Isadora Duncan Research Paper

With a fervent heart and free spirit, the passion embodied in Isadora Duncan extended far beyond the boarders of dance and even beyond the barriers of time. Her mere existence was an insurgent force against the rigidity of ballet as she disregarded the idea of pointe shoes and a corset, and began dancing barefoot as a profound form of personal expression. Having grown up in the United States, the time period in which Isadora was in her prime completely rejected originality. The basis of her career, and her entire life as a whole, was built on the fight against conventionalism. She was never to be a carbon copy of the world around her. Even through the painful tragedies her life went on to reveal, including a vastly unfulfilling marriage and …show more content…
Before Isadora was even born, her father deserted their family leaving her mother to teach piano lessons to support her family. Not only did this aid their family and provide them with the necessary resources to sustain a good quality of life, but it also instilled in Isadora just how beneficial and nourishing art can be to a person. She and her siblings frequently took part in poetry recitation and dramatic readings at family gatherings. These art explorations led Isadora to wander off into the fine art of dance. She created her own style that made the most sense to her given that she had not been classically trained in the art of ballet. In accordance with her own accounts, Isadora, as a six year old began teaching the younger neighborhood children in droves and therefore beginning her own school of dance. Her technique in teaching included a sort of arm-waving dance, which is largely inspired by the time she spent by the seashore near her childhood home. The rock of the waves truly resonated with her soul and inspired her free-range of motion. This was so well received by the mothers of the children she taught, that they in turn began to offer Isadora money to continue to teach their children her innovative art form. Dancing for her was not just a way to generate money for her struggling, single-parent family - it was an …show more content…
Not one movement in her repertoire was exceptionally difficult, though it could not be easily replicated because a great aspect of her dancing was the breathtaking way she executed even the simplest of moves. She spent excessive amounts of time in her personal studio “seeking that dance which might be the divine expression of the human spirit through the medium of the body’s movement.” (Duncan, My Life, 75) Simply, dance was to be an eloquent execution of the divine marriage between the spirit and the body. As a continued layer of her ideology, as well as commonly accepted ideology in the modern dance community, the body also reacts very much so the surrounding Earth. The gravitational pulls and the magnitude of the atmosphere encircling the dancer would generate a reaction to allow free movement. The art she studied, the poems she idolized, and the music she would listen to would inspire these dances and encourage a story. Later down the road, the devastating events that occurred in Isadora’s life would prove to be fodder for further inspiration for her expressive dancing. In the quite unfortunate event that Isadora’s children, Deidre and Patrick, drowned following a freak motor accident, Isadora conveyed her devastation in dances such as Marche Funebre and Mother which allowed others to relate to her on such a personal level. This in