Dance and American Art: A Long Embrace
In , Isadora settled in Gruenwald outside of Berlin and opened her first dance school. She subsidized the entire establishment with proceeds from her tours. Initially, she enrolled twenty girls and boys, but her effort to include boys was unsuccessful and was finally dropped due to a lack of funds. By this time, Isadora had begun to achieve celebrity status among the artistic and cultural illuminati of her day.
Duncan had vowed never to marry, but out of wedlock, she had a daughter named Deirdre whose father was the famous set designer, Edward Gordon Craig.
Although their passionate love affair ended after several years, he was to remain her lifelong friend. Her second child, Patrick, was fathered by a wealthy heir to a sewing machine fortune named Paris Singer. Later, in , Deirdre and Patrick drowned with their nanny as their car rolled into the river Seine.
History – Martha Graham Dance Company
Her dances Mother and Marche Funebre , featuring music by Scriabin and Chopin respectively, were inspired by her loss and conveyed her heartbreak on a universal level. Between and , she performed solo and toured extensively across Europe and America, including one sojourn to South America. Isadora was greatly taken with the social and political revolution that led to the creation of the Soviet Union. Believing that she could contribute to the development of a free and heroic society, Duncan followed her conviction and passion to Moscow in to make arrangements with the new government to found a new school of dance.
Timeless and mature works including The Revolutionary with music by Scriabin and a suite of dances set to Russian work songs communicate her fury at social injustice, her empathy with human suffering, and her faith in the power of perseverance to overcome obstacles. In Moscow, Isadora met the young poet Sergei Esenin and broke her previous vow by marrying him in order that he be allowed to travel with her during a tour of America. On September 14, , she encountered a young driver in Nice, France and suggested he take her for a spin in his open-air Bugatti sports car.
She is not the tenth muse but all nine muses in one. There are over 40 books about Isadora Duncan, countless drawings, paintings, and sculptures, two major motion pictures, a dozen TV documentaries, and several plays and poems. But not like anyone else.
Dance and American Art: A Long Embrace
She would be a revelation to the star ballet dancer; she is no high kicker, or toe acrobat. She employs no illusions, no cunningly arranged mirrors, no beautifully multicolored lime-lights.
Our planet needs that. Martha Graham remained a strong advocate of the individual throughout her career, creating works such as Deaths and Entrances , Appalachian Spring , Dark Meadow , and Errand into the Maze to explore human and societal complexities.
Through the representation of important American cultural groups such as Native Americans, African-Americans, and Puritans and the integration of text from historical American documents, Graham was able to capture the soul of the American people. During her long and illustrious career, Graham created masterpiece dance compositions, which continue to challenge and inspire generations of performers and audiences. Sometimes it is not pleasant.
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Sometimes it is fearful. But nevertheless it is inevitable. Always a fertile ground for experimentation, Martha Graham Dance Company has been an unparalleled resource in nurturing many of the leading choreographers and dancers of the 20th and 21st centuries, including Merce Cunningham, Erick Hawkins, Pearl Lang, Pascal Rioult, and Paul Taylor. Her groundbreaking techniques and unmistakable style have earned the Company acclaim from audiences in more than 50 countries throughout North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
With programs that unite the work of choreographers across time within a rich historical and thematic narrative, the Company is actively working to create new platforms for contemporary dance and multiple points of access for audiences. The Company continues to expand its mission to present the work of its founder and her contemporaries, and remains a leader by catalyzing new works with commissions that bring fresh perspectives to dance classics, such as American Document and Lamentation Variations Multimedia programs like Dance is a Weapon , a montage of several works connected through text and media, redefine the boundaries of contemporary dance composition.
The Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance has the distinction of being the longest continuously operating school of dance in America and is a charter member of the accrediting organization, the National Association of Schools of Dance.