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Born in San Francisco, California, in 1878, Isadora Duncan, the Mother of Modern Dance, was the youngest of four children. She claimed that because her mother lived on champagne and oysters during her pregnancy, she, Isadora, literally came into the world dancing. Isadora refused to take ballet, saying that the restricted and unfluidic movement was not harmonious. "One should be able to move the waist, the hips, arms, and legs freely and as the waves, or a tree that lifts its limbs to the sky." Such was the philosophy of Duncan's dance. There are no straight lines in nature. The whole of this art was of the spirit.
"Imagine then a dancer who, after long study, prayer and inspiration, has attained such a degree of understanding that his body is simply the luminous manifestation of his soul; whose body dances in accordance with a music heard inwardly, in an expression of something out of another, profounder world. This is the truly creative dancer; natural but not imitative,
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speaking in movement out of himself and out of something greater than all selves." (The Philosopher's Stone of Dancing, Isadora Duncan, 1920) This was the philosophy Isadora danced.
As a teenager Duncan started her own dance school to support her family, teaching younger children her very own way of dancing. Even then, she had no set instruction nor true technique, but Isadora never gained acceptance as a dancer in San Francisco. They told her to go home, to become a teacher, a wife, a mother. Finally at age twenty-one, Isadora set off for New York with a few of her family members, working in and performing in vaudeville productions such as Midsummer's Night Dream. Finding rather little success, Isadora set her sight and dreams on London and Paris.
Isadora Duncan was a woman of strength, yet not without trials or tribulations. Being one of the first predominant feminists, she defied convention by refusing to marry, and had two children out of wedlock. Tragically both
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