Free spirit: ill-fated dancer Isadora Duncan is portrayed by Tamara Rojo Photo: ALASTAIR MUIRIsadora Duncan: sublime or ridiculous?
Isadora Duncan’s bizarre death was a brutal end to a controversial life. Ismene Brown looks back at the dancer’s colourful story before the opening of the Royal Ballet’s revised production of Kenneth MacMillan’s 1981 ballet about her .
By Ismene Brown
Last Updated: 5:30PM GMT 06 Mar 2009
Fat, middle-aged, highly sexed women aren't supposed to dance. Or bare their breasts, or take lovers half their age. Nor were they when Isadora Duncan was leading her free-range, tragic, melodramatic life 90 years ago.
Could this woman really have been a dance genius? In 1921, when Duncan was 44, fat and notorious, a 17-year-old English boy bought a ticket for her performance at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London. "I didn't think I'd like it but I was absolutely captivated," he later recalled. "I suppose she was rather blowsy, and the first impact of her gave me a shock, but that soon passed. I find that people now stress this appalling life that she led, and the sexual side, but I didn't get that impression at all.
"She had the most extraordinary quality of repose. She would stand for what seemed quite a long time doing nothing, and then make a very small gesture that seemed full of meaning."
That boy, Frederick Ashton, would grow up to become Britain's foremost ballet choreographer, and he was not the only creative figure to be enchanted by the alternative dancing Duncan proposed. Auguste Rodin, the sculptor, said she was his greatest inspiration; Konstantin Stanislavsky, Moscow's radical theatre director, was fascinated; George Bernard Shaw was impressed, despite himself; and the pivotal figures of 20th-century Russian ballet, Sergei Diaghilev, Anna Pavlova and Michel Fokine unreservedly admired her.
But while half the world marvelled at Duncan's magical ability to pluck dance from the air without apparent preparation or technique, the other half was dismissing her as a sensationalist.
And when Duncan fell in love with Russia's greatest young poet, Sergei Esenin – he was 27, she was 43 – everything about her antagonised Esenin's fans: she did not speak even a word, they howled, of the language that he used with such eloquence; she was unseemly, lurid, an oversexed mother, her unnatural demands pushing this golden boy ever deeper into destructive alcoholism. In 1927, two years after Esenin hanged himself, Isadora herself was throttled, when her scarf caught in the wheel of a new admirer's Bugatti.
For a long time, the dance establishment tried to look away from Duncan's torrid life, to keep her image as an artist pure, or to cast her independence as feminist power. When, in 1975, Ashton created his exquisite tribute to her, Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan, he summoned up the sweetness, lightness, femininity and distilled force that he remembered and alluded hardly at all to her life's infamous events.
The great British choreographer Kenneth MacMillan was not yet born when Isadora died, and to him it was impossible to separate the crazy-paving of Isadora's life from her creativity. His 1981 Royal Ballet creation about her was intended to challenge conventions in ballet and theatre, in her honour.
He conceived Isadora as an unprecedented multimedia event, intensely emotive, flamboyantly unrestrained, with cutting-edge film and even holograms, and an actress on stage, playing Isadora the rhetorician, while a ballerina danced her. Some of his staging plans fell flat through technical inadequacies and lack of rehearsal time, but the production's episodic structure, sexual explicitness and many speeches taken from Isadora's writings weren't well-received either.
The hostile ballet view was that MacMillan's Isadora was a vulgar mess, rather like, perhaps, the woman herself was. On the other hand, some watchers, including contemporary choreographers and theatre critics, thought it a bold and exciting attempt to remap what dance could do as theatre. It was a mess, but a fascinating and innovative one – as, perhaps, was the woman herself.
