Isadora Duncan Pioneer in the Art of Dance By IRMA DUNCAN New York The New York Public Library 1958 Foreword Readers of Irma Duncan’s essay on Isadora Duncan’s pioneering years may wish to know something about the author’s own career as one of the original "young artists" trained by Isadora to dance in freedom "and be a fine example to all the other children in this world." We learned that Miss Duncan, who with most gracious generosity has given the Library not only her entire collection of Duncan memorabilia but the benefit of her knowledge of the dates and links and inner logic of Isadora’s life, is preparing for publication a volume of her own memoirs, and in response to our inquiry she was glad to give us a swift chronicle from birth to marriage. "I was born on February 26, 1897 in Schleswig-Holstein near Hamburg," she began. Shortly before her eighth birthday she became a pupil of Isadora Duncan and obtained a scholarship at her school in Grunewald near Berlin. "I made my dance debut as a pupil of the Isadora Duncan School at the Royal Opera House (Krolls) on July 20 1905, in Berlin." With Isadora she exemplified dance to audiences in a good part of this world - "on stages all over Europe, Russia, and America." At fourteen she herself began teaching. "In 1917 Isadora made me change my name from Inna Ebrich-Grimme to Irma Duncan. This was done legally through the New York courts, for her intention was to adopt her six original pupils as her daughters." In 1918 these six formed an independent group known as the Isadora Duncan Dancers, first appearing at Carnegie Hall that June. In 1921 at the invitation of the Soviet government, Irma went to Russia with Isadora to help her found a school of the dance; in it she taught for seven years. "I made my debut as a solo artist with my own group of pupils at the Comedia, the former Korsh Theatre, in Moscow April 29. 1923. After the death of Isadora in 1927 I was the head of that school till 1930. I toured with ten members of my school in the United States during the season of 1928—29 and 1929—30. In between I appeared with my group, known as the Isadora Duncan Dancers of Moscow, in Paris and Le Touquet, France. When the ten members of my troupe were forcibly returned to Russia by the Soviet government I decided to remain in the United States and take out citizenship." Miss Duncan became an American citizen in 1935. That September she married Sherman S. Rogers, a New York attorney. In 1937 she wrote a textbook, The Technique of Isadora Duncan. She was co-author of Isadora Duncan, Russian Days, 1929. For the last fourteen years she has lived in Hillsdale, N. Y. The collection of Isadora Duncan memorabilia given to the Library by Irma Duncan and now being integrated with other Duncan materials has been described in some detail - in December 1957 Dance Magazine in an essay by Doris Hering, with twelve illustrations; by Walter Terry in the New York Herald Tribune of September 15, 1957; by John Marlin in the New York Times of March 16, 1958; and by Anatole Chujoy in November 1957 Dance News (with an essay from one of Isadora`s notebooks and an article of 1913 by Valerian Svetlov). The dance of Isadora survives chiefly in words; the pictures of her are mostly either studio stills or offstage snapshots (see our two selections from the early files). A wonderful exception is the series of some 300 action drawings by Jules Grandjouan, presented by the artist to the Library last fall. We reproduce one of these and a rare woodcut by Cordon Craig. Isadon Duncan, Pioneer in the Art of Dance THIS is the eightieth anniversary of the birth of Isadora Duncan. The I advent of this gifted dancer, when Queen Victoria was in the last year of her long reign, heralded a more liberal and enlightened attitude towards not merely the dance, but Life in general. To pore over the scrapbooks, letters, clippings in which Isadora kept a record of her early triumphs is to recover the excitement of an era of transformation in both art and life? {1} The Isadora Duncan papers, the gift of Irma Duncan, are in the Dance Collection, Music Division, The New York Public Library. (Ed.) Encouraged by a group of contemporary artists, poets and musicians who early recognized her unusual talent, Isadora Duncan made her public debut before a select audience at the New Gallery in London in 1900. She performed in an inside courtyard with a fountain in the center and with potted palms and flowers for a background. The event passed off quietly, without sensation. But it did not go unnoticed by the local press, which preserved an accurate and detailed impression of the young woman at the very beginning of her career, in