| Isadora Duncan and Mata Hari |
| The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music…Dancing is poetry with arms and legs. —Charles Baudelaire |
“The dance is a poem of which each movement is a word.” So said Mata Hari who, in the early 1900s, became a Paris sensation. Her dances, described as “exotic, mysterious and sensual” took the Parisian elite by storm in 1905 as she captivated audiences with performances that were “thrilling, daring, completely new and very artistic” (Fries Museum). For a decade — until Germany declared war on France in 1914 — she thrived, earning the equivalent of as much as $40,000 per show.
Around the same period, Isadora Duncan, who similarly said “Movements are as eloquent as words,” was busy revolutionizing dance in her own way. Fiercely independent and self-directed, Duncan walked out of her first and only ballet class after twenty minutes and claimed she learned how to dance from the ocean waves. Rebelling against the unnatural way ballet “forced her to twist her body and squeeze herself into painful shoes…Duncan developed a style so natural that many critics believed that her dance was improvisation.” Her use of wave motions and circular forms expressed her “philosophy that movement comes from within, like rays emanating from the sun” (National Museum of Women in the Arts). Perhaps “the most important American-born dance artist of the early 20th century,” Duncan believed “the solar plexus—the region between the waist and the sternum—to be the wellspring for all movement” (DanceTeacher).
We salute these two radically uncompromising women, brilliant feminist icons and dance pioneers, who are inspirations to find our own unique dance. “The Dance is love,” said Duncan, and that is enough…it is amorously that I dance: to poems, to music but now I would like to no longer dance to anything but the rhythm of my soul.”
For ideas on where you can explore your singular, soulful style, see all events listed online at the Dance Calendar.
See you on the dance floor —Sean Donovan