Isadora Duncan and Modernism
By Karen Uminski. Copyright
2007.
Isadora Duncan
(1877-1927) was the mother of modern dance, but was she a Modernist? Is it
enough to have created a new form of art dance? There is some debate about
whether to place Duncan within the Modernist movement or more properly
assign her to the Romantic movement. (Daly, DID, p. 209) If Modernism is
more than just a time period, but also a distinct movement with certain
aesthetic commonalities, then this is a legitimate question. The Romantic
movement is generally said to end around the middle of the nineteenth
century, so 1900 might be considered late for a Romanticist. However,
change comes more slowly to dance than to other art forms. Painting the way
no one has ever painted before or writing in a way no one has ever been
written before is daring and can be radical, but painters and writers have
the luxury, if they choose, of making their work public and then not being
physically present for the critical or mocking reactions. Dance does not
allow this because the artist’s medium is his or her own body. So perhaps
Duncan is a late Romantic. This would not be completely out of the realm of
possibility. (Horst, p 16) It is a question that will be examined by
looking at her views about the body, particularly the female body.
We should learn that the
body of woman has through all ages itself been the symbol of highest Beauty.
(Duncan, IS, p. 41)
If my art is symbolic of any
one thing it is symbolic of the freedom of women and her emancipation for
the hidebound conventions. (Duncan, IS, p. 48)
This great wave movement
runs through all Nature, for when we look over the waters to the long line
of hills on the shore, they seem also to have the great undulating movement
of the sea. (Duncan, AD, p. 68)
The Greeks in all their
painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, dance and tragedy evolved
their movements from the movement of nature. (Duncan, AD, p. 58)
Thus, the body itself must be forgotten, for it is only a harmonious and
well adapted instrument whose movements express not only the movements of
the body, as in gymnastics, but also the thoughts and feelings of a soul.
(Duncan, AD, p. 83)
By the end of the
nineteenth century, intellectuals were disillusioned with language itself.
The culture of language, of the intellect, was distrusted and interest
shifted to the body and the “truth” of physicality. (Segal, p.15) One
result was the revival of pantomime as a popular form of entertainment. In
fact, one of Duncan’s first jobs in the theater was as a pantomime actress.
The era’s popular silent films were yet another form of pantomime.
One of the
features of Modernism which developed from this distrust of language is its
“extraordinary…preoccupation with physicality” (Segel, p.1). Tim Armstrong
states it more forcefully in Modernism: A Cultural History when he
says, “The body is central to modernism.” (p. 65.) There are many reasons
for this. By the middle of the nineteenth century, medical technology had
developed to the point where physicians were able to safely penetrate the
body, see into it and hear into it; instead of the external observations
available previously. “[A] doctor in 1800 would listen to a case history,
with examination by touch; the live body could not be penetrated safely. A
little later the same doctor might subscribe to phrenology, which let
interior states be ‘read’ off from lumps on the head” still external.
(Armstrong, MTB, p. 2) This changed when ether was discovered in 1841. It,
along with antiseptics, allowed physicians to cut open living patients for
surgery. In 1895, X-rays were discovered, and they allowed physicians to see
into a living patient. “The body could be penetrated by a barrage of
devices: the stethoscope, ophthalmoscope, laryngoscope, speculum, (and)
high-intensity light, X-rays” (Armstrong, MTB, p. 2)
This ability to
penetrate the body led to an anxiety about the body; “modernists with quite
different attitudes to social technological modernity saw the body as the
locus of anxiety, even crisis; as requiring an intervention” (Armstrong, MTB,
p.4.) Illnesses caused by living in the modern world, or wearing modern
clothes, were prevalent and anxiety-provoking. F. Matthias Alexander
(1869-1955), the developer of the Alexander Technique, summed up one theory
for this anxiety about the unhealthy body, “evolution had introduced a
dangerous gap between the body and consciousness” (Armstrong, MTB, p. 107.)
Others would argue that the split between body and consciousness (or soul)
was caused not by evolution but by Christian values which for hundreds of
years required a denial of the body and bodily needs in order to purify the
soul. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) writes in Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
“It was the sick and decaying who despised the body and earth and invented
the heavenly realm and the redemptive drops of blood.” (Nietzsche, p. 144)
The form of dance
which Duncan created consists of four major principles. First, the body,
which is the “the first principle of
any aesthetics, for our
fundamental understanding of proportion and symmetry
arises from our experience of
embodiment” (Daly, DDT, p4,) must be free from modern restrains,
especially from fashionable women’s clothing, because in its natural state
the body is the highest form of beauty. Next, the free body, in order to
create beautiful movements which harmonize with nature, must recognize and
respond to gravity. Third, movements must flow through the body, and one
movement must lead to the next. Finally, the natural body must be a strong,
well conditioned vehicle for the soul.
