Prelude

Celebrating a modern dance icon, interrogating her legacy, can be an unsettling proposition. You may not be quite prepared for what you find. It turned out that nothing could assuage my own distress at Isadora Duncan’s absence from the hilltop called Kopanos that she once called home: not the twenty-second film clip of her that is the only one extant. Neither a present-day rendering of her choreography, even by those whose transmission came in a direct line, nor a contemporary reflection on the elements and significance of her achievement. All of these seemed—and yes, it is unfair to compare anything to a myth, but there you have it—pale in comparison to the imagined magnitude of Her.

Why would I have come to feel this way? The only time I danced an Isadora piece (1970s sculpture garden, filmy costumes) it seemed an embarrassing anachronism. We had not made any connection between her search for “natural movement” and our own investigations of “release” and “embodiment.” Isadora can be perceived as an anachronism in the contemporary dance scene. The breathy waves of the movement appear quaint today when rough and tumble, thud and edge prevail. But her essential project as I understand it was to move the viewer. And, reading account after account by witnesses whose lives seemed transformed, illuminated by watching her, I only wanted to count myself among that number.

We do want, and need, heroes. Isadora today seems a tarnished hero, her myth in her day carefully crafted, allying her dancing mission with philosophies extolling human potential and nobility, and with music imbued with epic grandeur. She put the capital letters into “Dance as High Art” through her diatribes on the subject.

It is so rare to be deeply moved by dance. From the traces she left it seems that Isadora was about exactly that. It was her reason for being: to hold up a mirror to us as flesh and blood humans: utterly fallible, but still, noble.