Did you know that the invention of modern Dance came from a woman who rejected the formalities and frigidness of ballet?
Isadora Duncan is dubbed the “Mother of Modern Dance,” and this is how she earned that title.
Isadora was born in the late 1870s in San Francisco, California. She was born into a family with a great appreciation for the arts. Her parents divorced when she was young, and she moved with her mother and siblings to Oakland, California.
By age 10, Isadora dropped out of School and began teaching dance to local children to help her family make money.
As she got older and kept dancing, she realized that she loved freestyle forms of dance and improvisation, something she would use for the rest of her career.
When she was around 18-19 years old, she started traveling to audition and dance for theater companies, eventually Augustin Daly’s company in New York City.
She also took ballet classes but found them disappointing because of their rigid structure and routine.
Isadora couldn’t stand the corsets and shoes one had to wear for ballet as well. She wanted her body and movement to be free.
Isadora moved to London in 1898 to give private performances of her preferred style of dancing to wealthy people that hired her. Eventually, she could afford a studio, which she used to create more elaborate dance routines.
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She took an eye-opening trip to Paris around this time, visiting iconic museums and exhibitions like the Louvre. It was there and in other European museums like the British Museum where she got to study ancient Greek art, which often portrayed people moving in the way she preferred.
Isadora continued traveling and dancing for American and European audiences, making an impact everywhere she went with her distinctive style and movement. In 1904, she opened her first dance school in Berlin, Germany. Her true mission was to educate young dancers and teach them her unique outlook on dance.
Six of her students created a dance group called the “Isadorables.” Isadora ended up adopting each of the six girls and gave them her last name. How sweet is that? Besides the six girls she adopted, Isadora had three children out of wedlock. Tragically, two died in a car accident in 1913, and the third died shortly after he was born.
In 1914, Isadora moved from Berlin to New York City and opened a school there. She also put on elaborate productions at the Century Theatre.
In 1921, Isadora traveled to the Soviet Union to open a school in Moscow, Russia. She did not stay for long but left the school to be run by one of her adopted daughters, Irma.
Unfortunately, Isadora died too soon, at 50, in a horrific car accident in Nice, France, in 1927. She was cremated, and her ashes were spread near her children’s graves in Paris.
Although Isadora’s death was tragic and sudden, her legacy in the dance world lives on. Three of her adopted daughters continued to teach at her schools and carry on her iconic dance style. She was inducted into the National Museum of Dance and Hall of Fame in 1987 and has inspired some of today’s most famous dance teachers.
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