Breath of Nature
SEARCHING FOR THE SPIRIT OF ISADORA DUNCAN IN STOCKBRIDGE
By Haas Regen
“Isadora Duncan danced in our garden in the early days when she was just beginning to be known, and at the time in her career when she was most beautiful— young, slim, ethereal, like a Botticelli Muse,” wrote Mary Adams French, the wife of Daniel Chester French, in Memories of a Sculptor’s Wife.
Isadora Duncan dancers, 1915-23. GENTHE PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION. PUBLIC DOMAIN
Duncan, considered to be the “Mother of Modern Dance,” visited Chesterwood during the summer of 1898, when she traveled to Stockbridge to perform for audiences at John and Isabella Weyman Winthrop’s estate on Ice Glen Road (now site of Villa Virginia) and Oscar and Amy Iasigi’s home, Clovercroft, on Prospect Hill Road (which burned to the ground in 1954). Tickets were $2, and the local press reported that “all society people were present, and a very neat sum was netted for the Red Cross society.” During these performances, Duncan danced her interpretations of Mendelssohn’s incidental music to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and works by contemporary American composer Ethelbert Nevin.
According to Mrs. French, Duncan preferred the woods and paths of Chesterwood to the grounds of the Gilded Age Berkshire cottages. Duncan also was nourished by the sculptor’s aesthetic guidance: “She thought Mr. French would make some suggestion as to her gowns, and so on. So we dressed her up in wreaths of flowers and pieces of drapery, and tried all kinds of experiments… As she danced upon the upper terrace of the garden, with her long fragile figure, red poppies in her hair, her fleeting motions, she seemed like a Greek figure come to life. Her dancing at the time was like a breath of nature, but in everyday life… She lived in a dream; a very artistic beautiful dream; and she was apparently conscious of nothing on earth but that dream, which perhaps after all is the best part of creative art.”
Duncan, a revolutionary artistic figure and feminist icon, was born in San Francisco in 1877 and raised in what Agnes de Mille called “a free-thinking, free-experimenting, wholly non-orthodox manner.” Duncan went east in 1895, first to Chicago and then New York City, where she performed for Augustin Daly, the famed theater impresario. In her autobiography, My Life, Duncan wrote that her experience with Daly taught her to have “a perfect nausea for the theatre.” When she “could no longer stand the imbecility” of his company, she began dancing in Manhattan’s upper-class drawing rooms.
It was in these salons that she became “Society’s Favorite Dancer” and met some of the most influential socialites of the early Progressive Era: Adèle Le Bourgeois Chapin, who organized Duncan’s appearances in Stockbridge, as well as Caroline Webster “Lina” Schermerhorn, a.k.a., “the Mrs. Astor,” who invited Duncan to dance at their Newport villa, Beechwood, in September 1898.
Though Duncan had planned to dance on August 3, 1898, at Norwood, the Chapins’ summer house in Lenox (now the site of the Seven Hills Inn), she gave an additional performance at the Winthrops’ instead. There, she presented her dances to the Rubáiyát, Edward FitzGerald’s English translation of poems by the medieval Persian astronomer-poet-philosopher Omar Khayyám. Duncan left for London in the spring of 1899 and then moved to Paris in 1900. Years later, Mrs. Chapin wrote in her memoir, Their Trackless Way, that Duncan thanked her for helping to make her “the most famous dancer in Europe.” Indeed, the Russian choreographer Michel Fokine once remarked that Duncan was “the greatest American gift to the art.”
When Edith Wharton, who had presumably missed opportunities to see Duncan in both Stockbridge and Newport, finally saw the great dancer in Paris, she was immediately carried away: “That first sight of Isadora’s dancing was a white milestone to me,” Wharton wrote in A Backward Glance. “It shed a light on every kind of beauty, and showed me for the first time how each flows into the other as the music merged with her dancing. All through the immense rapt audience one felt the rush of her inspiration, as one feels the blowing open of a door.”