According to
Duncan, her first dance teacher was nature, specifically the coast of San
Francisco, California where she grew up. It is no wonder then that the
first three of her dance principles: the body must be free to move
naturally, it must move in with recognition of gravity, and every movement
must flow into the next, come together in her concept of the wave. “My
first idea of movement, of dance, certainly came from the rhythm of the
waves.” (Duncan, ML, p. 13) Recognizing gravity and working with it
continues to play a major part in the development of modern dance even
today.
Her second
teacher was ancient Greek art. For the ancient Greeks, dance was a high
religious art, and this is where Duncan wished it to be restored. She found
in these images not only inspiration for what dance can be again, but also
the route to the highest form of beauty. It is through the ancient Greeks
that Duncan found the connection between art and beauty. (Daly, DID, p.101)
To move the way the waves of water, grain, light, or sound (Duncan, AD, p.
69) women must be freed from the conventions which restrained them. This is
where Duncan connects to the dress reform movement. The body is eternal and
should only be changed by evolution, not the vagaries of fashion. “The
beauty of the human form is not chance. One cannot change it by dress…It is
because the human form is not and cannot be at the mercy of fashion or the
taste of an epoch that the beauty of woman is eternal.” (Duncan, AD, pp.
78-79)
Fashion has
always been a harsh mistress, and dress reform movements found an audience
even before Duncan’s birth. The dress of the early part of the century
caused just as many health problems as the corsets that followed. Worn year
round, wispy, neoclassical gowns (figure 1) often became wet and cold and
lead to many illnesses.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, however,
the fashion for extremely small waists and exaggerated hips and breasts had
taken hold (figure 2). To achieve this look, the following was required: a corset, tightly
laced; many petticoats (weighing as much as fifty pounds) banded tightly at
the waist, putting pressure on internal organs; tight boots, making it
difficult to walk and cutting off circulation to the feet; cotton stockings
held up by tight bands on the thighs, which cut off circulation to the legs;
and, finally skirts with trains, which dragged along the ground and
collected all kinds of dirt and filth. It is easy to fall into the trap of
thinking that these fashions affected only middle- and upper- class women
because they were wealthy enough to follow such fashions,
but in fact, as is true today, even working-class women followed the
dictates of high fashion. Before fashion became an industry, women made
their own clothes, or had them made by a local dressmaker. Patterns existed
for corsets, so we know that they were accessible to even the poorest of
women. In fact P. and R.A. Mactagart, in their research, revealed that even
the poorest of English peasants wore stays (corsets) which were not covered
by an outer garment. (Cunningham, p.22)
The corset was
not the only harmful garment, however. Physician Mary J. Safford-Blake was
present at the post mortems of several female Austrian construction workers
who died in an accident. She described severe internal damage done not by
corsets but by the very tight bands worn around the waists of these women
since childhood. While she expected to find the internal organs of these
women to be normal because they did not wear corsets, she was quite
surprised to find in each woman deformities of the liver, ribs, spleen and
uterus. (Woolson, p. 40)
Freeing the body was a real requirement for
women to participate fully in society, to knock down, as it were, the wall
between the public sphere and private spheres of life. Duncan recognized
this basic truth. “First draw me the form of a woman as it is in Nature.
And now draw me a form of a woman in a modern corset and the satin slippers
used by our modern [ballet] dancers. Now do you see that the movement that
would conform to one figure would
be perfectly impossible for the other?”
(Duncan, AD, p. 69) For her, corsets, petticoats, and tight or toe shoes
would not have enabled natural and, therefore, beautiful movements. “If the
true dance is appropriate to the most beautiful human form, then the false
dance is the opposite of this definition: that is, a movement which conforms
to a deformed human body.” (Duncan, IS, p. 45)
One of Duncan’s
lifelong projects was to properly educate children by opening schools for
dance in Europe, America, and, Russia (where her school was sponsored by
Constantin Stanislavski) which met with varying success. She wished to save
young girls from what she saw as the plague of ballet and modern clothing,
“Their tender little bodies already [are] forced into tight bodices and baby
corsets.” (Duncan, AD, p. 73) Baby corsets? This sounds incredible to
twenty-first century ears, but, in fact, the following was reported by Mercy
B. Jackson, M.D. of an 1874 trip she took to a corset manufacturer, “She
[the owner of the company] began by showing me the tiniest article I ever
saw in the shape of a corset, saying that was for babies.” (Woolson, p. 78)
Many mothers dressed their infants and young daughters in corsets in order
to “train” their bodies to take the corset as adults (usually around fifteen
or sixteen years old.) Indeed, women do not naturally take to the corset.
