DANCE
Monthly Herald Staff Writers, Arlette Lagrange
Dance of a goddess
Isadora Duncan's half-naked,
nymph-like movements changed the nature of ballet - and anticipated modern
choreography. Judith Mackrell celebrates her influence
When
Frederick Ashton choreographed Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora
Duncan, he was drawing on his own 55-year-old memories of the great dancer.
Back in 1921 he was a ballet-obsessed 17-year-old while Duncan, aged 44, was
well past her prime. Her red hair was badly dyed and her semi-transparent
drapes revealed a lot more wobbling flesh than Ashton wanted to see. Still, he
thought he was in the presence of genius and returned to watch her perform
night after night. Duncan seemed to Ashton to distil essential qualities. Her
movements were so responsively tuned to the music that she appeared to be
carried by the notes. She had a startling expressive variety - quick and
playful in her lightest moves, grand and resonating in her large gestures. And
she moved with a freedom he had never seen before. Within her seemingly
restricted vocabulary of steps, runs and leaps she registered pure sensation,
pure feeling. As Ashton later recalled: "She had a wonderful way of running
forward in which she, what I call, left herself behind and you felt the breeze
running through her hair." It was these qualities he recalled in 1976 when he
created Five Brahms Waltzes. The work started as a single waltz but Ashton
extended it into a suite of five as a gift for Marie Rambert, whose company
was celebrating its 50th anniversary. And the woman he chose to embody
Duncan's memory was the 37-year-old ballerina Lynn Seymour. Seymour, now 65,
recalls that Ashton used a lot of visual imagery to help her re-create
Duncan's movement style. "Fred brought along a huge book of photographs and a
programme that he'd saved all those years. There was a little line drawing of
Isadora that he'd painted in a peachy pink to remind him of the colour of her
dress. I loved that." But Seymour also had to use her own imagination to
capture Duncan's unique spirit. "She was apparently unbelievably charming on
stage. And the most astonishing thing was her stillness - she had this knack
of holding a stillness and then moving at an exquisitely timed moment that
made you crumble." Duncan has gone down in history as a hard act to follow - a
one-off original who, from mixed motives of exhibitionism and evangelicalism,
believed she could change the world. She was born in California in 1877 and
raised by her mother in a very West Coast bohemian style.
Photo, right: Isadora in Athens, 1903
The whole Duncan family were romantic idealists and deeply susceptible to the prevailing Greek revivalist craze. While most enthusiasts limited their affiliation to wearing sandals and sticking to a simple diet, the Duncans attempted to live the life. In 1903 mother and four children decamped to the outskirts of Athens, where they tried to build their own temple and persuade the locals to revert to the customs of their ancient forebears. In Isadora, however, wackiness proved to be the seedbed of greatness. As a child she had been taught conventional "fancy" dance steps and could easily have made a profitable career in music hall. But it became her mission to elevate dance into a language of liberation and transformation, to make it a vehicle for big emotions, big ideas and great art. Duncan was a natural mover and she had reserves of obsessive energy. For inspiration she read the Greek poets, Nietzsche and Havelock Ellis. For music she chose Beethoven, Chopin, Wagner - great romantic composers who had never previously been used for the dance stage. But Duncan was also a very canny operator. Her stages were decorated with flattering simplicity - grey voile curtains and soft pink lights. Even more radically, she danced without shoes or corsets. The fluid lines of her costumes not only liberated Duncan's body but also had the great advantage of showing her naked legs and the occasional glimpse of a breast. By 1907 Duncan had become a worldwide phenomenon - and her real-life performances started to make headlines as much her stage shows. Notoriously, she took many lovers, including the stage designer Gordon Craig, the multi-millionaire Paris Singer and the Russian poet Sergei Esenin. She danced before European royalty and before Lenin, and suffered a string of personal tragedies, including the drowning of her two children. By the time Ashton saw her in London she was drinking heavily and her stage performances were becoming erratic. Her death, at 50, was as stagy as her life. As she was driving in a sports car, chauffeured by the young man she was lining up to be her next lover, the fringes of Duncan's shawl caught in the back wheel and broke her neck instantly. Jean Cocteau wrote: "Isadora's end is perfect." Even though some of Duncan's dances have been reconstructed,
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