Dancing Greek Antiquity in Private and Public: Isadora Duncan's Early Patronage in Paris

In Done into Dance: Isadora Duncan in America, Ann Daly writes that Isadora Duncan defined her dance as high art, and describes how Duncan raised the dance from the bottom of the cultural landscape to the top of American society:

Dancing was considered cheap, so she associated herself with the great Greeks, who deemed the art noble, and she associated herself with upper-class audiences by carefully courting her patrons and selecting her performance venues. Dancing was considered mindless, so she invoked a pantheon of great minds, from Darwin to Whitman and Plato to Nietzsche, to prove otherwise. Dancing was considered feminine, and thus trivial, so she chose her liaisons and mentors—men whose cultural or economic power accrued, by association, to her. Dancing was considered profane, so she elevated her own practice by contrasting it to that of "African primitives." The fundamental strategy of Duncan's project to gain cultural legitimacy for dancing was one of exclusion.

(Daly 1995, 16)

Regarding Duncan's career path, Daly identifies Duncan's dance as one defined by exclusion (a dance that situated itself outside potentially scandalous discourses that raised questions of propriety and morality), and drives the point home in her appraisal of Duncan's oppositional conception of art. She notes that in her later writings, Duncan saw the "harmonious fluidity" of her own dance as "prayerful liberation," while criticizing the "spastic chaos of ragtime and jazz dancing as a reversion to 'African primitivism'" (Daly 1995, 6). Daly's theory of Duncan's dance of exclusivity explains how Duncan situated her dance outside of the discourses of eroticism and exoticism, yet does not account for why Duncan needed to exclude them, nor how Greece became the lingua franca for her art. While Duncan condemned others for allowing their dance to appeal to audiences seeking erotic performance, she discreetly diverted attention from her own Parisian audiences' tastes. Focusing on her American tours, Daly highlights the "African" as the abject pole that the dancer positioned herself against; however, her French audiences had a whole host of alternative "uncivilized, sexual, and profane" dances to compare to Duncan's (Daly 1995, 7).

This article examines the roots of Duncan's mature elevated "Hellenized" aesthetic reified in her prose writings and lectures as she garnered international fame touring Europe and America between 1903 and 1908. Once internationally successful in the 1910s, Duncan formulated an art of realignment, reinterpretation, and exclusion, reconfiguring and separating her elevated vision of ancient Greece in opposition to the Sapphic Greek fantasies of her early patrons in Paris and the erotic and exotic "Greek" fantasies on public stages. Upon her arrival in Paris in 1900, Duncan formed relationships and performed for an influential group of expatriate lesbian American women who received Duncan's early performances of private "Greek" gestures within the context of the private Sapphic music and dramatic activities popular in Paris between 1900 and 1910.¹ Interpretations and appropriations of antiquity in Parisian culture of the period between the Franco-Prussian War and WWI were unstable and changed according to venue and audience—a circumstance that allowed Duncan to redefine herself and her art years later, while insisting on a connection to antiquity.

Duncan's social and aesthetic involvement with Natalie Clifford Barney's (1876-1972) private community and the later claims of ignorance regarding the lesbian audiences' reception of her dance attest to Duncan's complex navigation and appropriation of varying meanings of antiquity in the first three decades of the twentieth century. This article suggests that Duncan's early private audiences in the years around 1900 shaped the aesthetics of her performance and, in particular, her writings from "The Dance of the Future" (1903) through her autobiography, My Life (1927). Due to initial associations with exotic and erotic conceptions of ancient Greek arts and culture as seen in the choreography at the Paris Opéra, it quickly became necessary for her to devise a new aesthetic framework in...