SOURCE: "La Presse," in The Search for Isadora: The Legend & Legacy of Isadora Duncan, Dance Horizons Books, 1993, pp. 129-53.

The importance of France in the formulation of Isadora Duncan's artistic image was emphasized to me by artist Abraham Walkowitz during a conversation at his Brooklyn home. He spoke of France's esteem and respect for creative people; how "without France, Isadora would not be Isadora… the French created her and the French got the best out of her." No other country had the opportunity to accumulate the quantity and variety of documentation concerning Isadora, who established the longest residency of her quasi-nomadic existence in Paris.

Writer George Delaquys reminisced how Isadora seemed to have dropped in on Paris in 1900, from out of nowhere, so to speak. She was not French; she was a foreigner. He pondered if she was even necessary. Parisian culture lacked for nothing; there were operas, café-concerts, and ballerinas galore. The suddenness of Isadora's appearance caught Parisians off guard, and after a brief display of her dancing before private gatherings, she took off as mysteriously as she had come.

Isadora's first public appearance in Paris took place at the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt during May and June 1903. "She was not successful," Delaquys noted. Objecting to "payoffs," Isadora earned herself a press who were "indifferent or hostile … the critics who lived on their reputation for making discoveries of persons of genius discovered nothing that year … not Isadora Duncan." Nevertheless, curiosity about this mysterious young woman and her mysterious dance had begun. Rumors circulated "like the flying winds," but the dancer eluded reporters who pursued her. "The truth is," said Delaquys, "Miss Duncan doesn't give a damn."

Isadora pulled off some adroit capers to safeguard her privacy. Wherever she was sought she proved to be elsewhere, but the shadows of stalking journalists were to hover permanently over her extraordinary life's events. With the increase of her concert activities, her fame flowered. She came under the scrutiny and judgment of the many writers and critics who penned the staggering quantity of printed material available to early twentieth-century Parisians.

On the subject of Isadora Duncan, these writers swung a wide critical pendulum, from full-blown emotionalism and adoration to fierce cynicism and rejection; few were middle of the road. One might parody, extol, or lampoon her efforts, but one rarely, if ever, was dispassionate. Journalists, on occasion, were known to make use of their newspaper column to take a serious "poke" at an irksome colleague for either his overenthusiasm or underappreciation of the dancer. Isadora herself became a "journalist" at crucial times. Responding to unflattering remarks, she was always ready to offer her "corrections" in a letter to the press.

It took Isadora one year to convert the 1903 setback at the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt into a 1904 conquest at the Trocadéro Palace. No less than the titan of music, Beethoven, now graced her expanded repertory. For her Soirée Beethoven she included two piano sonatas (the Pathétique, Opus 13 in C minor and the Moonlight (Quasi una Fantasia) Opus 27 no. 2 in C-sharp minor), some minuets (arranged by Hans von Bülow), and two movements from the Seventh Symphony (Opus 92 in A major)—her first attempt at symphonic choreography. She was assisted by the famous Colonne Orchestra and its venerable conductor, Edouard Colonne.

A cavernous theater, the Trocadéro was filled to overflowing. The musicians in the audience were especially wary of choreographed Beethoven. Afterward, composer Gustave Charpentier commented that "she has understood that the most elusive, complex, and evanescent movements of the human spirit can be mirrored through the contours and lines of the dancer's body. With her, dance encompasses everything … the drama, the symphony.… With all the refinement of her own person, her leaps, her languors, the tremblings of the nakedness beneath the veils, she has created a new vocabulary, an ensemble of metaphors capable of speaking in the most immediate and musical of languages."

Musicologist and critic Louis Laloy indicated that he was usually reluctant to apply a term like "genius" to the dance, in view of the deteriorated state of the ballet of his time, but found Isadora's dance altogether a different matter. He had come to her concert fully expecting to find the manner of her dance "poor and puerile compared to the sumptuous music she wished to interpret. It was nothing like that."

Like other arts that reveal the most beautiful secrets of life, Laloy referred to Isadora's new dance as "mute music and moving sculpture." He was impressed that the presence of a full orchestra was not able to eclipse the dancer; she sustained full interest in her dance. Furthermore, in the more subtle, underlying themes of the "Adagio" of the sonata Pathétique and the "Adagio Sostenuto" of the Moonlight, her gestures transmitted the more profound human emotions that existed in the music.

For Laloy, the interest and beauty of Isadora's performance lay in the personal nature of her expressiveness through movements that were "nowhere to be found in any prior or existing textbook on dance.… Here a spirit is sensed and materialized before us." Laloy assured his readers that Isadora Duncan was a priestess "worthy of her God … she has piety, purity, and nobility of thought."

The swift-moving dances in close rapport with the music roused the critic's enthusiasm: "Melody and movement are here as twin flowers of the supporting rhythm. One does not know which of these flowers has the most grace and perfume." The minuets, he said, revealed a virginal face; Isadora's turnings were delicate, somewhat demure, and reminiscent of the maidens of the Parthenon. Finally, Laloy commented on the Beethoven symphony, after first subduing those who protested Isadora's use of the composer's music. The symphony, Laloy conceded, was in itself a complete work that required no supplemental clarification from another medium, such as dance, but the dance of Isadora Duncan was also to be regarded as "a work of art."