Duncan’s
re-thinking the body and finding news ways of working with it was part of a
larger, Modernist cultural wave brought on by medical and scientific
advances. As Jonathan Crary
observed, “Any effective account of modern culture must confront the ways in
which modernism, rather than being a reaction against or transcendence of
processes of scientific and economic rationalization, is inseparable from
them.” (Armstrong, MTB, p.4)
François
Delsarte (1811-1871), an important figure in the physical culture
movement who influenced Duncan, was born in France and entered the Paris
Conservatory for formal vocal training in 1829. After six months there,
he left, saying that his studies had ruined his voice. He also did not
approve of the acting training at the Conservatory which he felt was too
artificial and stilted. He began an independent study of the mechanisms
of the voice which lead him to a study of the mechanisms of the body. (Ruyter,
p. 4) The system he developed began as a way to train actors and
singers, but it soon expanded once it was brought to America by his
disciple James Morrison Steele Mackaye (1842-1894).
It was most likely
a Steele Mackaye curriculum that Duncan, like many other young women,
experienced while attending Delsarte classes in her youth. The Delsarte
movement techniques combine the spiritual with the physical. There are
three zones of the body: the head, which equals the intellect; the torso
which equals the emotions; and the lower limbs which equal the physical.
There are also three “Great Orders of Movement”: oppositions, in which
two parts move away form each other; parallelisms, in which two body
parts move together; and successions, in which a single movement that
flows through the body. Delsarte and Steele Mackaye’s primary
contribution to physical culture was the recognition that outward
movements of the body are signs of inner states. (Anderson, AWB, pp.
13-15) To quote Ann Daly, “These many systems became subsumed with a
popular movement dubbed ‘physical culture’ which, as the words imply,
forged an essential tie (upon which Duncan seized) between body and soul.” (DID, p. 127) It is ironic that
Duncan’s “natural body” is one that is highly conditioned through
gymnastics and other forms of exercise.
Duncan’s focus on
the body stands in sharp contrast to another pioneer of modern dance.
Loie Fuller (1862-1928) expanded the concept of the music hall “skirt
dance”, the manipulation of the skirt in rhythmic and often salacious ways.
Fuller added more silk fabric to the skirt and expanded it into a full
shift dress cascading downward and outward from the shoulders. At the
same time, she danced with a large cape or veil attached to long dowels
she held in her hands, thus extending her arms, not working with the
limits of her body, but using prosthetics to expand it. Her use of
technology continued with multicolored lights that flashed and projected
onto her costume as she spun and manipulated the fabric. She was known
to create realistic images of waves, flowers, and fire on the vaudeville and dance hall stages in Europe (primarily at
the Folies Bergeres in Paris).
While “La Loie”, as the French lovingly
called her, introduced Duncan to European audiences, their differences
could not be more striking. “She did not, like Isadora Duncan, bare her
soul and body, nor did she glorify the body…Instead, she glorified the triumphs of her time; the
ingenuity of the mind placed at the service of the body, the
transcendence of daily concepts of time and darkness, the dignity of
women, the power of the machine.” (Mazo, p. 34) Because of her use of
technology, Fuller is always identified as a Modernist. And while she
is credited with pioneering modern dance, she is not credited with
giving birth to modern dance because her dancing wasn’t distinctive
enough to spark a new movement. Her work was much more about the
movement of the costume than of the body. Also, since her work was
largely confined to the dance hall, she would not be accepted as a
“high” Modern artist.
Some may
argue that Duncan belongs to the anti-technological movement of
Modernism (a movement noted in the survey by Peter Nicholls see
Armstrong, MTB p. 4) if we are to think of corsets and waist bands as
technology. However, as Carrie J. Preston notes
Performers and
artists during the period, however, did not adhere to assumed
antagonisms between spirituality and materiality, human culture and the
machine age, or the soul and the motor. ‘I must place a motor in my
soul,’… [wrote] Isadora Duncan…in her 1927 autobiography, and she
consistently positions her choreography at the juncture of motorized
movement and soulful expression. Her efforts to reimagine spirit through
machine processes are shared by many key figures of modernism, including
the Russian director Constantin Stanislavski and even Marinetti. (p.
