Despite the fact they had little in common, Pavlova had a tremendous respect for this tall American dancer, who abhorred ballet.
Genius is a dangerous word. Often it is bandied about carelessly and, sometimes, indiscriminately. In the case of this long-limbed girl from California it could not be applied more accurately or more precisely, for she was a genius as a person as well as an artist. She brought to Europe and to her own America, as well, a new aesthetic.
One of four children of a rebellious mother who divorced the father she did not love, Isadora’s childhood was spent in a quasi-Bohemian atmosphere in her native San Francisco, where her mother eked out a dubious living by giving music lessons. Isadora was the youngest of the four. Brother Augustin took to the theatre; Brother Raymond to long hair, sandals, Greek robes, and asceticism; Sister Elizabeth eventually took over Isadora’s Berlin School.
What started Isadora on the road of the dance may never be known; although it is a well established fact that she danced as a child in San Francisco, and early in her career traveled across the United States, dancing her way, more or less, to New York. I am reasonably certain that her dancing of that period bore little or no relation to that of her later period. Her early works were, for the most part, innocuous little pieces done to snippets of music by Romantic composers. Her triumphs were in monumental works by Beethoven, Wagner, César Franck.
Her battle was for “freedom”: freedom in the dance; freedom in wearing apparel; freedom for women; freedom for the body; freedom for the human spirit. In the dance, ballet was to her a distortion of the human form. Personally, I suspect the truth was that the strict discipline of ballet was something to which Isadora could not submit. Inspiration was her guiding force. She wore Greek draperies when she danced; her feet were bare. Yet there are photographs of Isadora, taken in the later ’nineties, showing her wearing ballet slippers, and a costume in which considerable lace is to be seen. It was Europe, I feel, that “freed” her dance.
Isadora’s was a European triumph. In turn she conquered Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Greece. She was hailed and fêted. There was no place in the American theatre for Isadora’s simplicity and utter artlessness. It was in Budapest that the tide turned for her, thanks particularly to an able manager, one Alexander Gross. While I never knew Mr. Gross, I believe he fulfilled the true manager’s purpose and function. Gross made an audience for a great artist, an audience where one did not exist before, until, eventually, all Europe was her audience.
I have said that inspiration was Isadora’s guide. She did, of course, have theories of dance; but these theories were, for the most part, expressed in vague and general, rather than in precise and particular, terms. They can be summed up in a sentence. She believed that dance was life: therefore, the expression of some inner impulse, or urge, or inspiration. The source of this impulse she believed was centered in the solar plexus. She also believed she was of tremendous importance. Her own ideas of her own importance were, in my opinion, sometimes inflated.
To her eternal credit it must be noted that she battled against sugary music, against trivial themes, against artificiality of all sorts. When her “inspiration” did not proceed directly from the solar plexus, she found it in nature—in the waves of the sea and their rhythms, in the simple process of the opening of a flower.
These frank and simple and desirable objectives, if they had been all, would not have excited the tremendous opposition that was hers throughout her lifetime. Nor did this opposition, I believe, spring solely from her unconventional ideas on love and sex. Isadora insisted on becoming a citizen of the world, a champion of the world’s less fortunate, the underprivileged. In doing so she cleared the air of a lot of nonsense and a lot of nineteenth century prudery which was by way of being carried over into the twentieth.
In Europe, in each and every country she visited, she arrayed herself on the side of the angels, i.e., the revolutionaries. The same is true in her own country. She shocked her wealthy patrons with demonstrations of her own particular brand of democracy.