the audience besieged the theaters in droves to see a passionate dance performance of a half naked Isadora, who improvised to the music of famous composers (Strauss's "Blue Danube" or Chopin's "Funeral March").
Isadora was one of those who chooses men herself.
And I chose, it must be admitted, with excellent taste.
In Budapest, a talented actor, a handsome Magyar Oscar Berezhi preferred a career to a connection with her, then the writer and teacher Henrik Tode broke down under the weight of sanctimonious morality and broke up with Isadora after the first scandal of his legal wife.
Then the theater director Gordon Craig appeared in her life, already engaged to another.
At the age of 29, the dancer received the first award in her life from this unhappy love – her daughter Deirdre was born, which means "sadness"in Celtic.
Then, having suffered after a difficult birth, Isadora made a statement, then picked up by feminists: "Who came up with the idea that a woman should give birth in pain?
I donot want to hear about any women's social movements until someone figures out how to make childbirth painless.
It's time to stop this senseless agony."
And yet, after the marriage of another "Apollo" with his former bride, the great dancer made a disappointing conclusion for herself: love and marriage do not always go hand in hand, and love itself cannot be eternal.
At the end of 1907, she gave several concerts in St. Petersburg, where she met a new candidate for the role of the only man for the rest of her life.
She was unlucky again – Konstantin Stanislavsky, also a genius and also a handsome man, made it clear to her that he sees Isadora as nothing more than the perfect embodiment of some of his ideas.
The world famous "barefoot" with her deafening romances with married men broke the taboos rooted in the consciousness of society, and those who could give her the long awaited happiness were satisfied that they were her lovers, nothing more.
She remained alone on her dancing Olympus, giving the ungrateful a return to the distant origins of art.
At this stage of her life, she seemed to have almost touched the realization of the eternal female dream, having met the sleek and beautiful rich man Paris Eugene Singer, the heir of the inventor of the sewing machine.
He not only paid all her overdue bills, but was even ready to offer his hand and heart.
However, he was so jealous that he set the marriage condition, stipulating a place for Isadora somewhere between a toothbrush and a sewing machine.
Isadora said that she could not be bought.
Almost immediately after their son Patrick was born, they broke up.
The new drama broke the actress: she began to see funeral marches, then two children's coffins among the snowdrifts.
"Insanity" turned out to be a premonition of the first real trouble, because in a series of novels, children were her only light.
In January 1913, after meeting Singer, both of Isadora's children, together with the governess, were traveling by car from Paris to Versailles.
On the road, the engine suddenly stopped, the driver looked under the hood, pulled something.
The car, knocking down the driver, took off and fell into the Seine together with the passengers.
She never recovered from this loss.
Isadora was haunted by visions – once she imagined that she saw her babies entering the water.
The sobbing woman who fell to the ground was picked up by a passerby.
"Save my mind, give me a child," she moaned.
The young man was engaged.
The boy born from their relationship lived only a few days.
Isadora began to drink, the newspaper even replaced her last name with Drunken (drunk). [5;63]
Fortunately, soon she had a chance to start life from scratch.
In 1921, Lunacharsky officially proposed to the aging dancer to open a dance school in Moscow.
In response, she was the first of the artists of the West to greet the new revolutionary state and did not even go – she ran...
But you canot run far from yourself.
In Soviet Russia, a new fatal passion overtook her.
At one of the receptions organized in the mansion allocated to her for the school of "experimental ballet", the golden haired Sergey Yesenin appeared.
He was bewitched: not knowing a word of English, he took off his shoes and danced some wild dance.
But Isadora understood everything: she stroked his head, repeating only two Russian words – "angel" and "chort".
Three hours after they met, they left together for a magical Russian night... she was 44 years old, he was 26.
But for both of them, this passion was the last, wild, exhausting.
Was it possible for them to merge spiritually?
It's hard to say.
After all, Yesenin spoke only Russian, she barely learned a dozen words in a foreign language.
If they had understood each other in time, everything could have turned out differently...
The poet went crazy with her dance with a scarf, fiery and temperamental, when the scarlet cloth curled around the hot body of a woman, allegorically symbolizing the storm of revolution over the eternally young earth that gives life.
But the idyll of their life together quickly ended: The "Moscow naughty reveller" loved Isadora and hated her.
The great seductress, who cherished great simplicity in art and female freedom in her work, endured everything like a woman – both his crazy impulses and his spree.
And even repeated through a stream of tears, catching a boot that almost hit her in the head, in broken Russian: "Serozha, I love you."