This June, Chesterwood’s dancer-in-residence, Ian Spencer Bell, will present Duncan’s interpretation of the Brahms Waltzes, The Many Faces of Love, as well as his own dance and poetry piece, Rosing. Pianist Lauren Aloia will accompany Bell on the summer solstice, Wednesday, June 21, at 5:30 p.m., in the garden where Duncan once danced. (A rain date is scheduled for Thursday, June 22, at 5:30 p.m.; visit chesterwood.org for more information.)
Isadora Duncan in her Pavilion at Bellevue, Meudon, France, 1919. BIBLIOTHÈQUE NATIONALE DE FRANCE. PUBLIC DOMAIN
“It sounds crazy to suggest that we haven’t seen men’s bodies dance freely,” says Bell. “Men have dominated history, but we still live in a culture steeped in gender norms. Dance still absolutely relies on them. In ballet class, the men and women are still separated. Duncan wanted women to throw off their corsets, breathe freely, live freely, and love freely—I want to celebrate that. When you think about it, modern dance is so young compared to other forms. It’s still exciting when dancers can be brave and strive to change how we’re able to see it.”
Because Duncan’s choreography was not notated during her lifetime, her dances had to be handed down and preserved by her students and disciples. Some works, such as the Brahms Waltzes, remain incomplete and must be reconstructed or reimagined. For The Many Faces of Love, nine of the 16 waltzes were staged by Lori Belilove, founder and artistic director of the Isadora Duncan Dance Foundation & Company, who was trained by first- and second-generation Duncan dancers. Bell worked with Belilove for ten weeks at her studio on West 26th Street in Manhattan, then choreographed the remaining seven waltzes—in the Duncan style—at his studio in rural Sandisfield.
“First, it’s about tasting the technique,” says Belilove. “There’s a very particular technique and vocabulary and—above all—a level of precision, which Ian respected. But it’s also about crafting a theatrical work, moving from this feeling to that feeling and making sure each idea is distinct. You have to find where to fill in the gaps and create the real narrative, putting in your own self, your own life, your own sadness or joy—or moments of sensuality. Before each dance begins, you have to ask, ‘Where are we coming from?’”
Isadora Duncan, Dover Street Studios, 1906-12. PUBLIC DOMAIN VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Although Duncan’s legend was built by conquering Europe’s most distinguished concert halls, Bell’s choice to perform her dances in the great outdoors—and in bare feet—may be more in keeping with Duncan’s basic principles.
“The one little snippet of the film we have of her dancing is at a garden party outside of London in 1908,” says Peter Kurth, author of Isadora: A Sensational Life. “Though her career became monumental and epic in its scope, she would still do these kinds of dances. She’d toss off her clothing and her shoes and begin to move, as if to say, ‘I will dance for you right here, right now, on the grass,’ which is what Ian is doing. When that happened, it was for the benefit and pleasure of all around.”
In 1903, Duncan gave a groundbreaking lecture in Berlin that was later published as a pamphlet—or manifesto—titled “The Dance of the Future.” In it, Duncan insisted: “If we seek the real source of the dance, if we go to nature, we find that the dance of the future is the dance of the past, the dance of eternity, and has been and will always be the same. The movement of waves, of winds, of the earth is ever in the same lasting harmony.” She also stated that she believed “in the religion of the beauty of the human foot,” and that “the expression and intelligence of the human foot is one of the greatest triumphs of the evolution of man.”
“Duncan was interested in the natural body as it appeared and as it moved,” explains Kurth. “It wasn’t about performing dances that had been written for the body. It was about the body dancing. It’s disarmingly simple next to a lot of the pyrotechnics that people are still accustomed to seeing. It is very simple, full-body expression, and it is all delighted, all melodious. Duncan thought that if you needed something artificial to accomplish it, it isn’t natural dance.”
Isadora Duncan portraits, 1916-18.
Aiming to capture this fundamental yet elusive quality of Duncan’s work, Belilove often takes her students off the dance floor and into the natural world: “I ask them to touch their toes into the grass and feel that sinking into the sand or mud, to move around in different ways,” she says. “Then— is it wet? Is it dry? Is it hot? You’ve got things you step on, crush over, and play with. You’ve got your trees, your bushes, your ponds and your streams, your flower beds. All of that is fertile ground for us. It’s fertile for the imagination and the narrative. This is where we get a larger quality of Isadora Duncan’s art.”
