Summer 2021: on a lush lawn before rocky ocean cliffs, we ran with paintings of waves. As a pandemic took over a thousand lives each day, we joined in movement (with all necessary precautions) to be part of illuminating a better way forward. One year later: reading alone late at night, I discovered that Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) – whom some call the “mother of modern dance” – had maybe, just maybe, danced on that same ground more than a hundred years earlier.
Ocean view from Doris Duke's Rough Point, Newport, RI (photography by the author)
Even while performing for unfathomably wealthy New York socialites, her time’s pinnacle of power and privilege, the embodiment of the status-quo, she offered a kinetic call to another way: to fearless artistic truth, to the gifts of the past, to unity with – rather than extraction from – the land.
After I picked my jaw up off the carpet (I may have a connection to her through the very soil!), I began to think more deeply. Could what we danced over that land speak to how we work for a better future, just as she sought to do with her work – radical at the time, and now fundamental to the art of dance and, arguably, broader culture as we know it? How do these threads connect over the span of a century? What could that mean for me as a creative, and for the art form that I love?
Drawn to these questions, be there be answers for them or not, I sat down to explore in the best way I know how – through writing. Come explore with me, if you are so inclined. Welcome, and thank you for coming along the ride!
Who was this modern dance “mother”?
Isadora Duncan (via Unsplash)
Yes, Duncan was a pioneer, though she wasn’t the first to perform in loose draperies and bare feet. The turn of the century brought a movement for women’s health through better hygiene and tossing corsets to the wind (and Duncan’s mother, Mary Gray, was a well-known soldier in that battle).
“[Duncan’s] real contribution lay in discovering a new motivation for dance” (McCormick and Reynolds 10) – and also perhaps connecting it back to something much more ancient than that women’s health movement. Duncan, Pratl, Splatt argue that “contact with nature” additionally set Duncan apart. “Her movements did not derive from copied poses, but from the movement of nature – the waves of the sea, the trees blowing in the wind,” (32). The result was catalyzing something that would grace concert stages, and be known as a high art, to this day.
It all began with Duncan’s childhood exposure to classical Greek culture, aesthetics, and a perspective that the “mind and body are equal” (which certainly contrasted Rene Descartes’ “dualism”, that the body and mind are separate). By their mother’s guidance, Duncan and her three siblings spent as much time in physical and artistic pursuits as they did intellectual.
Art of Isadora Duncan (via Splatt, Cynthia and Duncan, Dorée and Pratl, Carol; see below bibliography)
Poverty didn’t keep Ms. Gray from feeding her children a steady diet of the classics in both literature and music: Dickens, classical mythology, Shakespeare, Chopin, and Schubert. She held salons with Shakespeare recitations accompanied by the Duncan children’s dancing, while Botticelli’s Primavera hung on the wall. Duncan would also come to mix the more modern Transcendentalism to this classical body of ideals, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s belief that God “is inherent in both man and nature.” Therefore, to Duncan, the artist (for her the dancer) “must unearth spiritual truth within both man and nature,” (McCormick and Reynolds 11).
By age fifteen, with a grounding in gymnastics training and lessons from Delsarte teacher Genevieve Stebbins, Duncan had dropped out of school and was giving dance lessons to neighborhood children. In the late 1890s, the Duncans moved eastwards to New York, where Isadora was engaged with pantomime for Shakespearean theater. Yet she found the movement “vulgar and silly,” as well as wholly unconnected with the score at hand (McCormick and Reynolds 11, 12). That showed Duncan what she didn’t want her art to be. Her work would then be finding what it would be. The ground was fertile for that seed to grow.
Duncan didn’t explicitly set out to reject the culture and ideals of ballet; rather, it seemed that all of these artistic and kinetic ideas, in and of themselves, were her muse. Yet in 1904 she observed Anna Pavlova training, and had studied ballet with Marie Bonfanti and a renowned La Scala Opera House ballerina (Reynolds and McCormick 12) – and she certainly had a strong opinion about the art form.
Duncan saw ballet embodying the “opposite of all the theories” in her art and pedagogy – “by which the body becomes transparent and is a medium for the mind and the spirit.” She believed that dance should reflect honest human movement: no turned-out feet, no tense, straight legs. “Her dance was an expression of both mind and spirit, she told [audience members]; not like ballet, which separates the body from the mind,” (O’Connor 22).
