Life into Art: Isadora Duncan and Her World. - book reviews

Dance Magazine, Nov, 1996 by Doris Hering

The engaging intimacy of Life into Art: lsadora Duncan and Her World comes as a relief It is the intimacy of family recollections. These have been contributed by Doree Duncan, daughter of William Seligmann and Ligoa Duncan and granddaughter of Raymond and his second wife, Aia Bertrand. Isadora was Doree's great aunt.

The book was lovingly assembled by Doree, along with her friends Carol Pratl and, especially, Cynthia Splatt, who wrote the text. It is centered around a trove of unusual photographs and drawings. Most appealing is the oval frontispiece, a double exposure taken by Raymond in 1903. In it, the twenty-six-year-old Isadora, wearing a bulky chiton and an overly luxuriant chaplet of flowers, displays the airy step and the ineffable harmony of arms, head, and hands that are the legacy of the born dancer. In Yuri Annenkov's 1921 wash drawing of Isadora's head and graceful neck, the eyes are deeply shadowed, the mouth and nose are decisive, the jawline dips slightly into jowl. The drawing was done when she was forty-four. It is starkly ageless. In these, as in the more than three hundred other delineations gracefully deployed throughout by designer Katy Homans, one again senses the tremendous fount of inspiration that Isadora offered as a performer and as a person. Artists and photographers could not help deriving energy from her.

In a quaint 1896 shot of Isadora dancing with her sister Elizabeth and her brothers Augustin and Raymond, it is Isadora whose body flows. Augustin looks quite classical, Raymond capers energetically, and Elizabeth is restrained. Their roles in life are captured in this photograph.

The text is somewhat spasmodic in style and often takes for granted the reader's knowledge of Duncan lore. It is, however, more aware of her relationship with her family than most other treatments. For example, Isadora's personality, with its tangle of deeds and dreams, clearly seems reminiscent of that of her father, Joseph Charles. Only she rose to heights that he could not even imagine.

Doree Duncan concludes in the book's acknowledgments, "Isadora left her footsteps in the sand; they shift with time to fit . . . all those who would listen to the music of their own being." This book is an uneven but deeply sincere effort to do that kind of listening. Isadora deserves it.