273)
Duncan does not reject technology out of hand, but she does acknowledge
that technology did much to harm the bodies of women. The technology of
the corset, which became a much more restrictive garment with the advent
of the Industrial Revolution, is to be railed against as a technology
that deforms the body rather than, through the use of prosthetics,
making it better, stronger, or longer (Fuller); it constricts and
deforms. Men are deformed by war and work (factory and farm accidents,
from which women were not immune), whereas women were deformed by living
a “civilized” life. Duncan reasoned that we should not have to return
to a pre-civilized, primitive state to free the body, but that we can
have the vision to see a free and natural, modern body.
“Man, arrived at the end of civilization,
will have to return to nakedness, not to the unconscious nakedness of
the savage, but to the conscious and acknowledged nakedness of the
mature man…And the movement of this [mature, naked man] will be natural
and beautiful like those of free animals.” (Duncan, AD, p. 55)
Duncan does not reject technology out of hand, but she does acknowledge
that technology did much to harm the bodies of women. The technology of
the corset, which became a much more restrictive garment with the advent
of the Industrial Revolution, is to be railed against as a technology
that deforms the body rather than, through the use of prosthetics,
making it better, stronger, or longer (Fuller); it constricts and
deforms. Men are deformed by war and work (factory and farm accidents,
from which women were not immune), whereas women were deformed by living
a “civilized” life. Duncan reasoned that we should not have to return
to a pre-civilized, primitive state to free the body, but that we can
have the vision to see a free and natural, modern body. “Man,
arrived at the end of civilization, will have to return to nakedness,
not to the unconscious nakedness of the savage, but to the conscious and
acknowledged nakedness of the mature man…And the movement of this
[mature, naked man] will be natural and beautiful like those of free
animals.” (Duncan, AD, p. 55)
For
Duncan, the natural, well conditioned body was the ideal state, because
it allowed the body to move with unfettered inspiration from the soul.
Indeed, this is one of the most important principles of her dance
theory. It is also this discursive space which gives rise to the most
questions concerning Duncan’s Modernity. Duncan, a self-educated woman
like many women of her time, uses Romantic language to describe the
natural body and its relation to the soul. Looking deeper at her ideas,
however, shows a thoroughly modern thinker with affinities to Darwin and
Nietzsche, among others.
Duncan read Nietzsche in 1903, and in his writings she found a kindred
spirit. As Kimerer L. LaMothe rightly notes, “On the pages of
Nietzsche’s texts, multitudes dance.” (p.1) In fact, Duncan writes
approvingly in her essay “Movement is Life” (c.1909), “Nietzsche has
said that he cannot believe in a god that cannot dance. He has also
said, ‘Let that day be considered lost on which we have not danced.’”
(Duncan, AD, p. 77)
Before reading Nietzsche, Duncan’s dances were Apollonian in nature,
seeking Plutonic ideals of purity and balance. Her dance, La
Primavera, which takes its inspiration from Botticelli’s painting
Primavera, is an example of this view of nature. After Nietzsche,
she discovered Dionysian nature. “‘Nature’ was no longer just the
lovely Flora, heralding the Spring; it was also the menacing Furies and
the frenzied Bacchantes.” (Daly, DID, p. 95) Duncan became less
interested in relating the story of something and began to dance the
thing itself. “She [the dancer of the future] will dance not in the
form of nymph, nor fairy, nor coquette, but in the form of woman in her
greatest and purest expression…She shall dance the freedom of women.”
(Duncan, AD, pp. 62-63)
If
God is dead, as Nietzsche posits, and all we are really left with is
ourselves, our physical beings, then our bodies can become sources of
anxiety and limitation. Modernism can primarily be characterized as a
movement of turning inward. This is particularly true of canonical
works such as James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
and Virginia Wolfe’s Mrs. Dalloway. Modernist visual arts
movements such as Surrealism and Expressionism also valued internal
expression above objective reality. “Both modernist art and modernist
writing placed the artist’s own activity center-stage.” (Wilson, p. 62)
Duncan turns inward and finds the soul. Duncan’s soul exists in a
physical space, “the solar plexus, the temporal home of soul.” (Duncan,
AD, p. 48) This soul would not be very recognizable to many
Romantics. This soul is not the supernatural “other” given by God and
independent of the body. It is not the soul that enters the body at the
beginning of life and leaves at the end of life. Duncan’s soul is
physically part of the body. One needs to cultivate the body for the
soul to be free. Divinity is to be found within the body. Perhaps if
Duncan had used the words “will” or “self” instead of “soul” there would
be less question of her Modernism. In the section of Thus Spoke
Zarathustra titled “On the Despisers of the Body,” Nietzsche writes,
“Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there stands a mighty
ruler, an unknown sage – whose name is self. In your body he dwells; he
is your body.” (Nietzsche, p. 146) It is interesting to note that
Nietzsche’s “self” is related to “will,” which in the Hindu yogic
tradition resides in the solar plexus, and the solar plexus is where
Duncan locates the soul.
