ISADORA DUNCAN (1877-1927)

Commissioned By LOIS A. FLOOD

Written By PAUL-JAMES DWYER

Part II

It’s one thing to hear about someone’s life second hand, but why not go back to “la source”. Down in my dressing room I could hear over the stage intercom system, a voice giving the story of my early life to 1900. Now I’m not saying they got it wrong, all the facts were there, but now we come to when I went to Europe and started to breathe, to really live, for my career to take-off! I thought enough is enough. Who better than I to tell the story of my own life! First off, I’d like to say that the facts of are one thing and the first section was fine in that respect. But one thing was left out. California as you all know is a paradise of beauty. Nature is a shining bower here. I grew up with the lush vegetation, the sparkling waves of the ocean, lapping on the pristine beaches of Oakland. As a child, I wandered for many hours in the garden that is this state. The sun opened my body and I grew strong watching the wind moving in the trees and the field grasses that bordered our numerous homes.

As I said the facts of one’s life are one thing. But it is the interior life that also makes us what we are. For an artist the interior development should mean much more. As my friend Sonia Delauney once said “It is the mystery of interior life which liberates, radiates and communicates. Beginning there a new language can be freely created.” I have always contended that “We do not know how to get down to the depths, to lose ourselves in an inner self, how to develop our visions into the harmonies that attend our dreams.”

So ladies and gentlemen let us begin from where the narrator left-off and continue on the odyssey of my life. Now a few of you may have heard some of my speeches from the stage during and after my performances. Some of the American press called them my “harranging the audiences”. Really they have their gall, because most of what they print is just plain propaganda anyway. Pure bunkum! But what I will try to keep all this within the limits of the time my worthy disciple Miss Flood has suggested. Shall we begin?

Arriving in Europe at the turn of the century, contacts with other artists and my career developed quickly, first in England, then in France and Austria. I toured in Hungary for nine months in 1903 and from then on was considered world famous. Newspapers back in the US followed my career closely and their journalists quoted me repeatedly. My next triumph was in Germany and there I started a school, in Berlin, with my sister Elizabeth. Because I became pregnant by Edward Gordon Craig, I was forced to leave Germany and settle in France, as Craig and I were not married, and German society turned hostile. My first child was a girl, Deidre. 1907 saw Craig and I separate. In 1908 I toured back to the United States, but had to cut it short as I was pregnant with my second child Patrick, by Paris Singer. He, of the famous sewing machine family. The US tour later continued in 1911, with the New York Symphony Orchestra.

Life is the root, art is the flower! I published my ideas on dance, child education and the need for societal reform in many publications. If I were only a dancer I would not speak. But I am a teacher with a mission. It is the dance of the future: the highest intelligence in the freest body, and the knowledge of the spirit, the soul. Yes, my dance is religion! We just don’t use that word. For all free natural movements conform to the law of wave movement. All energy expresses itself through this wave movement. It is the alternate attraction and resistance to the law of gravity, that creates this wave movement. Form and movement are one! Sound waves, light waves, movement waves are all the same! In 1929 they gave a French physicist a Nobel Prize for this idea. I had already preached it, for over two decades!

n November 1911 the Paris Police closed a series of performances I was giving in a theatre downtown, for what they called, partial nudity. I was dancing to Wagner’s “Venusberg” and my costume was a one piece garment that showed all of my arms and legs. Now you people, wouldn’t think anything of this today, but back then it was considered totally revolutionary. I was furious and was quoted in the NY Times as saying “I was thinking of leaving Paris permanently. 1912, the scandal was still being talked about in Europe, and I only danced in two cities all year: London and Rome.  If my art is symbolic of any one thing, it is symbolic of the freedom of woman. By 1913 I felt I could return to the Paris stage again and scheduled a series of concerts in March and April. Looking back on the last few years...I guess I was restless and not content with my lover Paris Singer, my wealth, world fame and two beautiful children. Singer and I fought regularly. Politically, intellectually and ideologically we were totally opposite. Like many of the rich he could care less about the poor! He actually left me for a few months and took another woman on a cruise up the Nile, on his private yacht.

Now we come to the event that over-shadows the rest of my life, like the black wings of Asmodeus! How can a Mother tell of the deaths of her own flesh and blood! I will try but please be patient, since that day I have never been the same, I died myself in some ways that day and the tragedy has never left me! It was April 19^th, we’d had lunch together in my Paris house and the children were to go back to my suite at the Trianon Palace Hotel in Versailles...so I could do some work on new choreography. I kissed Patrick and Deirdre good-bye and they got into the hired Renault with their nurse Anny Sim. The chauffeur drove away. On a steep decline, near the house the car stalled and he got out to hand crank the engine started again. But he’d forgot to properly secure the brake mechanism. The car jerked forward and gaining momentum, rolled down the street crashing through a railing, it disappeared into the Seine River. He was later arrested for criminal negligence, but I begged the authorities to drop the case and they relented. By the time the car was found and hauled to the bank, it was too late. The two children were found smothered into the breast of their nurse in the backseat.

I was resting on my bed, eating a few chocolates and musing to myself “I am the happiest woman alive”, when the double doors burst open and Singer crying, stumbled, and fell at my feet. He gasped, “The children - the children are dead.” For weeks I had repeatedly seen a hallucination of two big black ravens flying around my bedroom ceiling. It had been a presage from across the veil. One night after a performance in Paris I had asked my young English pianist Hener Skene to play as an encore, a movement from Chopin’s Funeral March. I danced to it as one in a trance. The audience sat silent at the end, for what seemed an eternity. I heard tears from many in the front rows!

It was one of the two times in my career that I had ever improvised on stage before the public. In spite of all my critics and later so-called historians who said my whole dance was an improvisation, or improve as you now say. Anyway, when I told my great friend Alfred Lord Douglas (he of the Oscar Wilds fame) about the hallucination of the black ravens, he secretly baptised both Deidre and Patrick without my knowledge, a few days before the tragedy.

When Singer uttered those words, I was calm, his tears and cries filled the house...but I realize now I was in total denial, it was the only thing that saved my sanity. Later that day or was it the next...I slipped out of the house and walked down to the spot by the river with a pair of scissors. I know my sister and Mary Desti trailed me but I never let-on. As the ancient Greeks had done, mourning the death of a loved-one, I cut off my hair and dropped it into the river. My eyes watched it silently float away. But even then I couldn’t cry. Turning, I went back to the house and tried to lie down but I couldn’t sleep for days-on-end. I was totally numb. Yes, it’s true, a Catholic priest somehow found his way into my room, soon after the accident, and asked if he could help, but I said “No, I am a pagan.” The Paris music and arts students, were so sweet...they covered the trees of my house with thousands of tiny white bunches of flowers and garlands for the loss of my two babies.

The funeral was too much for me to bear. The children were cremated at Pere Lachaise on the other side of town. I stayed in my room as my horror only increased with the thought of seeing (slight pause) all over town were posters and billboards for a hand soap that had used Patrick’s face, taken in a photograph the year before. So every time I ventured out of the house, I was haunted by his sweet face smiling at me! Fleeing Paris, I went south, vowing never to dance again, as soon as I could!

[PART III has been temporarily disabled]