In 1906 the City by the Bay would experience an earthquake of unimaginable devastation, but prior to that San Francisco gave birth to another tempestuous earthquake in 1877 when Angela Isadora Duncan was born, a human earthquake that in time would shake up the world of dance and bring it into modern times with flair and panache that was insanely creative and all Isadora!
Her parents fell on hard times financially and were divorced in 1889. Isadora moved with her mother to Oakland across the bay and as young as six years old was giving dancing lessons to some of the neighborhood children! She was also attending school full time but found the curriculum dull and Oakland even duller and wanted more than anything in her teen years wanted to escape from the city and to the stage. Evan at her early age she followed a different drummer to the art of dance and began teaching the other students movements that were purely improvisational in an anything goes manner.
By 1896 she had left Oakland, and where most adventurous types went west, she headed east to Chicago, America's Second City landing a job with a dance troupe where her unorthodox approach to the art form attracted the attention of the theatrical gods of New York City. What the gods got in exchange was a rogue artist with her own ideas that clashed with the Titans of Theater on the Great White Way so rather than fight the status quo she gave her regards to Broadway in 1898 and headed across the pond to the more liberal enclave of the arts in Europe. No more pantomine theatrics for this girl.
London was her first stop and she found work dancing for private shows for wealthy patrons. She visited the museums and art galleries absorbing all she could of form and function in ancient Greek arts she found in the British Museum. She loved the costuming of the Greek idealized women, especially with the flowing tunics and sheer capes and yes, in the bas relief bare breasts. In time with the money she had earned and saved, she opened her own studio by renting space where she could create and develope her ideas of ideal dance and how they should be performed. London was only one stepping stone in her quest for dance perfection, but Paris was next on her list. The Left Bank and arts flourished in this Republic that gave birth to the Louvre, the paintings of the great artists of the the world, the cafe's and their literary pre-Beat Gen intellectualism, and the great European architecture on display along the Seine as well as the King Kong of Gothic Architecture, Victor Hugo's Notre Dame with it's inspriational gothic spires.
Her creativity was a raging inferno by 1902 when it came to dance innovations, and as the new century was cutting loose the horse and buggy as it ushered in the industrial age another chance meeting took her on a path that led to worldwide acclaim. It was Loie Fuller, a serious grande dame of the dance arts, say Isadora perform and persuaded her to join her on a tour of Europe to introduce her new style of dance that the world would soon embrace. This tour was so sucessful it was extended to North and South America and Isadora was now on the A List, a rock star in sheer tunic who teased the audience with her grace and style and captivated the male species with her beauty, as well as attracting a legion of faithful lesbian groupies who wanted to camp it up in her camp. Visual artists who were awed by her performance and style such as Auguste Ronin of "Thinker" fame created works based on Isadore herself!
After her triumphant return to Europe in 1904, she opened a studio in Germany, as she still was not pleased with the art of dance as it was. So it was that her first "group" the Isadorables was formed that included along with Isadora seven young nymphs and protegee's who would spread the Isadora gospel far and wide. While the 7 Apostles of Isadora Christ were proselytising across the land, she herself opened a new school back in the the City of Lights but had to close soon after. It seems World War One could care less who was doing leg lifts in the ballet studio, Germany was hungry for France and it's appetite had to be satiated.
On the sexual frontier she was a pioneer as well. She could not only turn a man into a quivering mass of jello with her beauty, but in bed could contort into a sexual pretzel. She seemed to favor married men, as there were no promises to keep or great expectations, (had to steal that line..I love it!) and she managed even with her hectic schedule to fornicate and give birth to three children who had tragic deaths that colored Isadora's outlook on life as she eventually took her dance over to the dark side of creative expression, almost a forerunner of the dark, moody, brooding German expressionist films of the Fritz Lang school of Metropolis and Peter Lorre pedophilia! Her first two children drowned in Paris when the car they were driving in along the Seine went in to the river along with their nurse. No one survived. In 1914 at the outbreak of war, another child, a son by yet another unmarried lover inpregnated her and the son to be was not as he died during childbirth.