Beginning with the second movement (the first was an orchestral prelude), Laloy remarked on "the mystic weeping, which invokes in her alone a whole procession of moods, alternately sad and weary, or bathed in elysian light." In the rondo, "one imagines seeing nymphs reaching for one another's hand." Finally, there was the "seraphic bacchanale" of the last movement, in which Isadora's brisk movements and the accentuated bounce of her body on the final note of the main phrase infused the music with "fine images of nymphs dancing at the festivals of Dionysus."

Other European performances, motherhood, and her first tour of her native United States in 1908 consumed the almost five years until Isadora once again appeared in concert in the French capital from late January into February 1909, at the Théâtre-Lyrique Municipal de la Gaîté. Two distinctive premières took place on that occasion: Gluck's Iphigénie (which had first been presented in Germany in late 1904) and the Paris debut of the children from her first school of dance in Grunewald (the children had already been widely seen in Germany and throughout Europe).

Gluck's two operas—Iphigénie en Aulide (1774) and Iphigénie en Tauride (1779)—were revered by the dancer and were long a choreographic preoccupation of hers. From them, she fashioned a single concert-length production. Into the second section ("Tauride") she interpolated an orchestral arrangement by Felix Motti from yet another Gluck opera, Armide, which furnished the accelerating mood of celebration in the closing portion with dances of an added joyous character. With Iphigénie, another block of Isadora's broadening exploration into music for her dance was set in place. It was possibly her chef-d'oeuvre, the apex of her lyric-dramatic style, and remained an actively integral part of her repertory.

At the Gaîté-Lyrique Isadora was assisted in her series of performances by the Concerts Lamoureux Orchestra, conducted by Camille Chevillard, under the artistic management of Lugné-Poë. A second engagement at this theater, with a seating capacity of approximately 2,200, took place in May and June 1909, when she was accompanied by the Colonne Orchestra and by her pupils as well, who charmed audiences with their innocence and grace in a group of incidental dances.

Reviewing for Comoedia Illustré in February 1909, André Marty described the scene at the Gaîté-Lyrique:

Let's imagine a stage, completely hung with gray-blue draperies, a carpet of the same color; a soft light facing toward the back of the stage. The curtain parts, and with the first measures of a Gluck air we see emerging from the shadows the strangest, most exquisite of apparitions. Have we seen her on one of those immortal paintings that adorned Greek vases; does she step live from the land of Tanagra; is she the serene muse on Parnassus out of a Mantegna, the most perfect of Clodion's statuettes? She is none of these, she is all of them; even more, one makes a mistake to compare her with anything else. Her dance is not imitative of other plastic arts, nor an appealing accompaniment for music; it is an art in itself, she attains the beautiful by means all her own.

Marty observed that Isadora, in her expression of feelings and in her representation of human actions, created something simpler and more forceful than reality. He referred to this as a "superior synthesis," a stylization seen in the games she played in the "Aulide" segment—ball and knucklebones. Not literal images, they were devoid of relation to a specific time, place, or period. And when in the "Bacchanale" "she might seem an intoxicated bacchante incited by some god to irrational behavior, we are actually seeing the symbol of divine folly itself."

Pierre Mille started his account of Isadora's concert in the February 1909 issue of Le Théâtre by quoting his colleague, Fernand Nozière: '"One wants to get down on the knees and pray, even to cry' … It seems insane that a dance, only a dance—two feet, fast or slow, the arms open or folded, and the supple body of a woman could inspire you to pray or cry. Yet this is the truth! Noziére is right. There is a great mystery here." To his own rhetorical questions he provided answers: "What is it that she does, this large woman with long legs, an undulating torso, and muscled like the statues of virgins sculpted by Polycletus?" Whatever it was that she did, Mille was certain of one thing: "She dances and no one has ever danced as she."

To describe her attire, Mille referred to the virgins of the Parthenon frieze, the priestesses in flowing robes standing before the temple of Athena, the winged victory, the seductive folds that cover without concealing, the forms of Botticelli's nymphs. "And then, what is it that she does? Certainly others have danced better, if it were solely a question of … beat and step. But what she does is so very open, so very unsophisticated—a simple manner and that is all that is necessary." Utterly convinced that Isadora knew at all times what she wished to achieve, Mille went on to describe the heroine Iphigenia as she played along the shoreline with knucklebones: "They are like flowers in her hands. She tosses them in the air; they fall back downward. She seizes them. So convincing are all her actions that spectators do not question that she truly sees the sea before her and that her eyes are filled with the shape of the waves." With certainty and pride she runs to welcome the victorious Greek fleet, arriving to the reverberations of trumpets, "her bosom heaving, her figure seeming to grow taller."

