Many saw a glorious vision for the future in Isadora’s choreography. Isadora was a champion in the struggle for women‘s rights. Shocking some audience members and inspiring others, Isadora posed a challenge to the prevailing orthodoxies of her time. She was determined to “dance a different dance,” telling her own life story through abstract, universal expressions of the human condition. Her dances were born of the impulse to embrace life’s bittersweet challenges, meeting destiny and fate head-on in her own whirlwind journey, filled with both tragedy and ecstasy. Stepping out of the dance studio with a vision of the dance of the future, Isadora embraced artists, philosophers, and writers as her teachers and guides.Īccording to Isadora, the development of her dance was a natural phenomenon – not an invention, but a rediscovery of the classical principles of beauty, motion, and form. Duncan shed the restrictive corsets of the Victorian era and broke away from the vocabulary of the ballet. Isadora elevated the dance to a high place among the arts, returning the discipline to its roots as a sacred art. With free-flowing costumes, bare feet, and loose hair, she took to the stage inspired by the ancient Greeks, the music of classical composers, the wind and the sea. She brought into being a totally new way to dance, and it is this unique gift of Isadora Duncan that the Isadora Duncan Dance Foundation wishes to preserve, present, and protect.ĭancer, adventurer, and ardent defender of the free spirit, Isadora Duncan is one of the most enduring influences on contemporary culture and can be credited with inventing what came to be known as Modern Dance. Her style of dancing eschewed the rigidity of ballet and she championed the notion of free-spiritedness coupled with the high ideals of ancient Greece: beauty, philosophy, and humanity. ![]() Known as the “Mother of Modern Dance,” Isadora Duncan was a self-styled revolutionary whose influence spread from American to Europe and Russia, creating a sensation everywhere she performed. While still occasionally coaching younger dancers, in 1996 Gamson returned to painting, an earlier interest.Isadora Duncan (1877-1927) was an American pioneer of dance and is an important figure in both the arts and history. Gamson’s own choreography revealed the dynamic influence of her predecessors, and she passed on her knowledge of their work to younger performers. She celebrated the twentieth anniversary of her solo career in 1994. ![]() Later, she added the solos of Eleanor King, an American modern dancer who had performed with the Humphrey-Weidman Company. Her performances of Summer Dance, Pastorale, and the Witch Dance brought her additional critical acclaim. To generations of dance lovers, for whom Duncan was a legend previously accessible only through writings and artistic representation, Gamson imbued the dances with a musicality and dynamic spirit that, while never intending to mimic Duncan, gave some sense of what was essential in Duncan’s choreography and the apparent spontaneity of her performance.įollowing this success, Gamson began work on the solos of another pioneer of modern dance, German expressionist Mary Wigman. Through her extraordinary performances, Gamson gave audiences the opportunity to understand and appreciate the craftsmanship of Duncan’s choreography, forever doing away with the rumor that Duncan’s dances were improvised. The Duncan pieces made an enormous impression. In 1974, at the American Theater Laboratory in New York City, she performed Duncan’s Water Study (Schubert), Five Waltzes (Brahms), Dance of the Furies (Gluck), and Étude (Scriabin), as well as her own work. In the early 1970s, Gamson resumed her studies with Levien, for there was something in Duncan’s work she had not found in any other kind of dancing.
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