Another generation passed, MacMillan died in 1992, and Isadora remained gratefully forgotten by many who loved his other works. Until, that is, the Royal Ballet announced last spring, their intention to resurrect Isadora, cut to half its original length and totally restaged by MacMillan's widow, Lady Deborah MacMillan. "I don't want you to think I came in willy-nilly," MacMillan says, sitting at the large kitchen table in her south London home. "Monica [Mason, the Royal Ballet's artistic director] thought it would be worth reviving, and I thought it was worth reviving. I did live with him for 22 years, and he did discuss things every night in this very kitchen. He wasn't happy with it. I've stuck to the original substructure as much as I can, and gone for the things that he spoke about as meaning most to him.
"Kenneth was riveted by the diametrically opposed opinions of Isadora. Frederick Ashton thought she was spectacular and Marie Rambert adored her. Madam [Ninette de Valois, Royal Ballet founder] thought she was rubbish. Balanchine was very dismissive. But you can't ignore that she was outside of her time, and very bravely, too. She knocked a lot of conventions on their head. She was also this celebrity figure, she had a child by Edward Gordon Craig, and a child by Paris Singer, she was feted in theatres throughout Europe, pulled through the streets in carriages surrounded by an adoring throng. And Kenneth was attempting to show facets of her that today would look preposterous – she embraces Communism, she attacks the rich, she harangues the audiences.
"But the downside of subsidised opera houses is that you don't get time to try things out, and things appear for viewing by critics with not much technical rehearsal and so on. So Isadora got judged permanently as a failure, and something valuable got chucked away."
MacMillan has returned to the one-act concept her husband had first imagined in the Sixties. All the startling choreography remains intact but she has removed the scenes and characters he said he'd felt obliged to create in 1981 just to involve the whole Royal Ballet.
Today technology is capable of creating the hallucinatory memory effects that were not achievable back then, so the 2009 design is an empty stage with video (including chunks of recently discovered archive film) used to set time and place, and period music in places instead of some of Richard Rodney Bennett's original score.
Gone too will be two pivotal characters: now that voice-over is fully possible, there will be no actress on stage to compete with the dancing Isadora (played by Tamara Rojo, and voiced by Nichola McAuliffe). Sergei Esenin, whom MacMillan did not have in mind in his early conception, has vanished altogether.
It an unprecedented overhaul, and the results are now as much Deborah MacMillan's responsibility as Kenneth's. It is hard to call. The original may have been a mess, but at least it was a MacMillanesque/Duncanesque mess. Exactly how much of that turbulent individuality will survive such streamlining? Will it be like giving Isadora liposuction and Botox? Maybe she'll be improved. After all, updatings are routine in classical ballets, without qualm. In any case, without this new attempt to stage Isadora, the courage that Kenneth MacMillan showed at Covent Garden in 1981 might have stayed forgotten.
D'Isadora' is at the Royal Opera House, London WC2 (020 7304 4000), March 11-21
Timeline: the rise and fall of a legend
1877 Angela Isadora Duncan is born in San Francisco.
1896 First job in Chicago music hall.
1900 Moves to London and gives public dance recitals, inspired by Botticelli’s 'Primavera’ and the British Museum's antiquities.
1902-3 Conquers Budapest, Vienna, Berlin and Paris.
1904 Falls for serial adulterer, English theatre designer Edward Gordon Craig. Russian debut wildly successful.
1905 While Craig’s wife bears his third child, Duncan becomes pregnant by him. After Deirdre is born (1906), Duncan despairingly ends the relationship.
1908 New York debut tour; dances Beethoven’s 7th symphony in the Metropolitan Opera House.
1909 In Paris meets sewing-machine millionaire Paris Singer; their son Patrick born 1910. Deirdre and Patrick drown in the Seine in car mishap in 1913.
1914 Develops Paris school. Becomes pregnant by Italian admirer; child stillborn. Creates Marseillaise solo.
1921 Frederick Ashton sees her dance in London. Founds Moscow school. Meets Russian poet Sergei Esenin and marries him a year later to get him US tour visa. Constant scandals on tour over drunkenness and politics.
