`I have discovered the dance,” Isadora Duncan boasted at age 19. “I have discovered the art which has been lost for 2,000 years.”
Big talk for a teenager, to be sure, and yet few aficionados would quibble with her claims today. Though maybe vague on the details, dance enthusiasts and others are well aware of Duncan’s pioneering role in the art–as well as her revolutionary lifestyle and grotesque death at 49 in 1927, when her long scarf caught in the rear wheel of an open car in which she was riding along the French Riviera.
Go to any dance class and say “Isadora,” and almost everyone will know instantly whom you mean.
Yet despite all the scholarly credit given her work, the legends about her fascinating life and the detailed 1968 film biography starring Vanessa Redgrave, her contributions to dance receive precious little celebration in formal concerts. Choreographers such as the even older Petipa or contemporaries such as Fokine and Nijinsky are better represented in the repertoires of companies around the world.
Almost single-handedly bucking that trend is a woman named Lori Belilove. A dancer and teacher who, like Duncan, was born in San Francisco, Belilove has devoted the past 20 years to researching Duncan’s techniques and to reviving her works in solo performances and ensemble efforts with her troupe, Lori Belilove and Company. She is in Chicago this week to perform and talk about Duncan on Saturday at Northwestern University in Evanston and will return in March to stage two group dances for “Danceworks 98” on the campus.
Belilove is, to be sure, a true believer. “She was a phenomenon who changed the face of how we think of dance,” Belilove says of Duncan. “She was an original, and the boldness of her thought made her one of those enduring influences of 20th Century culture.”
Nineteenth Century ballet, the dominant form when Duncan became interested in dance as a young woman, struck her as restricted, confined and unnatural. She rejected its rigid physical moves in favor of more flowing, organic ones, and she also abandoned tights and toe shoes for loose gowns and bare feet–a preference much more shocking and revolutionary to her contemporaries than to us. Ballet imposes its own mechanics on its dancers; Duncan sought, instead, as one critic once wrote, “a new liberty of movement inspired by man’s natural impulses.”
Duncan’s unconventional, non-conformist views stretched to many areas of her life beyond dance, an aspect that makes her all the more fascinating and her works harder to preserve. She believed in the emancipation of women and of the human body from Puritan restriction, and those social ideas may have been more important to her than codifying and preserving her work. (She won condemnation from fellow Americans for both her public love affairs and her early praise of the young Communist state in Russia.)
She deliberately avoided the movie camera as a tool too crude to capture her fluid style. “She felt the technology was too loose and jerky to capture the continuity of movement, the sense of one movement flowing into another which was arguably the start of all modern dance,” Belilove says. As a result, only a five-second film clip of Duncan’s work survives.
Also, the very nature of her revolution against what she saw as the stuffiness of the past led her to eschew large institutions and the rigid routines of a sizeable dance company–the kind of organization which, despite its flaws, can survive and carry on an artist’s work. Duncan founded a handful of schools, which she saw as schools of life as well as dance, but only one (in the Soviet Union) survived beyond her death, and that for only 10 years.
And then, too, after her death, as modern dance evolved, Duncan’s pupils and practitioners were overshadowed by the likes of Martha Graham, who created her own elaborate modern dance technique and whose mythic, often somber works are much more angst-ridden than Duncan’s. Belilove says the Duncan enthusiasts went underground, in a sense.
“They taught and ran schools of their own, but in small, out-of-the way studios, and sometimes they wouldn’t even describe their work as `Duncan,’ ” Belilove says. “In the ’50s, after the war, Duncan’s style was thought to be antiquated.”
As noted by dance historian Gerald Jonas, there were three major influences on Duncan and her work: nature, classical Greece and a search for the inner self. From studying herself in the mirror, Duncan concluded that the center of the body was not the base of the back, as taught in ballet class, but the solar plexus. Her gauzy, nightgown-like clothing, inspired by Greek sculpture and urns, was an almost countercultural embrace of the body’s simple beauty; she found the titillating, peekaboo costumes of burlesque much more vulgar and degrading than her own straightforwardly revealing classical garb. And much like the Romantic poets, Duncan saw dance essentially as a mode for highly personal, emotional and spiritual self-expression.
“She was inspired by folk dancing too,” Belilove says. “She believed in freedom. She once said if there was anything her art symbolized, it was the emancipation of women from the hidebound conventions of New England Puritanism. She also said she was glad the Boston critics didn’t like her. (She was later banned in Boston, by the way.) If they did, she said, `I’d feel hopeless.’ “
Belilove’s own involvement began when she herself was only a teenager in the late ’60s. “I was a tomboy visiting Greece with my parents,” she says. “I’d studied some ballet, but rejected it, and I was into yoga and athletics. I met a man who said he had worked with Duncan many years ago and had a souvenir picture with a lock of her hair preserved in the frame. I went home and read an autobiography of her and thought, `Wow.’ “
She returned to Greece and studied with the man for two years. Then, thanks to a newspaper article in a San Francisco paper about Belilove’s work, one of Duncan’s surviving pupils who lived in the Bay Area called her up and led her to another. These two surviving “Isadorables,” as they were called, had worked with Duncan first-hand.
“I learned by working with them and different teachers they were all doing the same works to the same music,” she says by way of attesting to their authenticity. Today, she says her company has preserved 100 samples of Duncan’s actual choreography, including several longer pieces set to complete symphonies.
“If you put Duncan dancers in black leotards, they look very modern,” Belilove says. “One Graham rehearsal coach exclaimed when watching us, `Omigosh. It’s all Graham.’ But the final form of her work, with the tunic, is more rounded and toward beauty. There is an optimism to Duncan that’s unique.”
What would this free spirit think of someone preserving her as if in a living museum? Would she find that contradictory to her own spirit of self-invention?
“I think she’d be happy because I infuse the work with my own interpretation and view of life,” Belilove says. “Her work teaches people to dance freely; it’s very aerobic and it’s timeless. After a period a few years back when dancers were urged to be as cool and detached as they could be, hers strips away that fourth wall and recognizes that the audience is out there. She beckons outward, inviting.”
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Belilove will perform solo at 8 p.m. Saturday in the Ballroom Studio Theatre, Marjorie Ward Marshall Dance Center, 1979 S. Campus Dr., Evanston. For information: 847-491-3147.
