Done into Dance: Isadora Duncan in America

Notes

N O T E S PREFACE 1. There have been a number of films depicting Duncan's life, including TheLoves of Isadora (1968), Ken Russell's Isadora Duncan, the Biggest Dancer in the World (1966), and Isadora (1969), with Vanessa Redgrave. This last one garnered substantial publicity when it opened; today, it is still replayed on television and was featured prominently in cable network A&E's program guide, whose blurb for the movie describes Duncan as "the tempestuous dancer who jolted turn-of-thecentury America and Europe with her torrid lifestyle and sensual modernistic dance" (A&E Program Guide 6, no. 3 [March 1991]: 36). I thank Bud Coleman for alerting me to this program guide material. 2. Ruth Kozodoy, Isadora Duncan (New York: Chelsea House, 1988). Part of a series devoted to "American Women of Achievement," this book uses information, such as Duncan's birth date, that had been revised by scholars twelve years earlier . The play When She Danced, by Martin Sherman, produced in New York in 1990, was about Duncan in her later years, a fat, drunken woman with an abusive young husband. An article on Duncan's last choreography (Ann Daly, "The Continuing Beauty of the Curve," Ballett International 13, no. 8 [August 1990]: 10-15) prompted an indignant letter to the editor vehemently clinging to notions about Duncan's dancing being produced by trance. A trio of articles devoted to Duncan in the Spring 1994 issue ofAmerican Studies indicates, perhaps, a reversal in this trend, at least in academia. 3. To refer to the dancer by her given or family name was an issue for me. On the one hand, "Isadora," as she is commonly called, is a kind of shorthand for the sensational haze that has hidden from view her artistry; on the other hand, she herself claimed "Isadora" as her true name, as distinct from the name of her father, Duncan (Janet Vale, "Interviewing Isadora," New York Morning Telegraph, 14 February 1915, 5). Because calling women by their first names today is a way of inscribing their inferior social status (the implication is that they are not important enough to be addressed formally, as a sign of respect), I have chosen to refer to her as Duncan, as part of my project to reestablish the seriousness of her artistic practice. 4. Duncan persuaded photographer Edward Steichen to go along with her to Greece in 1921 by promising that she would let him make motion pictures of her dancing on the Acropolis. "When we got to Athens, she changed her mind. She said she didn't want her dancing recorded in motion pictures but would rather have it remembered as a legend" (Edward Steichen, A Life in Photography [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963]). 5. I borrow from Marcel Mauss the term "body techniques," by which he means "the ways in which, from society to society, men [sic ] know how to use their bodies " (Marcel Mauss, "Techniques of the Body," m Incorporations, ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter [1934; reprint, New York: Zone, 1992], 455). 6. Fredrika Blair, Isadora: Portrait of the Artist as a Woman (New York: William Morrow, 1986); Deborah Jowitt, "The Search for Motion," in Time and the Dancing Image (New York: William Morrow and Co., Inc., 1988); Elizabeth Kendall, Where She Danced: The Birth ofAmerican Art-Dance (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979); Allan Ross Macdougall, Isadora: A Revolutionary in Art and Love (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1960); Nancy Chalfa Ruyter, Reformers and Visionaries: TheAmericanization oftheArt ofDance (New York: Dance Horizons, 1979); Francis Steegmuller, ed., "YourIsadora": TheLove Story ofIsadora Duncan and Gordon Craig (New York: Random House and the New York Public Library, 1974). 7. Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 20. 1. PROLOGUE 1. Refuting Marcel Mauss's argument that there is no such thing as "natural" behavior , Douglas suggests that the body is both natural and culturally defined. (For a structuralist who relies on the defining properties of oppositions, there can be no nature without culture, and vice versa). "Here I seek to identify a natural tendency to express situations of a certain kind in an appropriate bodily style. In so far as it is unconscious, in so far as it is obeyed universally in all cultures, the tendency is natural. It is generated in response to a perceived social situation, but the latter must always come clothed in its local history and culture. Therefore the natural expression...