an article entitled “An American Dancer”: `` Miss Isadora Duncan is the very latest in the way of plastic dancers. She does not undertake the terpsichorean art in the ordinary way, but illustrates poems or poetic ideals to music by means of what seem to be perfectly artless and natural dance movements. For instance, she dances Mendelsohn`s musical poem, "A Welcome to Spring," with a frolicsome, laughing grace that makes one think of flowers and birds and lambs at play. Her costume for this is appropriately copied from Botticellis “Primavera.” The robe appears to consist of several gauze slips worn one over another. The upper one has angel sleeves and is a dim, pale green colour, painted here and there with delicate flowers. The draperies reach to the feet and are full enough to blow about outlining the figure as she dances. `` Very Botticelli-like is the long, dark hair crowned with roses, and falling in curls to the waist. Ropes of roses wind about the body and the feet are shod with golden sandals. Not a single stock step is taken and the whole dance seems like something that might have happened in ancient Greece. `` A Californian by birth ... dancing has been her passion from childhood and she believes in it as a fine art. She had her first lesson in San Francisco, then put in a year at a ballet school in New York and afterwards came to Europe to study. She has been analysing and memorising the steps and attitudes of the classic nymphs of antique art. Her work thus is the result of the application of poetic intelligence to the art of dancing. Her aim is to study nature and the classics and to abjure the conventional. ... In appearance Miss Isadora is tall, graceful and slender with a small oval face, good features and a mass of thick dark hair. She is beautiful on the stage and has particularly graceful arms and hands. {2} The Times (London) March 16, 1900. Despite the lessons she took at a ballet school however, no ballet master taught her to dance. She tells us in her autobiography that, when she was a novice at this form of dancing, her instructor told her to stand on her toes. When she asked him "why" and he said "because it is beautiful," she frankly retorted from inner conviction: "I don’t think it is beautiful. How can it be beautiful when it goes against nature?" {3} Isadora Duncan, My Life (1927) 21. She herself has revealed to us that she derived her unique art from childhood observations of movements in nature. Instinctively looking for a more natural form of expression in dance, she drew inspiration, as she lived close to the Pacific Ocean, from the immemorially tossing waves, the graceful swaying palm trees, the majestic passing of clouds in the sky, or the winged flight of a bird. Later, in her intensive study of the Greek vases, she found the ideal form for her dances, which were often suggested to her fertile imagination by a beautiful painting or a lovely poem. At that first performance abroad, she presented her new-found art in a program of short dances performed either to music or to Greek poems such as the Homeric "Hymn to Demeter" and the "Idylls of Theocritus." She called them "Dance Idylls." The reviewer of the London Times observed: `` She is a young dancer of remarkable skill, whose art, though it might fail to satisfy the average ballet master, has a wonderful eloquence of its own. It is as far from the acrobatics of the opera dancer as from the conventional tricks by which the pantomimists are wont to express the more elementary human emotions. {4} March 18, 1900. Another contemporary critic recognized that these dance interpretations, breaking for all time the chains in which the outdated, old-style ballet routine had so long held captive the art of the dance, were ushering in a new era. He later recalled: `` Until Isadora Duncan appeared and gave the dance new form and life helping us to realize that the dance can be an art, it had no validity other than a mere diversion. No one who considered himself an intellectual gave the dance as it was then serious consideration. It either appeared in the guise of social dancing and therefore could not be pronounced an art, or it represented ballet dancing - a diversion for the less intelligent-minded and for old gentlemen known as balletomanes. {5} Undated clipping. Another contemporary writer, a Frenchman, who was much impressed by the American dancer’s work as it affected the reawakening of the ninth muse, most graphically describes one of those Victorian-style ballet corps in action. Jean Julien tells us: `` I still remember the rehearsal of a ballet I once saw in a small theatre. The dim, half-light which descended from the