The Motor in the Soul: Isadora Duncan and Modernist Performance

Before I go out on the stage, I must place a motor in my soul. When that begins to work my legs and arms and my whole body will move independently of my will. But if I do not get time to put that motor in my soul, I cannot dance.

— Isadora Duncan, My Life

In the first decades of the twentieth century, F.T. Marinetti's futurist cheer, "Hurrah for motors," collided against Victorian invocations of spirituality—or so the period divide is often oversimplified.¹ Performers and artists during the period, however, did not adhere to assumed antagonisms between spirituality and materiality, human culture and the machine age, or the soul and the motor. "I must place a motor in my soul," declares the American-born dancer, Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) in her 1927 autobiography, and she consistently positions her choreography at the juncture of motorized movement and soulful expression. Her efforts to reimagine spirit through machine processes are shared by many key figures of modernism, including the Russian director Constantin Stanislavski and even Marinetti. Although Duncan is credited with the invention of the performance form now called "modern dance," her influence on modernist performance has not been recognized. Her theories are dismissed as "romantic grandiloquence,"² primarily due to her use of terms associated with Victorianism ("soul," "inner self," and "human spirit").³ Even the best critical studies argue that Duncan "never completed the leap" from "late-nineteenth-century-romanticism" to modernism's "secular collectivism" (DID, 220). Yet, this presumed secularity is belied by the Christian and classical interests of figures such as T.S. Eliot and H.D., and the notion of a divide between Victorianism and modernism to be leapt across has been questioned by Michael Levenson and others.⁴ Duncan's conjuncture of metaphysical and materialist thought is actually a dominant feature of twentieth-century art, shared by such diverse movements as Italian futurism, the Moscow Art Theatre's innovations in drama, Greenwich Village Radicalism, and U.S. feminism.

As the motor in the soul indicates, Duncan'sideas of spirit are grounded in twentieth-century movement practices and especially that icon of modernist industrial society, the motor. This essay locates Duncan in the context of modernist performance by tracing her influences on more canonical figures, recognizing that her dances represent a diverse body of choreography that developed and responded to modernist aesthetics, and reading her many essays and speeches as attempts to theorize her practice. ⁵ Duncan repeatedly figures her fundamental movement principles through the symbol of the motor. First, the motor's ability to move several objects suggests the possibility of representing a "multiplied body," an interest she shared with Marinetti and other futurists. The constant, tireless motion of the motorized machine also offers the ideal of continuous dance movements that appear to be executed effortlessly, without the intervention of the "will," a concept she derives from Friedrich Nietzsche. Third, the motor's repetitive motion inspires Duncan's rehearsal process and desire to simulate spontaneity, a goal that significantly influenced Stanislavski's acting theory. As the "Muse of Modernism," an international star, and a polemical speaker, Duncan's motorized movement practices shaped modernist understandings of the body and soul, influenced spheres of performance from futurism to method acting, and launched an important trajectory of feminism.⁶

An overview of Duncan's career reveals that she was performing simultaneously with the most significant gestures of aesthetic modernism. Like many key modernist literary figures, Duncan left the United States and began her career in Europe, arriving in London in 1899. By 1908, Duncan was touring the U.S. with an established reputation in Europe, and John Butler Yeats, father of the poet, added his sketch to the many images of her by Abraham Walkowitz, John Sloan, José Clará, Auguste Rodin, and Gordon Craig (IDA, 35–63). Also in 1908, Duncan developed a close friendship with Constantin Stanislavski, introduced the acting...