While
in Russia in 1907, Duncan met Constantin Stanislavski (1863-1938). At
this time, Stanislavski was working on his new Method of acting. He
found much to be inspired by in Duncan. “The famous Stanislavski Method
of acting is nothing more than a device for switching on at will what
Isadora called the ‘motor in my soul.’” (Mazo, p. 52)
By
inventing a new form of dance, Duncan is in full rebellion against
tradition. This is one of the basic tenets of Modernism. In this case,
that tradition is ballet, the reigning high/respectable art of the dance
at this time, as opposed to the popular dancing on the vaudeville stage
and social dancing in the ballroom. By the late nineteenth century,
ballet in America and Europe had begun to fall from its place as high
art. After 1792, the hidden wires were no longer used to lift the
dancers, which created the illusion that they were floating on the
stage. Now, they had to dance en pointe in order to produce the
same gravity-defying effect. As such, the technique became more
difficult, giving rise to the professional dancer, a professional for
sure, but also a working girl. No longer were the dancers of the ballet
nobility, aristocrats, or even royalty. They were more often than not
women of modest means who saw the ballet as an opportunity for social
advancement. Part of the experience was the hope of their upper-class
audience, which consisted primarily of men, for sexual liaisons with the
ballerinas. “Whilst ballet patronage of the eighteenth century was
royal and aristocratic the patronage of the nineteenth century (except
in pre-revolutionary Russia which was still governed by the Tsars) was
bourgeois and capitalist.” (Adair, p. 91) Indeed, the basic body
position of the ballet, the leg turned out from the hip and dancing up
on toes exists not only because such positions help the dancers move in
every direction, but also because this is the best position to display
the female form on stage. (Adair, p.84)
There
are five basic still positions in ballet with all movement originating
from the stiff and straight upper back. The dance consists of movements
between each of these positions. For Duncan, as we have seen, dance is
about one movement flowing naturally into another. “The school of
ballet of today, vainly striving against the natural laws of gravitation
or the natural will of the individual, and working in discord in its
form and movement of nature produces sterile movement which gives not
birth to future movements, but dies as it is made.” (Duncan, AD, p. 55)
Ballet’s cultural and artistic decline continued when ballerinas began
to be cast in previously male roles. Thus the importance of male
dancing diminished and was not to be revived again until the 1970s. The
“ballet itself became a display of lovely ladies in charming costumes”
(Anderson, J., B&MD, p. 91) By the 1850s with audience wanting “only
legs, not brains” (Anderson, J., B&MD, p. 92) ballet was becoming
increasingly indistinguishable from the “low” entertainment arts of the
music hall, which primarily, and some would argue only, appealed to
prurient interests.