prascenium arch onto the stage illuminated a troupe of girls in pink tights and ballet skirts. They each had a woolen shawl wrapped around their shoulders because the theatre was very cold. The troupe evolved slowly and laboriously under the direction of the ballet master while a pianist hammered the piano. `` The ballet master, bustling about made the troupe of girls repeat the same movement a dozen times but it never seemed quite right. He got very angry and stormed at them and the stick with which he beat time, tapping it against the floor, frequently hit the legs in pink tights of all those whose incomprehension appeared only too evident. `` This whole set-up bad something infinitely sinister about it, something very sad. All those stiff turns, those affected pirouettes, those faced capers, all this inanimate gymnastic bad only a very faint resemblance to what one Imagines the dance should be. The dance must after all express something. It is not enough to execute certain movements with the legs alone; the whole body must participate, the entire being must express some feeling. No one will ever manage, even with blows from a stick, to make these unfortunate girls who really dont give a fig express the joyous nuances of sentiment or the raptures of joy. Our ballerinas are for the most part marvelously articulated dolls whose grace we can admire but whose pointes and jetes battus cannot be considered anything vise than choreographical exercises. `` It will be the glory of Isadora Duncan that wanting to renew the art of the dance, she drew her inspiration from ancient Greece and though her movements was able to revive for us again that epoch of beauty. {6} Translated from Jean Julien, "La Danse," in a Duncan program for April 22, 1912 Teatro Costanzi, Roma. Immediately following her small but gratifying success in the English capital, Isadora moved on to Paris, that European center to which every artist eventually gravitates. There, in a top floor studio in the Rue dela Gaiete, she continued her studies. She made the Louvre and other museums a happy hunting ground in her insatiable desire to acquire knowledge and culture. With youthful enthusiasm, she filled her copybook with quotations from Rousseau’s ideas on education and Descartes’ studies of mind in relation to body. She took herself and her work very seriously, impressing everyone she met as a rather shy young girl, eager to succeed. There exists an amusing announcement in her own handwriting for a soiree she planned to give at her studio during these early years. Dated December 12, 1901, it says: `` Miss Duncan will dance to The sound of Harp and flute in her Studio next Thursday Evening and if you feel that seeing this small person dance against the waves of an overpowering destiny is of ten francs benefit to you - why Come along! {7} From Isadora Duncan’s copybook, Irma Duncan Collection. She was poor in those days and led a hand-to-mouth existence. There never seemed enough to eat. But not for a moment did she doubt that her divine mission to bring a new beauty into this world would triumph in the end. Endowed by nature with a resilient robustness, she suffered very little from illness throughout her life. Always keeping svelte and fit in her youth, she throve despite adversity. It is somewhat ironical that France, the country where she later reaped her greatest triumphs, should in the beginning have shown little understanding of her work, But there were some who did recognize her genius. One of these, the French writer Andre Levinson who was an enthusiastic admirer of the ballet, wrote of Isadoras 1901 performance in Paris: `` The dance of Isadora Duncan, who finds inspiration for some of her dances in fifteenth century Italian paintings, reveals itself as a mimic art. In the "Angel playing the Viol," she reproduces the arm movement of the bow. In her "Trimavera," a choreographic copy of Botticei`s painting she simulates the act of sowing flowers with her open hand. In the "Berceuse" by Gretchaninoff, she pretends to lean, while kneeling, over the cradle of a child. In her "Narcissus," wearing a ticked up white tunic showing an admirable knee, and bending over an imaginary spring, the spectator seems to see her reflection in the clear water. And when she clips her hand in the water, one actually feels the refreshing contact of the hand with the liquid element. `` This eloquent illusion, this gift of plastic suggestion, is one of her strongest points. As in the ballad of Goethe, where water caught in the hollow of the hand by a Hindu girl transforms itself into a crystal ball, so does Isadora’s imitative gesture draw from space imaginary objects