To Discover the Language of My Soul.....: Isadora Duncan

Friday, September 30, 2011

Isadora Duncan

Isadora Duncan,

The Mother of Modern Dance

May 27, 1877 - September 14, 1927

Isadora Duncan lived in the United States, Russia, and Western Europe from age twenty-two until she died. She studied ballet, and eventually created 'Modern Dance'- a way to show beauty- unlike that of ballet.

Isadora taught that the body was meant to show the beauty of itself through dance. Instead of placing her dancers in ballet slippers or Pointe shoes, she had them dance barefoot; instead of placing them in tutus and leotards, she placed them in tunics and flowing dresses.

Isadora Duncan performing

She moved to Europe in 1899, settling eventually in Paris after a year in London. During her time in Paris, she had an affair with set designer Edward Gordon Craig. Her daughter Dierdre was born in 1905; her son, Patrick was born a couple years later, the result of an affair with the Singer sewing machine heir, Paris Singer. She started several schools of dance in Germany, London and Paris.

Unfortunately, both of her children- along with their governess- died in a tragic drowning in 1913, when their car rolled into the Seine. In 1920, she went to Moscow and opened a school of dance. She married a Russian poet in 1922, and on tour in America, they were labeled Bolshevik agents. In '25, he committed suicide.

Isadora and Sergei Yesenin, her poet husband

She moved back to France, and settled in Nice. In '27, her autobiography, My Life, was published. On September 14, 1927, Isadora was strangled to death when her long silk scarf got caught in the spoked wheel of a motorcar. It not only strangled her, it broke her neck. She was fifty.

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 human body. The dancer will not belong to any nation but to all humanity."
–Isadora Duncan

No comments:

Post a Comment

The Photograph in the Music Box

April 15, 1912

“They recovered two children that had been in first class. One was identified as Loraine Allison. The other was never identified.”

The RMS Titanic sinks after striking an iceberg in the middle of the Atlantic on April 15, 1912, taking thousands with her. Though the majority of the survivors are first and second class, and the majority of the victims third and crew, there were a few casualties among the upper classes that have long since been forgotten with the passage of time.

Among the casualties is a young girl; never claimed, she is later referred to as Victim 281 and buried in Halifax. All that is left of this innocent girl is a fading photograph in a music box buried in the wall of an apartment building in Manhattan- discovered nearly a century later by Shaynee Wilcox, the daughter of the new tenants. Armed with only the faded photograph of the young girl, Shaynee’s determined to discover
her true identity, and finally lay to rest the spirit of one of the Titanic’s youngest victims. As she uncovers clue after clue, Shaynee soon discovers that, not only does the girl have a link to the Titanic sinking, but she also has a link to Shaynee herself.

The Romantic Egotists

“I grew up among the great artists of Paris- Ernest Hemingway and his wife, Hadley; Ezra Pound and William Faulkner, Picasso, Gertrude Stein and her lover, Alice Toklas, and
of course my parents Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.”

It is with these very words, that Frances “Scottie” Fitzgerald takes us back to those long ago nights in Paris; when the
world was still recovering from the destruction of the Great War, when Russia was trying to reassemble the shattered pieces of itself after the bloody fall of the Romanov dynasty and Germany was allowing a man called Hitler to start taking control.

In Paris, the wave of painters, writers, dancers and playwrights’ crashes upon its shores like the Allies upon the European coast. Sex, drugs and alcohol run the streets of grand ol’ Paris, corrupting the mind and setting in motion the wheels of rebellion. It is here, in Paris, at 27 Rue de Fleurus, that a group of expatriate Americans meet and begin turning out some of the greatest literature, art and dance of the twentieth century. The child of the couple forever known as the “Romantic Egotists”- the real beautiful and damned- Scottie tries
hard to come into her own during those muggy Paris nights, despite the constant push and pull of her mother’s erratic behavior and her father’s egotistic criticisms. Here, among the sting of smoke and smell of alcohol, surrounded by lust, love and sex, young Scottie sips her first taste of jealousy, and
discovers the cost of being famous. Into this world, Frances Fitzgerald is thrust, a silent witness to the trials, tribulations, darkness and light of a generation defined as forever “Lost.”

The Sound of Sickness

"Sickness has returned.
Cover your ears and hold your breath.
Breathing in could result in death."

Alexi Michaels has been surrounded by Tuberculosis his entire life. With his mother, he places docent at the Waverly Hills Sanitarium to tourists in Hawaiian shirts and flip-flops, telling them the history of this sad and disturbing chapter in Kentucky's history.

That same evening, while taking a private night tour of the decaying building, Alexi meets Marit, a fourteen-year-old girl who resides at the Sanitarium while she slowly dies from TB. She's watched and waited for Alexi to arrive, spending decades within Waverly's rotting walls, a spiritual shell of the girl she once was.

Over time, Alexi begins to win Marit's trust, and using a series of family photographs, Marit tells him of her unfortunate story. She knows all the secrets and stories of the hospital, including those of her unlucky family members- both hospital resident and worker.

But Marit has a secret. A secret that sent her to an early grave. A secret she's willing to share with Alexi if he gives her something in return.

Something that, to Marit- like every other patient at Waverly Hills- is worth more than its weight in gold.