Dancing the Future, Performing the Past: Isadora Duncan and Wagnerism in the American Imagination

Abstract

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, dancer Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) regularly appeared on concert hall and opera house stages in New York and other American cities. Audiences were taken with her striking persona and nontraditional conception of dance, and impressed by her success in Europe. Duncan's artistic, intellectual, and personal self-association with Richard Wagner—a mythological being in the contemporary American imagination—also captured the attention of many audience members. Duncan danced to excerpts from Tristan und Isolde, Parsifal, and other works while rejecting Wagner's conception of dance; she borrowed language and ideological formulations from his writings while dismissing his aesthetic theories. The American Wagner cult has long been associated with the Gilded Age and conductor Anton Seidl (1850–1898). Isadora Duncan's American performances demonstrate that American Wagnerism persisted well into the twentieth century, albeit in a different form. Conjuring herself as a rebellious disciple of Wagner, Duncan modeled a second generation of American Wagnerism that combined contemporary cultural debates and early modernist aesthetics with strains of Wagner's art and ideologies.

Madame Mariquita, Greek Dance, and French Ballet Modernism

“…Duncan wrote that she was “bitterly disappointed” by what passed as Greek dancing in Paris and described Greek dance at the Opéra as “a sort of modified Ballet in white gowns … all stupid, vanity and vexation.…” (Daly 1995, 74). On Duncan's connections with cultural practices in France (and Europe), see especially Dorf (2009; 2012; 2015); Daly (1994; 1995); Dickinson (2017); Kurth (2001); Simonson (2012); and Jowitt (1987).…”

India and the Translocal Modern Dance Scene, 1890s–1950s

“…Between 1895 and 1897 she was part of the Company of Augustine Daly in New York, but she quit because she felt constrained by its environment and she had to play parts assigned to her by the stars of the company. These included acting, singing and reciting, and only seldom dancing (Duncan 2013, Simonson 2012. Duncan thought that Greek art showed a more natural way to relate to nature and felt inspired by it.…”