When Anna Duncan, Isadora’s adopted daughter and protégée, danced at the inaugural season of the Ted Shawn Theatre in 1942—also in bare feet—she asked for the upstage “barn doors” to be opened, allowing the Jacob’s Pillow Festival audience to see the trees and landscape behind her. Thirty-nine years later, in 1981, the dancer and choreographer Annabelle Gamson performed Duncan’s work on the same stage. The occasion was felicitous: Gamson had studied with Julia Levien, who had been a pupil of Anna Duncan. Belilove’s company last performed at the Pillow in 2019, on the Inside/Out Stage, surrounded by nature. The same year, the Boston- based company Dances by Isadora performed on the grounds of Chesterwood in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Frenches’ summer home becoming a historic site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Ian Spencer Bell dances in the Studio at Chesterwood. He will perform in the Garden on Wednesday, June 21, at 5:30 p.m. STEPHANIE ZOLLSHAN
More than a decade before the Dances by Isadora company appeared at Chesterwood, Deborah Harris—a Great Barrington-based musician, dance teacher, and Duncan enthusiast—had the idea of performing there with her young students. Influenced by Mrs. French’s writings, Harris and her troupe, the Spirit of Isadora Dancers, gathered in the summers of 2004 and 2005 and entertained audiences in the manner of “Peggy’s Party”—birthday parties the Frenches would throw for their daughter, Margaret.
“Every year, they had a big, outdoor party and invited all the Stockbridge kids,” says Harris. “We wanted to bring that back. When you see these dances in the Greek costumes, with the trees and the animals, the wind blowing and the waves pulsating, one thing flows into the other and you think, of course, this is just right—it’s reflecting nature! Duncan wanted her movements to reflect the natural world. We came skipping down the Hydrangea Walk and did our performance on the adjacent lawn where Isadora had done her impromptu dance. We then disappeared into the forest.”
Above all, Duncan valued children’s dance education: “Let us first teach children to breathe, to vibrate, to feel, and to become one with the general harmony of nature,” she wrote. “Let us first produce a beautiful human being, a dancing child.” The Isadora Duncan School of Dance was first established in Grunewald, Germany, in 1904. Bell, who teaches dance to roughly 250 students at the Nightingale-Bamford School in New York City, is also inspired by children’s response to music and movement.
“They do those things that we see in Duncan’s dances,” Bell observes. “They skip. They run. They walk. They fall. They swing. They turn. They leap. They hop. They glide. They dart. They throw. They gather. They push. They do all of those things. Most people stop doing that kind of thing by the time they’re teenagers. But we keep doing them in private. By the time we get to sex, we start moving our bodies again in ways that are not dissimilar. The movements are smaller, but they’re still beautiful and gorgeous. As adults, it seems like the only time we really move like that is in moments of joy and ecstasy.”
Off the stage, Duncan’s life was beset with tragedy. All three of her biological children died, one in childbirth and two in a devastating automobile accident. Her own death, in September 1927, at the age of 50, is notoriously gruesome: her neck was broken when her shawl became entangled in the spokes of the left rear wheel of a low, two-seat Amilcar CGSS in Nice, France.
“She still speaks, even now—it’s quite amazing,” says Kurth. “She still encourages people to open themselves and let themselves out. And people in the Berkshires will be seeing Ian Spencer Bell’s freedom to dance. In that sense, Duncan would have been very supportive of what Ian is doing. And the reason she would be is because Ian is doing it. In other words, a man is dancing these dances. This is how you’ll find out that they are universal. They have always been emblems of liberation.”
For Bell, the opportunity to dance Duncan in the gardens of Chesterwood is Romantic in the true sense of the word: “You feel you’re in conversation with another being in another history, and you’re bringing all of it to life like you’re giving breath to that thing,” he says. “It feels especially powerful to do it in this very place, gathering that energy. Dance is always a practice of communing with the past and the present.”