which she animates with concrete life, more realistic often than real objects. This juggling with the shadows of things, this visual illusion is the triumph of the great mime. Whenever she uses ferns, or a scarf or autumn leaves, as in the "Romance" of Tchaikowsky, she moves away from her original intention, and it becomes an unjustifiable infraction of her pure style as a mime. {8} Undated clipping from a Paris newspaper, ca. 1901; cf. Andre Levinson. La Danse D’Aujourd’hui (Paris 1929) 154. This unusual gift of Isadora’s, to make others see the things born of her imagination and transformed into dance movement, gave depth and meaning to everything she created. From the start, she danced with a commanding authority, which made a profound impression on those who saw her perform even if they did not quite understand her art. To few dancers has the gift been given to possess such insight into music that the dance seems to express exactly what the composer intended. With every movement, Isadora revealed herself as a supreme artist. In pursuing her ideal of art, she would stand motionless for hours alone in her studio, concentrating on the discovery of the central source of all movement in the human body. The indefatigable zeal with which she pursued her researches in kinetics eventually revealed the truth to her, of the centrality of the solar plexus. People had always taken all body movements as for granted as breathing. Isadora discovered that there is a Science of Movement. It is perhaps her finest achievement In the medical field alone, apart from athletics and not to mention the art of dance, her vital contribution has had far-reaching effect. The eminent scientist Dr. Alexis Carrel stated: "There is a right and wrong to every movement." Isadora Duncan discovered that over a half century ago. Her own art was based on the idea. But full acknowledgement of her genius was far off during her period of struggle in France. Moving farther afield, she had her first taste of popular success in Hungary, in the city of Budapest. Thus far she had exhibited her dances only in a studio or in private drawing rooms or lecture halls, none of them providing an adequate background for her art. At Budapest an impressario offered to present her in a real theatre. On the stage of the Urania Theatre in the Hungarian capitol, inspired by the romantic stream that flows past its ancient buildings, Isadora Duncan first danced what one may call her most popular composition - the "Blue Danube." In the Johann Strauss waltz she expressed her own carefree, youthful abandon and the joyous mood induced by the river in spring with love in the air. She brought down the house, not only in Budapest and Vienna but wherever she performed this particular waltz. Today, when one visualizes Isadora dancing, one is apt to think of her doing an interpretation demanding great dramatic power of expression. But in her youth she really excelled in the lighter offerings, the sort known as popular numbers. She was superbly fitted for such dances. Little dance poems - similar to the ones I most often like to recall - a Chopin mazurka, a Brahms waltz, and the ineffable "Dance of the Happy Spirits" executed to a flute solo from Gluck’s Orpheus - represent what the true dance should be. They are lightfooted, graceful, expressing the soul of Terpsichorean art, which is really joy in action. Who, burdened with grief, would ever think of dancing? These were Isadora Duncan’s masterpieces and they were performed with a brilliant technique of her own requiring perfect nimbleness of limbs and body and genuine elevation. This latter, the most Important technical quality in a dancer, was always produced by Isadora and her pupils under their on power and never artificially induced as in the ballet, where the ballerina is lifted off the ground by the strong arms of her partner. On that point alone, Isadora’s technique stands far above that of the ballet. The remarkable quality of her elevation gave her dance creations in the gayer mood the incomparable effect of being executed off the ground rather than on it. How unlike the gyrations of the leaden-footed idols of the dance that are worshipped nowadays! An American reviewer who saw her dance the "Blue Danube" within the first decade of her career remarked: `` Once again she fairly mesmerized her audience with the very perfection of pose and movement, transforming her lithe body from a physical entity into an ethereal medium for the expression of the soul of the composer. `` ... Her personification of the "Blue Danube" is too well known to need comment other than this - that it seemed the spirit of the river itself, flowing