In
her autobiography, My Life, Duncan writes of her early experience
with ballet. “The teacher told me to stand on my toes. I asked him why,
and when he replied ‘Because it is beautiful,’ I said that it is ugly
and against nature, and after the third lesson I left his class, never
to return. His stiff and commonplace gymnastics which he called dancing
only disturbed my dream.”(p. 22.) Duncan was not the only critic of
ballet for its unnatural movements. Grete Wiesenthal (1886-1970) was a
former ballerina who became a pantomime actress after recognizing the
restrictive nature of ballet. She also found it to be disconnected from
its musical accompaniment. “It was a matter of staying in time and not
leaving the line, as if we were supposed to be representing a company of
soldiers marching past. Nobody knew a thing about the merging of music
and movement." (Segel, pp. 35-36)
Ballet restricted the body far too much to allow full expression of the
soul. Duncan stated that there were three kinds of dancers, the first
two of whom can reasonably assumed to be ballet dancers and some music
hall dancers (i.e. Loie Fuller and Maud Allen). “[F]irst,
those who consider dancing as a sort of gymnastic drill, made up of
impersonal and graceful arabesques; second, those who by concentrating
their minds, lead the body into rhythm of a desired emotion, expressing
a remembered feeling or experience. And finally, there are those who
convert the body into luminous fluidity, surrendering it to the
inspiration of the soul.” (Duncan, AD, p. 51) She proceeds to describe
this third type of dancer in very modern, scientific terms. “This third
sort of dancer understands that the body, by force of the soul, can in
fact be converted to a luminous fluid. The flesh becomes light and
transparent, as shown through the X-ray—but with the difference that the
human soul is lighter than these rays.” (Duncan, AD, p. 51)
Duncan looked to nature for inspiration. This can be a very Romantic
notion, but again, on closer inspection of her words, and more
importantly of her practice, Duncan reveals that while her inspiration
is nature and all that is natural, she is not imitating nature. “Nature
must be the source of all art, and dance must make use of nature’s
forces in harmony and rhythm, but the dancer’s movements will always be
separate from any movement in nature.” (Duncan, AD, p. 79) Nature is a
jumping-off point, not to be ignored, and any movements that go against
nature are deemed ugly. For example, the ballerina’s attempt to ignore
gravity is unnatural. While nature is inspirational, it is not to be
copied. Ann Daly, in Done into Dance, quotes an anecdote by Irma
Duncan that illustrates the point.
I still recall the initial lesson in dance composition she gave me
privately and how miserably I erred in interpreting the Brahms song she
had chosen. It began “If I were a bird,” so I flew about the room as if
I were a bird. When I stopped, I saw “that look” on Isadora’s face. I
was terrified. No, she explained, the song did not say “I am a bird,”
it said “If I were a bird.” It meant, “I wish I could fly to
you, but I am earthbound.” From her couch, she demonstrated with
beautiful gestures how the dance should have been done. (p.134)
Duncan is endeavoring to transform dance into a high art, indeed, to her
way of thinking, restore it to the high art it once was in ancient
Greece. For writers and painters of the time, this was not a contentious
issue. “But the dance of the future will have to be come again a high
religious art as it was for the Greeks. For art which is not religious
is not art, is mere merchandise.” (Duncan, AD, p. 62) Religion for
Duncan again comes back to the body. “I believe in the beauty and
religion of the human foot.” (Duncan, AD, p. 54)
With
her manifestos (for example, I See American Dancing, Dance of
the Future, and What Dancing Should Be)
and radical change in the dance form Duncan may in fact be aligned with
the avant-garde, but she was also concerned with creating high,
monumental art (particularly in dances like Les Marseillaise, a
dance meant to stir up French patriotic feelings during World War 1.)
In creating this high art, she used elements of “low” culture: bare
feet, bare costumes, and indeed dance itself. One could argue she laid
the seeds for the mix of high and low culture as used by the
Post-Modernists.
In
the end, Duncan is a transitional figure. She flows as freely between
the Romanticism of nature and the Modernist strength of will as the
undulating movements which flowed through her body. However, it is
important to recognize Duncan’s contributions to Modernism, modern
dance, and Modernist performance. As Joseph Mazo points out, she left
dancers and, through Stanislavski, actors, “with a series of concepts
and principles, which they developed in a variety of ways.”(p.60) She
elevated dance to an art worthy of serious study and discourse. And she
is responsible for starting a movement in America, which continues
today, for girls and women to learn to dance (first her kind of dancing
and later many other kinds of dancing) in order to express themselves in
healthy, natural, and beautiful bodies.
Works Cited
Adair, Christy. Women and Dance: Sylphs and Sirens. Washington
Square, N.Y.: New York University Press, 1992.
Anderson, Jack. Art without Boundaries: The World of Modern Dance.
Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997.
---. Ballet & Modern Dance: A Concise History. 2nd ed. Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton Book Co., 1992.
Armstrong, Tim. Modernism: A Cultural History. Cambridge; Malden,
MA: Polity, 2005.
---. Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study.
Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Brown, Jean Morrison, Naomi Mindlin, and Charles Humphrey Woodford. The
Vision of Modern Dance: In the Words of its Creators. 2nd ed.
Pennington, N.J.: Princeton
Cunningham, Patricia A. Reforming Women's Fashion, 1850-1920:
Politics, Health, and
Art.
Kent: Kent State University Press, 2003.
Daly, Ann. Done into Dance:
Isadora Duncan in America.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995
--. “Isadora Duncan’s Dance Theory.”
Dance Research Journal,
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