Isadora: A Sensational Life (review)

Peter Kurth's biography Isadora: A Sensational Life begins with a preface that is startling in several respects. Explaining that he was "thrashing between projects" when a friend suggested "almost casually over lunch" that he write a biography of Isadora Duncan (ix), Kurth admits that he knew next to nothing about his subject when he started his research except that she was a dancer, that she died in a freak accident when her shawl became entangled in the wheel of the car she was riding in, and that she came across as "one of the world's great flakes" in Ken Russell's "mischievous film" Isadora Duncan: The Biggest Dancer in the World, which he saw as a teenager in about 1970 (ix). Kurth then adds, "Only after I began reading seriously about Isadora did I dare to watch Vanessa Redgrave in Karel Reisz's 1968 romance, Isadora— originally released as The Loves of Isadora—and only when I saw Redgrave playing Isadora onstage in London, in Martin Sherman's enchanting play When She Danced, did I decide to go ahead with the book. By then I'd come to understand Isadora differently. I remember thinking it was lucky that Martin's play was closing, because if too many more people saw Vanessa as Isadora—live, in the flesh—I wouldn't need to write a word" (ix-x).

While Joseph Roach has suggested that "the process of surrogation" is fundamental to performance and that the fact of surrogation accounts for "the abiding yet vexed affinities between performance and memory" (Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, 1996, 2-3), Kurth's equation of Redgrave with Duncan is certainly antithetical to the project of biography, which generally seeks to represent unique lives. Redgrave may indeed possess a charismatic magnificence and a grandness of style suggestive of Duncan and unmatched by other living female performers, but a comparison of the dance sequences in Reisz's biopic with more recent reconstructions of Duncan's work by, for example, dance artist Annabelle Gamson, reveals that Redgrave was/is not a dancer, whereas Duncan was, her personal notoriety being consequent to that essential defining fact.

The doubts about Kurth's biography that are raised by his suggestion that Redgrave's performances nearly negate the need for the historical recovery of Duncan from such popular representations are compounded when he goes on to suggest that the great pioneer of modern dance "needs rescuing from dancers" and "more particularly, from dance scholars," and then again when he flies in the face of decades of feminist historiographic recuperation of women's authoritative contributions to all fields of the arts by asserting (with reference to the title of a 1998 exhibition relating to Duncan at the Georgia Museum of Art) that her "larger and . . . more important role" was "as 'Muse of Modernism'" (x).

Yet despite its unfortunate beginning, Kurth's biography is a significant contribution to the ever-growing literature on Duncan's life and art. Other than his own need for a writing project, Kurth's preface provides no rationale for a new biography of Duncan, and unlike that of Fredrika Blair's 1986 biography Isadora: Portrait of the Artist as a Woman, his title offers no hint of an interpretative lens or thesis by which he understands Duncan. In an afterword, however, he explains that he has "attempt[ed] to synthesize the available material in a single biographical narrative" (560), and although he makes only very occasional passing references to the work of leading contemporary Duncan scholar Ann Daly, this synthesis is indeed Kurth's major achievement as Duncan's most recent biographer. While he at times relies somewhat too heavily on Duncan's own autobiography My Life (1927), incorporating many lengthy quotations of this very familiar material (albeit with some reinstated short passages that had been cut from English-language versions of the text), he succeeds admirably in bringing together an enormous body of published and archival material, and his meticulous documentation of his many...