on to the wide sea, and, though Miss Duncan has always to be coaxed into doing this, she owes it to herself to make it a fixed feature of every program she presents, for she is the river. {9} Leight Mitchell Hodges, in the Philadelphia North Amercan, 1910. Clipping in the Irma Duncan Collection. The Hungarian people returned her youthful enthusiasm with the greatest ovation they knew how to bestow on an artist. But serious recognition actually came to her in Germany. Her winter season of 1902-03, commencing with a series of performances in Munich, set off a wild brush fire of enthusiasm. Wherever she appeared artists flocked to her in great numbers, but in the land of Goethe and Beethoven they went mad over her. In the most romantic style the German students would unhitch the horses from her carriage and draw her in triumph through the streets from the theatre to her hotel. They serenaded her and tossed flowers at her feet every time she stepped onto the stage. Germany, at that period still an empire, had for the last thirty years enjoyed a state of uninterrupted peace. The liberal arts and sciences flourished. A new classicism found an upsurge especially notable in architecture. So when Isadora brought her dances inspired by Hellenic ideals, the youth of Germany saw in her a veritable goddess and spoke of her as the "divine" Isadora - enough to turn any woman’s head. But she had early learned to value the gifts of nature before those of fortune. And with her lively desire for learning more of what only the Old World could teach her through its free museums and libraries (at that period so sadly lacking in her own country) she decided to settle down in Berlin. She rented a pleasant apartment in Charlottenburg and spent her free time in deep thought and study. With disarming sincerity she told the German people: `` I come to Berlin to learn - I come as an eager & thirsty Pilgrim to drink from the Great fountain Head of German Knowledge & science - I come as a wistful & timid weakling to be made strong - by contact with men & women who have been cradeled in the Birth place of such Giants as Von Humboldt, Goethe & Kant - I come as a Western Barbarian - to the home of Winckleman Schlegel, & {Haeckel} ... my entire Consciousness is trembling ... before these great shrines. ... At present you should leave me in my library - With the help of my big German dictionary, I am just learning the verb - to know. {10} Note for a lecture in Berlin in 1903, evidently an early draft of her "Dance of the Future" in Isadors Duncan’s copybook. In this draft, the name Haeckel is left blank. In Berlin she had obtained her first lucrative contract. By this time, since her inspired dancing of the "Blue Danube," she had broken away from her early, slightly formalized choreography. Now she was to move on to greater things, more ambitious in artistic conception, like the dancing of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, which Wagner called "the Apotheosis of Dance herself." It was a bold venture in dance history, on her part, for no one had ever before interpreted a symphony in dance. It was animated by her desire to weld the two sister arts music and dance, closer together. To dance a Beethoven symphony played by a concert orchestra conducted by no less a luminary than Arthur Nikisch was something entirely novel. The Berlin audience flocked to her recitals because the idea was sensational. Music lovers became entangled in hot debates as to whether or not the music of the masters needed this visualization. She had no alternative. No other music but the very best afforded her growing interpretive powers full scope of expression. Only in great music did she find inspiration for the grandiose conception harmonizing with her own lofty ideals. The writer Karl Fedem, who made her acquaintance at that time, gives the following impression of her: `` The singular mixture of highest rapture for Greek culture and German philosophy together with her sure, free, and youthful Americanism, struck me as charming and informative. Her complete devotion to her idea compelled my friendship and help. `` Isadora was then very slender and pretty. She had read a great deal, was full of fun and good spirits; was carefully guarded ... by her mother, much admired by her brothers and sisters and even a little feared, since she turned out to be not without feminine malice although at bottom kindhearted and good. `` Her spiritual and physical resistance were astounding. She could practice all day and in the evening, give a two hour long performance, go from the theatre to the station, take a train for St. Petersburg, and while her companions went to