► Listen to this story(or right-click/option-click to download and save) Her influence on the world of dance continues today. She is often called the Mother of Modern Dance. She created almost two hundred dance pieces. Today, we explore the life of dancer and choreographer Martha Graham. Upcoming performances in the "America Dancing" series include Denishawn Repertory Dancers, Dance Consort: Mezzacappa/Gabrian (performing works by Charles Weidman), Limon Dance Company and Doug Varone and Dancers.BARBARA KLEIN: And I'm Barbara Klein with PEOPLE IN AMERICA in VOA Special English. To my mind, her approach was somewhat out of sync with Duncan's intent, yet the fact that the work can withstand a more galvanic execution speaks to its sturdy construction. Guest artist Bambi Anderson, a longtime dancer with the Jose Limon Dance Company, danced in "Brahms Waltzes" and "Furies," to music from the Gluck opera "Orpheus." She gave the works a noticeably contemporary edge and angularity, attacking the movement rather than riding it gently, as the ensemble dancers did. What's especially striking in observing a Duncan waltz is her emphasis on the downbeat, with the body swooping heavily toward the floor in an "oom-PAH-pah" rhythm. The dancers' buoyancy and velvety use of their shoulders and arms was especially apparent in the early Duncan works - the Schubert waltzes, which she choreographed for her teenage students, who became known as the "Isadorables." Duncan was exquisitely sensitive to music, pairing her innovative choreography to the great classical masters, and her musicality is nowhere as apparent as in the rippling, lighthearted works - such as "Water Study," "Moment Musical" and the playful "Balspiel" and "Narcissus Waltz," set to Chopin. (One member, Stephanie Bastos, lost her foot in a car accident a year ago, yet such was her will to return to the Duncan works that she danced in two of the Russian pieces - the fist-clenching "Dubinushka" and flag-waving "Warshavianka" - aided by a near-undetectable prosthesis.) Now in their twenties, they are a winsome, fresh-faced lot with notable expansiveness of the upper body. This is a labor of love for Mantell-Seidel, who began staging Duncan works for several of the dancers in her company when they were teenagers. (This direct link to a long-dead choreographer is rare in dance, and it will become even more so with time, making the Kennedy Center's efforts to bring dance history to the stage all the more timely.) Julia Levien, artistic adviser to the Duncan ensemble, performed with Duncan's daughters and directed her own Duncan-derived company in New York. Through these channels many of Duncan's works have been passed down to Mantell-Seidel. But her students - notably her two adopted daughters, Anna and Irma Duncan - continued promulgating the Duncan technique, which is still taught and danced today. No methods of dance notation existed at the time. When she died in 1927 - as flamboyantly as she had lived, strangled by one of her signature scarves as it caught in the wheels of her car - much of her choreography died with her. She was a vocal supporter of women's rights and of the young Soviet state, becoming a magnet for left-wing intellectuals - no doubt one reason she was, for the most part, shunned on these shores and celebrated on the Continent. Not only did she engage in much-publicized affairs with high-profile men, she bore three children out of wedlock, losing them all to early deaths (one died soon after birth, two others drowned in the Seine). To many, her scandalous life - played out against the strictures of the early 20th century - looms even larger than her creative contributions. Directed by dance historian Andrea Mantell-Seidel, the eight-member company presented 19 Duncan works, dating from the early 1900s to 1923 and ranging from her early Schubert and Chopin waltzes to the pieces inspired by Duncan's trips to post-revolutionary Russia.ĭuncan was an exceptionally colorful character as well as a genuine artist. In a fitting tribute to Duncan, the Kennedy Center inaugurated its "America Dancing" retrospective - a five-year series exploring the roots of modern and contemporary dance - with performances this past weekend by the Florida-based Isadora Duncan Dance Ensemble. Though beset by tragedy and largely unappreciated in her native land during her lifetime, Duncan never lost sight of her artistic vision - in her words, "the highest intelligence in the freest body" - and used it to craft a new way of dancing, rejecting the codified confines of classical ballet in favor of expressive, emotive movement. By Sarah Kaufman January 8, her life as in her art, Isadora Duncan embodied the rebelliousness, restlessness and thirst for freedom of a true American pioneer.
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