By 1920, the war was over in Europe and in the former Tsarist nation of Russia, the Bolsheviks had scored in the win column and were still getting there revolutionary feet wet to form the perfect Utopia. Many from the western democracies who had read a little Karl Mark and Joseph Engels were eager to toss in their lot with them to forge a new world of equality for all. Among them journalist John Reed, (thats another story) and Isadora Duncan. It was in Moscow where she was eager to start a dance school or what I call The Bi-sexual School of Bolshevik Ballet, that she met and fell in love with Sergey Yesenin. She was 43 and he was 23. It was a marriage of convienince as he wanted to go to America which they did. Unfortunately, coming home to America in the 1920's with a Soviet husband only led to FBI surveillance and accusations of both of them sharing a communist philosophy. In fact they were both branded as Bolsheviks! I guess that is worse than being a communist. A communist has a flag with a hammer and sickle but a Bolshevik must have pamphlets and bombs!
Isadora was a bit of minx not only in bed but on stage where her temper over her politics erupted one evening while appearing in Boston. While on tour in the city she extolled the virtues of bi-sexuality and on stage one night in response to her politics and to flaunt her freedom of expression she came out on stage in see through flowing gown which she lowered to her waist and bared her ample breasts for all to feast on or gasp in horror, whichever they preferred. I would have feasted on them, literally and figuratively. If that wasn't enough of a "red flag" she removed her red scarf and waved it to the audience yelling. "This is Red, and so am I!" She was then as they say...Banned In Boston!
It was now time to leave America again...the press was full of Isadora the bi-sexual bolshevik, and her husband Sergey was young, and not strong by any stretch of Isadora's imagination, and she made no bones about it..she was in charge and in fact always said, "men do what I tell them to do!" They left for the Soviet Union as fast as they could and she told the press as they were boarding their ship.."I'll never return to America again!" A promise she kept. Back in the USSR, things fell apart, Isadora started having lesbian affairs and Sergey, his manhood stripped or so he thought in his Russian manliness way committed suicide in 1924. Isadora now was on a new path of lesbian love attractions and liasons that would put her in the fast track company of Talullah Bankhead and Greta Garbo.
Her most famous lesbian lover was Mercedes de Acosta who was famous in her way for walking around in mans pants, pointed mens boots, huge hats and a cape. She was the goddess of Goth before Goth caught on keeping her face as white as a ghost with pancake, her lips flaming red as the fires of hell and jet black sexy hair greased up and slicked back. One of her lovers, Talullah Bankhead referred to her as Coutess Dracula! On of Mercedes circle, a part time journalist for the art world referred to her as that "furious lesbian" and she herself always said, "I can get any woman from any man I want" There was some truth in that as you will find in the later writings of Alice B. Toklas who said, "She's ahd the most important women of the 20th century in bed with her!" She also had a fixation on Greta Garbo who had take out a restraining order on this "sexual psychopath" Isadora found comfort in her for a time, but was diverse enough to have numerous girlfriends, mainly young dance students she would seduce for her pleasure, and along with men, boys really in their twenties that she also craved to eat alive in bed, sometimes along with one of her young female students and watch them make love to each other and then to her.
Her fast life was coming to the end of the road, literally while living in France where in 1927 as Lucky Lindy was crossing the Atlantic in the Spirit of St.Louis, she was riding in a car at breakneck speed along a French country road. One of the long scarves she was famous for was blowing in the wind and got caught in the spokes of the rear wheel, strangling her to death with the fashion statement she had helped popularize.
All in all she founded dance schools in the US and Europe and there are probably a new gen of Isadorables out there somewhere in the shadows waiting for the footlights to fire up. Her technique was out of the box, away from the rigidity of post-modern ballet and more in tune with natural movements and natural environments. The body movements were the expression of the human spirit and dancing in bare feet, sometimes bare breasted were more in keeping with classic dance of forgotten civilizations that were more "earthy" in philosophy. The ocean and it's movements also exemplified the free form of her dance technique, the ebb and flow of the body and tide as one movement, not seperate.
Call her what you will, but I find Isadora Adorable, along with her Isadorables. She was brash, innovative and had more balls then most men, or even Mercedes de Acosta. She was not a drag but a brilliant light on stage and in life. She is not only the Goddess of Modern Dance, but she is my favorite Bi-Sexual Ballet Dancing Bolshevik! I mean..if you have to bed a Red, why not Isadora?