bed and rested, continue on to the theatre upon arrival for rehearsal and give another performance at night without feeling tired. {11} Translated from Federn, "Nuch Funfundzwaning Jahren," dated 1928, in Isadora Duncan. Der Tanz der Zukunft (The Dance of the Future) Eine Vorlesung (Jena 1929) [v-vi]. Of her dancing at this time (toward the end of 1902) he wrote: `` A simple scene ... a green carpet and a spacious gray-blue backdrop ... almost childish and laughable seems this stage decor until she appears, for then the scene changes with each of her dances and becomes real. So powerful is the mood she creates that we can see meadows and the flowers she gathers ... hear the waves break against the shore and surmise the approach in the distance of a fleet of ancient ships with billowing sails. `` Her entrance, her walk, her simple gesture of greeting are movements of beauty. She wears no tights, no frilled ballet skirts, her slender limbs gleam through the veils and her dance is religion. ... She appears as the Angel with Viol out of the painting by Ambrosio di Predis. A long, violet garment worn over grayish veils floats down to her bare feet. In her hair, which hangs loosely to her shoulders, she wears a crown of white and red roses. And the Quatrocento comes alive again before our eyes with all its innocence and deep religious feeling. `` "Pan and Echo" - a short Greek tunic, her hair tied into a knot. We ask ourselves: can this possibly be the same creature? With wonderful gestures expressive of the antique ideal, she resurrects the nostalgia of Hellas. How many statues have come to life in her! In a heavily draped long Greek attire, she mourns to music of Gluck over the death of Euridice, in rhythmic, measured, ceremonious grief that mounts and mounts until she sinks to the ground in despair. And then she appears again - this time the scene is darker, wrapped in sombre shadows, and her gown is colourless and floating like the shadows, and her movements are rapid and ghost-like: the shadows of the underworld listening to Orpheus. Suddenly the scene is bright again and everything is joy and contentment - Orpheus has found Euridice. `` She has a dance without music, awesome and very gripping, called "Death and the Maiden." ... as in Maeterlinck’s "Intruse," death announces itself unseen but intensely apprehended. ... The spectator feels a cold shiver run up and down his spine. Everyone has sensed the awesome presence of the destroyer. {12} ibid [iii—iv] quoting his introduction to the first printing of her lecture Isadora Duncan. Der Tanz der Zukunft (The Dance of the Future) Eine Vorlesung. Ubersedzt und Eingeleitet von Karl Federn (Leipzig 1903) 7-9. Federn translated Nietzche’s Zarathustra for her, and she also evinced a keen interest in the works of Ernst Haeckel. She had read his The Riddle of the Universe in which he asserted the essential unity of organic and inorganic nature. Filled with admiration for his Darwinian theories of the origin of species, she wrote him a congratulatory message upon the occasion of his seventieth birthday. Dear Master... Your genius has brought light Into the darkness of many human souls. Your works have given me religion and understanding which counts for more than life with me ... all my love. Isadora Duncan The great scientist made his home in Jena but spent his birthday that year in Italy. He received so many congratulatory messages from all over the world that he was unable to answer each one personally. He had a note printed thanking his friends. On the back of one of them, he personally penned a letter to Isadora acknowledging her message. She treasured and kept his letter all her life. Bordighera, Park Hotel 2 March 1904 Much admired artiste! The receipt of your amiable letter together with the present of your beautiful pictures have given me much joy on my 70th birthday and I want to thank you heartily for them. I have been for quite a while a sincere admirer of your classic art (being an old admirer of the Greeks) and I hope at last within this present year to have the pleasure of making your aquaintance [acquaintance]. As author of the "Anthropogenie" I would be charmed to see in the harmonious movements of your graceful person the greatest creation of nature. I shall remain for the rest of the month in Bordighera at the Park Hotel. Middle of April I go back to Jena. As a return gift I shall then send you my picture. Please forward me your address for the month of May and let me know if you desire some of my pamphlets. With thanks and best wishes for the growing success of your art-reform along the lines of evolving nature, I remain, your sincere admirer. Ernst