Isadora Duncan - 1877 - 1927 - was an American artist of movement and costume who freed women from the constraints of traditional dance forms, especially ballet.
Angela Isadora Duncan was born in San Francisco, California, says Wikipedia, the youngest of the four children of Joseph Charles Duncan, a banker, mining engineer and connoisseur of the arts, and Mary Isadora Gray, youngest daughter of Thomas Gray, a California state senator.
In her early years, Duncan did attend school but, finding it to be constricting to her individuality, she dropped out. Owing to an untimely divorce and reverse in her family's fortune, there was no extra money. Both she and her sister gave dance classes to local children to earn extra money.
In 1895 Duncan became part of Augustin Daly's theater company in New York. She soon became disillusioned with the form. In 1899 she decided to move to Europe, first to London and then a year later, to Paris. Within two years she achieved both notoriety and success.
The developing Bohemian environment in the Montparnasse section of Paris did not suit her. In 1909 Duncan moved to two large apartments at 5 rue Danton, where she lived on the ground floor and used the first floor for her dance school. Barefoot, dressed in clinging scarves and faux-Grecian tunics, she created a primitivist style of improvisational dance to counter the rigid styles of the time.
She was inspired by the classics, especially Greek myth. She rejected traditional ballet steps to stress improvisation, emotion and the human form. Duncan believed that classical ballet, with its strict rules of posture and formation, was "ugly and against nature"; she gained a wide following that allowed her to set up a school to teach.
Duncan became so famous that she inspired artists and authors to create sculpture, jewelry, poetry, novels, photographs, watercolors, prints and paintings of her.
When the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées was built in 1913, her likeness was carved in its bas-relief over the entrance by sculptor Antoine Bourdelle and included in painted murals of the nine muses by Maurice Denis in the auditorium.
Throughout her career Duncan did not like the commercial aspects of public performance, regarding touring, contracts and other practicalities as distractions from her real mission: the creation of beauty and the education of the young. A gifted, if unconventional pedagogue, she was the founder of three schools dedicated to teaching her dance philosophy to groups of young girls (a brief effort to include boys was unsuccessful).
Both in her professional and private lives, Duncan flouted traditional mores and morality.
She was though to be bisexual. She alluded to her Communism during her last United States tour, in 1922-23; Duncan waved a red scarf and bared her breast on stage in Boston, proclaiming, "This is red! So am I!".
Duncan bore two children, both out of wedlock.
Duncan's fondness for flowing scarves was the cause of her death in a freak automobile accident in Nice, France, on the night of September 14, 1927, at the age of 50. Her long scarf, hand-painted silk from the Russian-born artist Roman Chatov, became enmeshed in the wheel of the auto. She was thrown from the open car to her death.
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