My Life
by Isadora Duncan
from Liveright Publishing Corporation
Fabulous is the only adjective that comes close to doing justice to Isadora Duncan (1878-1927). Her awesomely self-assured autobiography depicts a woman who while still in her teens tells an eminent theatrical manager (from whom she desperately needs a job), "I have discovered the art that has been lost for two thousand years.... I bring you the dance." In Duncan's rendering of her life, composers fling themselves at the piano and compose new music for her on the spot. Men pine for her love (the book's sexual frankness, while hardly startling today, was considered quite scandalous in 1927). And the poor mortals who can never understand her need to be free can at least applaud wildly at her concerts. Duncan and her siblings sleep in a bare Parisian attic, then dance barefoot through the Luxembourg Gardens. They travel to Greece to worship "in the Sacred Land of Hellas," where they build their very own temple. Duncan is capable of seeing the humor in her rhapsodic immersion in art, but we don't really want her to be realistic and self-deprecating like ordinary mortals. It's her divine passion, her supreme confidence in her own genius that make My Life such fun to read. --Wendy Smith
1927. An account of her life in her own words, Isadora Duncan's life is one containing the most illustrative content and value. She thought the story of her life was "fitted for the pen of a Cervantes, or Casanova." She made the purest attempt at the life of adventure. She states her art as a dancer is just an effort to express the truth of her Being in gesture and movement.
Nijinsky, Pavlova, Duncan: Three Lives In Dance (Da Capo Paperback)
by Paul Magriel
from Da Capo Press
Dance Was Her Religion: The Spiritual Choreography of Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis and Martha Graham
by Janet Lynn Roseman
from Hohm Press
Three dancers who changed the face of Modern Dance and liberated dancers from ballet's rigidity to glorify the human body as a scared vessel: Isadora Duncan, 1877-1927, Ruth St. Denis, 1879-1968, and Martha Graham, 1894-1991. From youth, each recognized an organic urge for ecstatic human expression. This book explores their pioneering approaches to spiritual choreography and reveals unkown aspects of their lives and work:
* each insisted upon her vision of dance as prayer
* each was a mystic
* each had a profound, personal devotion to the Virgin Mary
* each choreographed work in her honor
* each portrayed the Madonna in dance
* each felt herself to be a priestess of dance
* each worked to establish a school, where dance was the basis for an enlightened life
The book contains quotes about and interviews with these women, including rare materials, restoring the understanding of dance as religious expression and placing these women in their rightful places among spiritual philosophers.
The Collected Poems of Yesenin in English
by Sergei Aleksandrovich Yesenin
from Floridian Publisher
Collected Poems of Sergey Yesenin in English preserves the rhyme and rhythm of the Russian genius contains all his poetry.
Isadora Duncan; her life, her art, her legacy: Illustrated with photos. and drawings
Done into Dance: Isadora Duncan in America
by Ann Daly
from Wesleyan
This cultural study of modern dance icon Isadora Duncan is the first to place her within the thought, politics and art of her time. Duncan's dancing earned her international fame and influenced generations of American girls and women, yet the romantic myth that surrounds her has left some questions unanswered: What did her audiences see on stage, and how did they respond? What dreams and fears of theirs did she play out? Why, in short, was Duncan's dancing so compelling? First published in 1995 and now back in print, Done into Dance reveals Duncan enmeshed in social and cultural currents of her time -- the moralism of the Progressive Era, the artistic radicalism of prewar Greenwich Village, the xenophobia of the 1920s, her association with feminism and her racial notion of "Americanness."
Life into Art: Isadora Duncan and Her World
from W. W. Norton & Company
Isadora: A Sensational Life
by Peter Kurth
from Little, Brown
It's a bit of a stretch to suggest, as Peter Kurth does in his biography of the expatriate artist, that Isadora Duncan (1877-1927) single-handedly invented modern dance, a claim that Vaslav Nijinsky and George Balanchine, among others, would almost certainly contest.
But Kurth has that claim on good authority, namely Duncan herself, who recalled, "I was possessed by the dream of Promethean creation that, at my call, might spring from the Earth, descend from the Heavens, such dancing figures as the world had never seen." Never shy of self-promotion, Duncan captivated audiences wherever she took the stage, earning a following--but also stirring controversy--in her native United States, and even greater exaltation and stormier criticism in Europe, where she made her home for most of her adult life. There she emerged as a textbook bohemian, avidly practicing and preaching free love and other convention-flouting doctrines, breaking hearts, taking up with political radicals and some of the great artists of the day, and drinking far too much. She also defined the figure of the artist as celebrity, living each day, as one Russian critic remarked, "as though bewitched by music" and unconcerned by the mundane. She even died spectacularly, done in by a fashion accessory and bad timing.
Toward the end of her life Duncan remarked, "I am not a dancer. I have never danced a step in my life." She was a dancer, of course, and one whose influence has endured. She was also an original, self-aware and certain of her greatness. Kurth tells her story well in this vivid biography, one of value to students of modern dance and the history of the Lost Generation. --Gregory McNamee
Isadora Duncan is considered by many to be the founder of modern dance. Her name is synonymous with originality, spontaneity, drama, and sensuality. Finally, here is a biography that does justice to the life of this unforgettable woman. Never before has Isadora Duncan been so thoroughly explored.
The Search for Isadora: The Legend & Legacy of Isadora Duncan
by Lillian Loewenthal
from Princeton Book Company Publishers
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