Haeckel {13} Translated from original in Irma Duncan Collection. Dear Master ... I consider it a great honor that you have written to me. I have read your dear letter many times and can hardly believe that you dear Master, have written in this way to me. I have just returned from my performance at the Philharmonie and in the solitude of my room am thinking of you. Of your wonderful life-work, of your great human heart that has worked for all mankind. ... How I would love to dance for you! I am going to be in Bayreuth this summer and perhaps I can come to Jam and dance for you in the open air perhaps under the trees. But my dances will only be a poor way to express my love and gratitude for you. ... Now I must go to sleep since I have to travel tomorrow to Mannheim, Hannover, Luebeck and Hamburg etc. and later to Paris. Good-night dear Master, your Isadora Duncan. {14} In the Ernst Haeckel Archives, Jena, Germany; here retranslated from an article by Dr. Cuido Schmidt in the Berliner Tageblatt, 1927. Jena, 15 July 1904 Much admired woman! Your letter and the for me particularly interesting photograph of you, have given me much pleasure. And I thank you also for the kind invitation to come and visit you at Phillips Rube in Bayreuth. I should love to accept if circumstances allowed me to do so, but unfortunately I am swamped with work and may not find time to come. I may not be able even to travel anywhere during my vacation August & September. I have never been in Bayreuth and naturally would very much like to attend the world-famous Festspiele - despite the little comprehension I have of serious music, and at the same time - above everything else! - to admire your wonderful art of which I have heard so much. But all tickets to the performances have been sold out, so I am given to understand. Anyhow I shall continue to hope that sooner or later I may meet you and have the opportunity to enjoy your art. With heartiest greetings and best wishes, Your devoted Ernst Haeckel {15} Translated from original in Irma Duncan Collection. Isadora took part in the Festspiele, that year under the direction of Frau Cosima Wagner, by dancing, with two girls of the local ballet, the three Graces in Tannhauser. The German scientist came and visited her there. Although all the artists sang her praises in Germany she also, upon occasion, encountered animadversion. One misguided and confused critic went so far as to print an article in the Berlin Morgen Post in 1903 entitled "Can miss Duncan Dance?" Comparing her technique unfavourably with that of the prima ballerina of the Berlin Opera, be declared Isadora lacking In either the correct figure or the required technique to establish a new art form. He proposed that the question of her qualifications should be put before the ballet masters of the world. "Let them be the judge!" Isadora, who had concentrated on proving the obsolescence of the old-style ballet, declaring: "The principles of the ballet school are in direct opposition to what I am aiming at," did not let the insult go unchallenged. She sent a typical reply to the Morgen Post: Dear Sir; I was very much embarrassed on reading your esteemed paper to find that you had asked of so many admirable masters of the dance to expend such deep thought and consideration on so insignificant a subject as my humble self. I feel that much excellent literature was somewhat wasted on so unworthy a subject. And I suggest that instead of asking them Can Miss Duncan Dance?’ you should have called their attention to a far more celebrated dancer — one who has been dancing in Berlin for some years before Miss Duncan appeared. A natural dancer who also in her style (which Miss Duncan tries to follow) is in direct opposition to the school of the ballet of today. The dancer I allude to is the statue of the dancing Maenade in the Berlin Museum. Now will you kindly write again to the admirable masters and mistresses of the ballet and ask them "Can the dancing Maenade Dance?" For this dancer of whom I speak has never tried to walk on the end of her toes. Neither has she spent much time in the practice of leaping in the air in order to find out how many times she could clap together her heels before she came down again. She neither wears corset or tights and her barefeet rest freely in her sandals. I believe a prize has been offered for the sculptor who could replace the broken arms in their original position. I suggest It might be even more useful for art of today to offer a prize for whoever could reproduce in life the heavenly pose of her body and the secret beauty of her movement. I suggest that your excellent paper might offer such a prize and