And he, breaking away from her embrace, hiding from friends, sending telegrams, it was over, but again covered by the tenderness and remorse, and she ran her fingers in his curls when he dropped his face against her knees.
To snatch a loved one from a permanent spree and disappointments venomous rebuke from the then literary elite of the new Russia, Isadora went to the trick – having him in 1922, the marriage took Yesenin abroad.
For the first time in her life, she, who had never been married before, was happy. [7;34]
However, in Europe, the poet became even more sad after talking with Russian emigrants: "They are drinking here again, fighting and crying to the harmonica yellow sadness.
They curse their failures, they remember Moscow Russia... "
Since it didnot work out from Paris for a sanatorium for a drinking Yesenin, Isadora took him to her homeland.
In America, both were treated with squeamish caution, almost like a Trojan horse of the Bolsheviks in the sphere of culture.
Duncan was not confused by this: spitting on the upper world, "red Isadora" began to perform in proletarian quarters, she was received "with a bang", life smiled at her.
But then for the first time she learned what marriage is in the understanding of a man.
When the press called the poet "Duncan's young husband", he literally exploded.
Yesenin was patriarchal at heart and could not bear such humiliation.
Hard, to the point of unconsciousness and the destruction of furniture in restaurants, he drank again.
One day, after paying the bills of his " festivities", Isadora could not stand it and told him: "Go home!".
He left, but rushed to her again from the Belgian border, unable to bear the separation.
Alas, the broken cup could no longer be glued together.
Wild passion was dying, killing those in whom it lived, like a deadly disease.
2 years after the breakup, the poet was taken out of the loop in the St. Petersburg hotel "Angleterre".[8;79]
Duncan tried to lose herself in the dance.
"Isadora dances everything that others say, sing, write, play and draw," Maximilian Voloshin said of her, " she dances Beethoven's Seventh Symphony and the Moonlight Sonata, she dances Botticelli's Primavera and Horace's poems."
But it was more of a look back at the past than a real life.
Even a short romance with the Russian pianist Viktor Serov could not resurrect her.
She tried to commit suicide... a couple of days after she was pumped out, on September 14, 1927, in Nice, Isadora Duncan got behind the wheel of a sports car.
It was chilly, but she refused to put on a coat, tying a long scarf around her neck.
The car took off, but did not pass even a hundred meters.
The end of the scarlet scarf was pulled into the spokes of the wheel by a gust of wind...
The head of the 50 year old dancer fell sharply, bumping her face into the car door.
The scarlet scarf strangled her.
It is hardly worth looking for an allegory in this, they say, the founder of the new philosophy of natural dance was killed by a symbol of the revolution floating in the wind, just as the proletarian stranglehold itself strangled free art.
Dying, she managed to say: "Goodbye, friends, I'm going to glory!".
And in this glory was her happiness.
Well deserved.
Even if it is not as desired by her as a simple female happiness, given to many. [3;70]
Already at a young age, the girl rejected the strict canons of classical ballet, striving for naturalness in dance.
Her first performances in America did not bring her success, and at the age of 21 she left the United States, sailing to England on a cattle ship.
Her meager savings did not allow for more.
In London, she was patronized by the famous actress CAMPBELL, who invited the ballerina to perform at private receptions.
By this time, Duncan's dance had already been formed, taking as a basis samples of ancient Greek plastic art, which she studied in the halls of Ancient Greek art in the British Museum.
The ballerina changed her traditional ballet costume a tutu for a tunic, performed barefoot on stage, and abandoned the language of conventional gestures.
Duncan's innovation aroused the admiration of dance lovers, and soon she was greeted by crowded theaters and concert halls throughout Europe.
During her first visit to Russia in 1905, she attracted the attention of Sergei Diaghilev.
The ballerina's personal life was also a constant topic of newspaper headlines.
As in art, she constantly violated taboos that were ingrained in people's minds.
She gave birth to two children without marrying any of the fathers.
In 1913, a tragedy occurred in Paris that shocked the ballerina.
The car in which her children and their nanny were accompanying them fell into the Seine, and all three drowned.
the year 1920 marked a new stage in the life of a ballerina: she was invited to Soviet Russia to organize her own ballet school.
One of the first among the artists of the West, she welcomed the young revolutionary state, and this decision fully corresponded to her nature.
Acquaintance with the poet Sergei YESENIN, who was 17 years younger than her, ended with their marriage in 1922.
Duncan decided to conduct a tour of the United States and went there with the poet.
But the timing was unfortunate: America was frightened by the "red threat" - and they were met as Bolshevik agents.
The obstruction arranged in Boston, when she introduced Yesenin to the public during one of the performances, forced her to leave the ro
