ISADORA DUNCAN 1877-1927
Isadora Duncan on the Lido in Venice (Raymond Duncan 1903)
"To seek in nature the fairest forms and to find the movement
which expresses the soul in these forms—this is the art of the dancer. ... My inspiration
has been drawn from trees, from waves, from clouds, from the sympathies that
exist between passion and the storm."
ROBERT EDMOND JONES:
"Come away! her dancing
says. Come out into the splendid
perilous world! Come up on the
mountain-top where the great wind blows!
Learn to be young always! Learn
to be incessantly renewed! Learn to live
in the intemperate careless land of song and rhythm and rapture! Say farewell to the world you know and join
the passionate spirits of the world’s history!
Storm through into your dreams!
Give yourself up to the frenzy that is in the heart of life, and never
look back, and never regret!"
REYNALDO HAHN: "In
those moments where beauty and emotion fuse and climax, something of the
immortal floats about the dancer; she wanders in a divine ray, in a mist where
all works of art circle in unison with her."
Paris 1901 (Raymond Duncan)
CARL SANDBURG ("Isadora Duncan"): "The wind? I am the wind. The sea and the moon? I am the sea and the moon. Tears, pain, love, bird-flights? I am all of them. I dance what I am. Sin, prayer, flight, the light that never was
on land or sea? I dance what I am."
SHAEMAS O’SHEEL: "What
glorious things she makes the soul remember!
Once we were young, and the leaping blades of our desire striking the
granite facts of life lit lively fires of wonder. We were simple, so that when the moving
beauty of nature and the joy of each other’s company stirred us to ecstasies,
we sought free and natural expression; we danced—we danced as the
movements of waves and branches, and as the exquisite beauties of our own
bodies suggested. Such memories she
evokes by her subtle gestures and movements. … The morning of time dawns on our
spirits again, and once more we have a sense that hears the gods."
At the Parthenon, 1920 (Edward
Steichen)