the excellent masters and mistresses of the ballet compete for it. Perhaps after a trial of some years they will have learnt something about human anatomy, something about the beauty, the purity, the intelligence of the movements of the human body. Breathlessly awaiting their learned reply, I remain, most sincerely - Isadora Duncan {16} Translated from a letter written for the Morgen Past in January or February 1903. As a result of the controversy, the Berlin Presse Verein invited her to lecture on the "Dance of the Future." She complied with the request by reading a long and cleverly propounded treatise. The statement was later issued in pamphlet form and widely distributed in Germany and elsewhere and had much influence on modern thought on the subject. {17} The 1903 and 1929 editions are cited in notes 12 and 11 above. The first copyright edition was The Dance (Jena 1909). On that occasion, she promised in due time to found a school of her own `` where a hundred little girls shall be trained in my art, which they in turn will better. In this school I shall not teach the children to imitate my movements, but shall teach them to make their own. ... I shall help them to develop those movements which are natural to them. `` And so I say its the duty of the dance of the future to give first to the young artists who come to its door for instruction freer and [more] beautiful bodies - and to instruct them in movements that are in full harmony with nature.... `` The Dancer of the Future will be one whose body & soul have grown so harmoniously together that the natural language of that soul will have become the movement of the body. ... Her dance will belong to no Nationality but to all Humanity. {18} A reconstruction from incomplete notes in Isadora`s 1903 copybook and the 1903 text, pages 21-22, 24-25. One day in 1904, while walking with an artist friend, Isadora came across a group of girls doing callisthenics with dumbells in the open courtyard of a school. Curious to see what they would do she stopped to watch them. The girls went though their exercises in a lifeless manner, dressed in woolen bloomers, middy blouses, black stockings and shoes. Isadora, always bent on reform, dreaming of a new race of beings clad in as few clothes as possible to permit the sun and air to reach the body and allow for maximum freedom of motion, said to her companion: "Consider these poor girls trying to exercise with all those horrible clothes on! One of these days I am going to change all that." "How are you going to bring that miracle about?" her friend asked, doubtfully bearing in mind the ingrained prudishness of the age they lived in. "I am determined to found a school," Isadora answered with conviction, "where children will walk barefoot in sandals just as I do, and wear short sleeveless tunics when they dance so they can move in utter freedom and be a fine example to all the other children in this world. They shall learn not to be ashamed to expose their limbs to the health-giving sun. And I shall teach them to dance, not in the stilted outworn tradition I found when a child, but in harmony with everything that is beautiful in nature." Determined as she was to create her "Dancer of the Future," she thought only in terms of health and happiness for all children on earth, rich and poor alike. In her youthful idealism, she desired immediately to adopt a limitless number in order to teach them the way to a better, more beautiful life. With extraordinary magnanimity, she unhesitantly used her own small capital, only recently acquired, to achieve this laudable end. She ardently wished to share with others - in the unselfish attitude of an inspired leader devoted to a lofty ideal - her revelation of truth and beauty. In December 1904 she founded her first school of the dance in Grunewald near Berlin, with her little niece as her first pupil. This unique, non-paying school, that endeavored to educate children though the medium of a natural dance was, however, not officially opened until January 1905. It was then that I, as one of her original pupils, enrolled there fifty-three years ago. My long dance career has been devoted entirely to furthering the doctrine and ideals of Isadora Duncan, that remarkable woman and great American artist, who was not only my inspired teacher, but also my beloved foster-mother. Irma Duncan * Duncan, Irma. Isadora Duncan, pioneer in the art of dance, 1958. Pp. 3-15. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.32106000782836;view=thumb;seq=21 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.32106000782836;view=1up;seq=8 —Irma Duncan, Isadora Duncan: Pioneer in the Art of Dance, p. 15.