Art of Isadora Duncan (via Splatt et al)
The foundation for her movement lay not in a set of predetermined positions. Rather, it lay in those images and rhythms of nature, and in what she saw as the source of movement evoking “the wellsprings of experience”: the solar plexus. She saw this source as something in her, yet beyond her; “it existed before me, but it was asleep, and I awakened it,” (McCormick and Reynolds 14).
Ballet critic and aficionado André R. Levinson described Isadora’s work as “the cult of the transfigured flesh, the religion of the body, the habitat of the gods.” What she offered seemingly captivated him in a way that ballet could not (Reynolds and McCormick 13).
Dancing for high society on their summer cottage lawns
Through fortuitous and serendipitous connections, Duncan found her way out of concert halls and into New York City high society drawing rooms. Upper-class ladies took a liking to her dancing – perhaps because it was “innocent and happy, reflecting her enthusiasm for all forms of art,” (O’Connor 20). These clients also eventually hired her to dance on the lawns of their Newport, RI mansions: the “summer cottages” of this New York City upper crust.
With these new opportunities and affirmation of her art, Duncan “was the happiest she had been in a long time….[she] was happy to be out of her fairy wings and creating her own dances. She had the artistic freedom to create her own form of dance—and was getting paid for it.” (O’Connor 19, 20, 22).
Duncan's Greco-Roman aesthetic and philosophy, deeply tied with ecological truth and the Divine Feminine (via Unsplash)
Yet that stability and contentment would only be temporary. Even while those socialites hired her, they weren’t always exactly overjoyed with her performances. ”The proper, tight-lipped matrons of New York society had never seen dances quite like Isadora’s….On at least one occasion, indigent women marched out in the middle of the performance. But either Isadora didn’t notice or she didn’t care. She went right on dancing – and utterly delighting those who remained in the audience,” (O’Connor 20).
Even if she didn’t mind audience members walking out on her performances, she wasn’t fully satisfied. “Dancing on the lawns of society ladies was not her idea of success.” (O’Connor 22). And, to note, just because her patrons were wealthy did not mean that they paid her as such. Performances at New York high society summer “cottages” barely made her enough to cover transportation. “Furthermore, although Duncan found the society audiences ‘affable,’ none of them, she said, ‘had the slightest understanding of what I was doing’,” (Kozody 25).
Duncan needed audiences that truly appreciated her work, and an environment that nurtured it. That would bring her to Europe, her next chapter (full discussion of which is beyond the scope of my focus here – but noted to acknowledge it as what she subsequently experienced and accomplished).
Dancing in her spirit, 100 years later
Banner for Melissa McGill's In the Waves at Rough Point (photography by the author)
Fast forward more than a century, and our group was moving on the lawn of Doris Duke’s Rough Point, a Newport mansion: walking, running, and gesturing with artist Melissa McGill’s rectangular paintings of waves. This was In The Waves. Working in pairs, with each person holding one side of the panel, we moved our painted panels through various planes (up and down, forward and back, on diagonals), circled them, stretched and shortened them via changing our physical proximity. Shades of blue and white blended and diverged as we moved from formation to formation, shaped by choreographer Davalois Fearon.
These waves were in conversation with the (real) cliff-crashing waves just beyond us, as well as sometimes temperamental winds. These natural ingredients in our performance were different on each day – and it was always a thrilling question as to what nature would bring to each performance. Audience members, sitting right before the performance space and facing the ocean, were as immersed in wind and wave as we movers. The canvases for these paintings were also made from repurposed ocean plastic.
There was clearly an environmental message at hand – yet it was one that did not shout, nor prescribe, nor judge. The work let the space, and how we humans moved through it, do the talking. It demonstrated how art can shine a light on urgent issues with beauty and joy, rather than anger and fear. It underscored that, aesthetically and stylistically speaking, less can be so, so much more (a big shout-out to Fearon for making largely pedestrian movement so layered and cohesive).
