Born on May 27, 1878, in San Francisco, the daughter of a poet and a musician, Isadora Duncan was the youngest of four children, all theatrically inclined. Soon after she was born, her mother and father were divorced, and for some years the family lived in poverty. She attended school only to the age of ten and had virtually no formal discipline in her home life. She taught dancing to the children in her neighborhood and with her sister developed a spontaneous style in which they attempted to symbolize music, poetry, and the elements of nature. They won attention in San Francisco and traveled on a spare budget to Chicago and New York City, where Isadora joined the company of theatrical manager Augustin Daly in 1896. She, her mother, a sister, and a brother embarked on a cattle boat to London in 1900. While dancing in a public park, she was discovered by a woman who introduced her through a series of private performances to the elite of London. Similar introductions brought her fame in Paris in 1902. In that year she was briefly a member of Loie Fuller╒s troupe in Vienna. On her own she was hailed in Germany and Hungary, and after traveling briefly in Greece╤she had been profoundly influenced by Greek sculptures she had seen in the British Museum╤she returned to Berlin to begin a dancing school for children.
Disapproving of what she considered the restrictive bonds of matrimony, Duncan bore two children out of wedlock╤a daughter by designer Edward Gordon Craig, born in 1905, and a son by Paris Singer, born in 1910. She made successful Russian tours in 1905, 1907, and 1908; on the first she made a deep impression on choreographer Michel Fokine and on Sergei Diaghilev, who was soon to become the leading ballet impresario in Europe, and on the last she brought about the fruitful alliance of Craig with Konstantin Stanislavski, producer and theorist of the stage. An American tour in 1908 managed by Charles Frohman was unsuccessful, while Paris appearances in 1909 brought her her accustomed acclaim.
At the height of her career, in 1913, Duncan╒s two children and their nurse were drowned in an accident. She attempted to forget the tragedy through work, but World War I intervened and she was forced to move her new dancing school first to the United States and then to South America, Athens, and Paris in turn. Finally the school disbanded. In 1921 the Soviet government offered her another school in Moscow. There she met and in May 1922 married Sergei Yesenin, a wild, dashing poet of the Revolution. On a tour through the United States at the height of the post-war ╥Red Scare╙ they were everywhere attacked as Bolshevist spies; as a result she bade a bitter farewell to the United States. Impoverished, they made their way back to the Soviet Union. Their poverty was such that they had to sell her furniture. Yesenin went berserk, deserted her, and committed suicide in 1925. The school she had created continued under other management, and she never performed again.
Duncan╒s influence was nonetheless permanent. Her teaching and dancing had freed ballet from its conservative restrictions and presaged the development of modern expressive dance. Her interpretations of music by Gluck, Brahms, Wagner, Chopin and Beethoven were not recorded, but her unrestrained performances in bare feet and loose Grecian-style garb helped to free women╒s dress and manners as well as the art of the dance. Her last years were spent in France. She died on September 14, 1927, in Nice, strangled when the long scarf she was wearing caught in a wheel of the car in which she was riding. Her autobiography, My Life, appeared in 1927.
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