1923 Back in Russia, Esenin struggles with alcoholism, Duncan with poverty 1925 Esenin hangs himself, aged 30.
1926 Duncan inherits Esenin’s poetry royalties, but rejects them despite debts.
1927 Duncan killed when scarf catches in the wheel of an admirer’s Bugatti.
Could this woman really have been a dance genius? In 1921, when Duncan was 44, fat and notorious, a 17-year-old English boy bought a ticket for her performance at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London. "I didn't think I'd like it but I was absolutely captivated," he later recalled. "I suppose she was rather blowsy, and the first impact of her gave me a shock, but that soon passed. I find that people now stress this appalling life that she led, and the sexual side, but I didn't get that impression at all.
"She had the most extraordinary quality of repose. She would stand for what seemed quite a long time doing nothing, and then make a very small gesture that seemed full of meaning."
That boy, Frederick Ashton, would grow up to become Britain's foremost ballet choreographer, and he was not the only creative figure to be enchanted by the alternative dancing Duncan proposed. Auguste Rodin, the sculptor, said she was his greatest inspiration; Konstantin Stanislavsky, Moscow's radical theatre director, was fascinated; George Bernard Shaw was impressed, despite himself; and the pivotal figures of 20th-century Russian ballet, Sergei Diaghilev, Anna Pavlova and Michel Fokine unreservedly admired her.
But while half the world marvelled at Duncan's magical ability to pluck dance from the air without apparent preparation or technique, the other half was dismissing her as a sensationalist.
And when Duncan fell in love with Russia's greatest young poet, Sergei Esenin – he was 27, she was 43 – everything about her antagonised Esenin's fans: she did not speak even a word, they howled, of the language that he used with such eloquence; she was unseemly, lurid, an oversexed mother, her unnatural demands pushing this golden boy ever deeper into destructive alcoholism. In 1927, two years after Esenin hanged himself, Isadora herself was throttled, when her scarf caught in the wheel of a new admirer's Bugatti.
For a long time, the dance establishment tried to look away from Duncan's torrid life, to keep her image as an artist pure, or to cast her independence as feminist power. When, in 1975, Ashton created his exquisite tribute to her, Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan, he summoned up the sweetness, lightness, femininity and distilled force that he remembered and alluded hardly at all to her life's infamous events.
The great British choreographer Kenneth MacMillan was not yet born when Isadora died, and to him it was impossible to separate the crazy-paving of Isadora's life from her creativity. His 1981 Royal Ballet creation about her was intended to challenge conventions in ballet and theatre, in her honour.
He conceived Isadora as an unprecedented multimedia event, intensely emotive, flamboyantly unrestrained, with cutting-edge film and even holograms, and an actress on stage, playing Isadora the rhetorician, while a ballerina danced her. Some of his staging plans fell flat through technical inadequacies and lack of rehearsal time, but the production's episodic structure, sexual explicitness and many speeches taken from Isadora's writings weren't well-received either.
The hostile ballet view was that MacMillan's Isadora was a vulgar mess, rather like, perhaps, the woman herself was. On the other hand, some watchers, including contemporary choreographers and theatre critics, thought it a bold and exciting attempt to remap what dance could do as theatre. It was a mess, but a fascinating and innovative one – as, perhaps, was the woman herself.
Another generation passed, MacMillan died in 1992, and Isadora remained gratefully forgotten by many who loved his other works. Until, that is, the Royal Ballet announced last spring, their intention to resurrect Isadora, cut to half its original length and totally restaged by MacMillan's widow, Lady Deborah MacMillan. "I don't want you to think I came in willy-nilly," MacMillan says, sitting at the large kitchen table in her south London home. "Monica [Mason, the Royal Ballet's artistic director] thought it would be worth reviving, and I thought it was worth reviving. I did live with him for 22 years, and he did discuss things every night in this very kitchen. He wasn't happy with it. I've stuck to the original substructure as much as I can, and gone for the things that he spoke about as meaning most to him.
