Wednesday, July 6 – “Done Into Dance: Isadora Duncan in America” by Ann Daly
Today, I made the trek down to Logan Square. I spent the morning at Gaslight Coffee Roasters (a super hipster, very cool place to do work–but bring headphones, because people like to chat) and the afternoon at Cafe Mustache (less clean-cut than Gaslight, but much quieter). “Done Into Dance” was not nearly as difficult to get through as “My Life,” so I finished in fewer than my eight allotted hours (making up for going over time yesterday!).
Daly’s book tracks the different “bodies” of Isadora Duncan–the dancing body, the natural body, the expressive body, the female body, and the body politic. Suffice it to say that Duncan was not an uncomplicated woman.
My biggest goal in reading this book was to supplement my understanding of Duncan’s life, and to compare an outside record of it to her own memoir. While I’m not necessarily surprised by a lot of the differences, they still exist in abundance and should be noted. The one huge one for me is Duncan’s intense racism.
In “My Life,” I got inklings of a dislike for anything not upper-class, but “Done Into Dance” made Duncan’s thoughts and feelings so much clearer (ironically enough). Duncan’s primary aim was to make dance a “higher-class” art form, something that would appeal to the American elite. She hated jazz music and swing dancing, and she quite explicitly tied this to a dislike for black people and their culture/anything they stood for, really. She had no desire for dance to be “of the people” (in huge contrast to Whitman, whom she loved), but wanted it to be elite and exclusive.
Duncan also seems to have very feminist ideals–she considers marriage a trap; she believes in the woman’s right to bear children out of wedlock–but she manages to subvert these at the same time. She talks repeatedly about how she refuses to get married and doesn’t understand why any woman would subject herself to marriage in “My Life,” but she conveniently leaves out the fact that she got married in 1922 (the book was published in 1927). She has two kids out of wedlock, but when touring she lies and says that they’re children in her dance school instead of presenting them as her own children. She also insists that she quit ballet classes as a child and never went back, but there’s a lot of evidence to show that she kept taking dance classes throughout her life.
Also, William Carlos Williams adored her.
Basically, Duncan was a racist liar who selectively described her own life. But hey, she did some really incredible stuff for modern dance. You win some, you lose some, right? We owe her big time.
(Also, with everything going on in the world today, I feel it’s necessary to add that racism is never excusable, even if you are the pioneer of American modern dance. We all need to check our privilege and be aware of the world in which we’re living, and make sure that we’re conscious of the racism ingrained in each of us because of the society in which we live. We have to actively work against it. #blacklivesmatter.)