DUNCAN, ISADORA (1878-1927), American dancer, was born at San Francisco (Calif.), on May 27, 1878. She began her career as a girl of 17 at Daly's theatre, New York, where she danced the part of a fairy in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Her early years were full of poverty and difficulty. With only the sum of $150, the Duncans went to England in a cattle boat; and in London and Paris, before recognition was won, they nearly starved.
Isadora had already conceived the thought of interpretative dancing to awaken the world to the grace and meaning of nature dancing, spiritual expression flowing into the channels of the body. She spent hours studying the Greek vases in the Louvre. Then she danced in Paris, Budapest, Florence and Berlin. Later, amid the ruins of the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens, she meditated on the dances of Hellas. In that atmosphere she further worked out her ideas of the dance evolved directly from nature, through the rhythmic movement of wind and wave and the winged flight of bird and bee. Her ideas were so old that, to an over-civilized world accustomed to the artificiality of the ballet and much dressed dramatic dancing, they were startlingly new. Even the Russian ballet through Michel Fokine at home and Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes abroad was influenced by Isadora Duncan's ideas and technique after she visited St. Petersburg in 1905. In 1904 she established a school for classical dancing near Berlin, where she taught her art to girls who later became known as the Duncan dancers; another in Paris in 1914 ; and another in Moscow in 1921, which was closed in the spring of 1928. Isadora Duncan and her sister had a school near Tarrytown.
When she returned to her native country in 1908 the United States was puzzled and divided itself into enthusiasts and critics. But later the stage of the Metropolitan opera house itself was hers for her performances. In April 1915, with the dancers from her Paris school she danced for a month at the Century theatre, trying to interest Americans in a project for a school in her own land. One was conducted for a short time near Tarrytown, N.Y., by her sister, Elizabeth, who had much to do with the display of Isadora's genius. Conventionally minded people were estranged, however, by her erratic actions, which became more marked after an automobile tragedy in Paris, 1913, when her two children, Deidre and Patrick, with their nurse were drowned.
She became an ardent advocate of the Soviet revolution in Russia and accepted Lenin's invitation (1921) to open the Moscow school of dancing in the palace of a former nobleman, which was given to her. Her marriage with a Russian, Sergei Essenin, ten years younger than herself, the difficulties at Ellis Island in 1922 on re-entering the United States with him, the episode of the red scarf waved during a performance on the stage of the Symphony Hall, Boston (Oct. 22, 1922), brought on her such trials that she left America vowing never to return.
The last years of her life were pitiably tragic-in debt and diffi culty in Germany and France. Her many friends rallied to estab lish the Duncan memorial dance school at Neuilly, raising in all 400,00o francs. She was killed in an automobile accident at Nice on Sept. 14, 1927. Her work to a certain extent was carried on by her adopted daughters, Anna and Irma who danced, and by Elizabeth Duncan who had a school near Salzburg.
See her autobiography My Life (1927) ; Shaemas O'Sheel's "Isadora," New Republic (Oct. 26, 1927) ; Jose Clara's "Isadora Duncan," L'Art decoratif (1913) ; Le Ballet Contemporain, ouvrage edite avec la collaboration de L. Bakst. Traduction francaise de M. D. Calvocoressi V .' Svetlow, pseud. of Valerian Yakovlevich Ivchenko; and Charles H. Caffin's "Henry Matisse and Isadora Duncan," Camera Work 0909).