"Kenneth was riveted by the diametrically opposed opinions of Isadora. Frederick Ashton thought she was spectacular and Marie Rambert adored her. Madam [Ninette de Valois, Royal Ballet founder] thought she was rubbish. Balanchine was very dismissive. But you can't ignore that she was outside of her time, and very bravely, too. She knocked a lot of conventions on their head. She was also this celebrity figure, she had a child by Edward Gordon Craig, and a child by Paris Singer, she was feted in theatres throughout Europe, pulled through the streets in carriages surrounded by an adoring throng. And Kenneth was attempting to show facets of her that today would look preposterous – she embraces Communism, she attacks the rich, she harangues the audiences.
"But the downside of subsidised opera houses is that you don't get time to try things out, and things appear for viewing by critics with not much technical rehearsal and so on. So Isadora got judged permanently as a failure, and something valuable got chucked away."
MacMillan has returned to the one-act concept her husband had first imagined in the Sixties. All the startling choreography remains intact but she has removed the scenes and characters he said he'd felt obliged to create in 1981 just to involve the whole Royal Ballet.
Today technology is capable of creating the hallucinatory memory effects that were not achievable back then, so the 2009 design is an empty stage with video (including chunks of recently discovered archive film) used to set time and place, and period music in places instead of some of Richard Rodney Bennett's original score.
Gone too will be two pivotal characters: now that voice-over is fully possible, there will be no actress on stage to compete with the dancing Isadora (played by Tamara Rojo, and voiced by Nichola McAuliffe). Sergei Esenin, whom MacMillan did not have in mind in his early conception, has vanished altogether.
It an unprecedented overhaul, and the results are now as much Deborah MacMillan's responsibility as Kenneth's. It is hard to call. The original may have been a mess, but at least it was a MacMillanesque/Duncanesque mess. Exactly how much of that turbulent individuality will survive such streamlining? Will it be like giving Isadora liposuction and Botox? Maybe she'll be improved. After all, updatings are routine in classical ballets, without qualm. In any case, without this new attempt to stage Isadora, the courage that Kenneth MacMillan showed at Covent Garden in 1981 might have stayed forgotten.
D'Isadora' is at the Royal Opera House, London WC2 (020 7304 4000), March 11-21
Timeline: the rise and fall of a legend
1877 Angela Isadora Duncan is born in San Francisco.
1896 First job in Chicago music hall.
1900 Moves to London and gives public dance recitals, inspired by Botticelli’s 'Primavera’ and the British Museum's antiquities.
1902-3 Conquers Budapest, Vienna, Berlin and Paris.
1904 Falls for serial adulterer, English theatre designer Edward Gordon Craig. Russian debut wildly successful.
1905 While Craig’s wife bears his third child, Duncan becomes pregnant by him. After Deirdre is born (1906), Duncan despairingly ends the relationship.
1908 New York debut tour; dances Beethoven’s 7th symphony in the Metropolitan Opera House.
1909 In Paris meets sewing-machine millionaire Paris Singer; their son Patrick born 1910. Deirdre and Patrick drown in the Seine in car mishap in 1913.
1914 Develops Paris school. Becomes pregnant by Italian admirer; child stillborn. Creates Marseillaise solo.
1921 Frederick Ashton sees her dance in London. Founds Moscow school. Meets Russian poet Sergei Esenin and marries him a year later to get him US tour visa. Constant scandals on tour over drunkenness and politics.
1923 Back in Russia, Esenin struggles with alcoholism, Duncan with poverty 1925 Esenin hangs himself, aged 30.
1926 Duncan inherits Esenin’s poetry royalties, but rejects them despite debts.
1927 Duncan killed when scarf catches in the wheel of an admirer’s Bugatti.
FONTE (image include): Telegraph.co.uk - London,England,UK
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