Melissa McGill's wave paintings, used for In the Waves (photography by the author)
An unabashedly inclusive community ethos also shone through the work. From young, athletic dancers to an older gentleman using a cane (and his fantasy-obsessed daughter who wore elf ears every day), every kind of body – and every way of moving – was welcome. That even included me, without the “right” kind of body needed to succeed as a full-time professional dancer. That meant more to me than words can do justice.
One very special moment in the process had me viscerally feeling such wide-ranging connection and acceptance. Being one of the trained dancers in the group, one day Fearon had me lead a physical warm-up. Looking around our circle, I saw each person do something different – something of their very own – with the movement that I put forward.
Working with a partner only deepened that sense of kinetic attunement. We had no choice but to work together and find wordless understanding. I treasure that we ultimately did. Such authentic, embodied connection was particularly poignant at a time when COVID was still taking a painfully high number of lives every single day, and physical solitude could be necessary for biological survival.
Indeed, viral threat hung in the air throughout our process – sometimes literally, with us having to cancel a few performances because an ensemble member tested positive for COVID (and we all had to test negative before returning to the group…it was a whole ordeal, as one can imagine). Even with such a threat, being part of this project felt like a kind of spring after a winter of social isolation and countless Zoom meetings.
Stepping forward in that spirit
Our group and Duncan danced in the same proximity, if not on the same ground, more than one hundred years apart*. Were there other threads that connected us across more than a century? Living in communion with nature was certainly a theme in her work and its undergirding ethos, as described. I daresay that Duncan would have also appreciated our project’s embrace of all types of bodies, and moving in ways that were organic to those bodies.
Summer view from Newport's Cliff Walk, close to Rough Point (photography by the author)
We were also offering something that audience members likely didn’t expect to see at a contemporary dance performance. I don’t remember seeing anyone walk out of our performances as a result of the unexpected, as they did hers (to the contrary, audience reception was quite enthusiastic and gracious). We performers were also paid quite fairly. Perhaps that signals advances on field and societal levels…I like to think so.
On an artistic craft level, our open and positive approach also aligned with Duncan’s. As radical as it was for her time, her work didn’t shout her ideas. She moved them, and the ideas sang. Some couldn’t understand the language of the song, some weren’t ready to hear it – but sing the ideas did.
Her time called for a reckoning with Victorian ideals that kept women breathless, constrained by thick corset boning, and called them “hysterical” when they dared to ask for something different. Our time calls for confronting how we have used and abused the very air, water, and ground that we – and all other living things – need to survive.
Moving, connecting, reaching for what nourishes and leaving behind what doesn’t, both we and Duncan pushed these hard truths to the fore: with nary a word. Whatever that might mean for how we move forward as an art form, as a field, and as global citizens: well, I’ll leave that up to you, dear reader.
Late fall view from the Cliff Walk, close to Rough Point (photography by the author)
And for me, what might it all mean? Indeed, I’m learning to take space for that – just as I did running and circling my arms as expansively as can be, large plastic canvas in hand. As much as Duncan appreciated time and space to share her art and beliefs, something in her craved more (starting with more pay, most likely, let’s be honest).
Yes, the pudgy, starry-eyed teenage dancer in me would have loved to have been dancing on a big NYC stage in front of a packed house. Yet I had found my own kind of place in dance, in a way that fit with my values and spirit. From that vantage point, personally? I couldn’t complain.
The author dancing in Newport's Rovensky Park, photography of self-choreographed, self-taped dance
*Three of the below sources verify that Duncan danced on the lawns of Newport mansions.
Works Cited
Kozody, Ruth. American Women of Achievement: Isadora Duncan. New York, NY: Chelsea House Publishers. 1988. 26.
Jones, Sabrina. Ed Bohle, Paul. Isadora Duncan: a graphic biography. New York, NY: Hill and Wang. 2008. 15.
McCormick, Malcolm and Nancy Reynolds. No Fixed Points. Minneapolis, MN: Edwards, Brothers, Inc. 2003.
O’Connor, Barbara. Barefoot Dancer: the story of Isadora Duncan. Minneapolis, MN: Carolrhoda Books, Inc. 2001.
Ed. Splatt, Cynthia and Duncan, Dorée and Pratl, Carol. Life into art: Isadora Duncan and her world. Hong Kong: W.W. Norton. 1993.
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