Still later Isadora returned as a young warrior, dressed in a short red tunic, her arms bare. Then, during the clash of weapons (the "Dance of the Scythians" from Tauride), she brought an exaltation to the combat: "How vivid are the simulations of battle, the fist that strikes, the feigned flight, the bold young head warding off the blows, eyes brilliant in valor; and when the final assault fells the foe, her arm is raised in triumph. No longer does she battle, she remains still—a monument to glory."

For the Finale Isadora appeared as a bacchante, clumps of ivy and flowers in her hands. "First she tosses the flowers, then brandishes the vines, all the while continuously dancing and ever faster." If the role of the poet and artist was to awaken and to reveal, then "she is indeed artist and poet, this Isadora."

The American dancer and her revolutionary approach to her art created a furor, reported the New York Times on May 23, 1909. Her pursuit of acceptance by the French had been a resounding success. "Of all the cities where I have danced, Paris is the one from whom I most wanted admiration.…" The extraordinary success of the two Gaîté-Lyrique engagements placed Isadora firmly in the French consciousness. Increasing attention was paid to all aspects of her personal and professional life. Journalists wrote of her individual craft and style, music critics of the aptness of her choice of music, dance experts of balletic tradition vis-à-vis Isadora's more radical concepts. Feature articles spot-lighted her choreography, her school of dance, and her young pupils.

One of the few professional women to write on Isadora during this time was Jeanne Gazeau, whose lengthy essay in Les Entretiens Idéalistes on December 25, 1909, presented a discriminating and favorable assessment of the philosophical and esthetic underpinnings of the new dance and its theorist. Reacting to the choreographies, Gazeau described moments of wonder and excitement: Isadora's run in the "Scythian Dance" was "steady and fiery as an ephebe"; in the "Bacchanale," "she is possessed"; in her "glide into a Chopin waltz" she effected an easy transformation of mood and form.

Of the Chopin numbers on the dancer's programs, Gazeau considered that Isadora reached the peak of tragic emotion in The Maiden and Death to the Mazurka in B minor (opus 33, no. 4). "I know nothing more beautiful than the sudden transformation of this young being dancing with the exuberance of life, who now feels gripped by Death; there is a shudder, then an effort to shake off the icy embrace, finally a desperate stiffening of the entire body, a supreme convulsion, where she seems to raise herself erect like a fragile flower that shoots up from a blow, then falls lifeless. It is the eternal mystery of death in all its simple anguish.…"

One of the lengthiest and most detailed examinations of "The Dances of Isadora Duncan" appeared in the March 1910 issue of Mercure de France. In analyzing Iphigénie the author Ovion was intrigued by its archaeological character and the two distinct classifications of movements at work in this dance: movements of action, descriptive and evocative of the style of Greek art, and gestures expressing human emotion. Ovion did not find these derivative of earlier influences, but personal in nature and decidedly more interesting and original.

The best example of the action motions and the set figurative patterns of Greek origin, were the youthful scenes from Iphigénie en Aulide: the Tanagra figurine half-kneeling, counting the score points from the imaginary knucklebones caught on the back of the hand, the recumbent pose in the classic position of the Greeks—underleg bent, upper leg extended—or in the symbolic lamentations of Iphigenia, who, believing Orestes dead, makes her final tribute, articulating maddening grief by simulating the tearing of her hair.

Unmistakably derived from ancient artifacts, Ovion believed, were the physical gestures employed in the warrior's conflict: "One can point out by the hundreds the designs on vases where the poses of Isadora Duncan in this dance … can be traced." Ovion drew close parallels between the gestures in this dance, in which Isadora was both the attacker and the attacked, and Plato's description of the Pyrrhic dance in which he had written of those natural bodily modulations employed in battle: "… the posture of a man letting fly an arrow or hurling a javelin." Gestures characteristic of the one being attacked were associated with the body's mechanisms for self-defense, "be it flinging oneself to the side, drawing back, leaping, or bending."

But the dances of joy, as in the air gai, the delirious climax of the "Bacchanale," even the undulating motions of Isadora's arms in the "Entrance of the Priestesses" in Tauride, had the individuality of personal, interpreted gestures. Here one encountered the emotional, expressive movements that Ovion properly credited to Isadora—creative movements of "unusual novelty, a return to symmetrical form, architecture in dance, movements regular and broadly structured, well-proportioned, and evincing a sureness of balance and deliberate control of the emotional dynamics." In the music of Gluck, Isadora seemed to perfect her unusual art, the writer concluded: "She is the remarkable interpreter … a gesture from her radiant purity of style remains imprinted on the retina, a joy forever."

French deputy Paul Boncour eulogized "The Art of the Sublime Dancer" in his article for Le Figaro on May 22, 1909. When he called for the creation of a society to perpetuate Isadora's work in dance, he caused quite a stir. When his report on the fiscal state of the arts was carried by the newspaper Excelsior on November 30, 1910, it raised eyebrows in "parliamentary circles" and upset the "small, charming world of danseuses."

Boncour had provocatively made known his opinion that all ballet had had its day. He cited Isadora as a most important figure among new artists of the dance, suggesting in fact, that her fresh perceptions and innovative ideas had far more contemporary relevance than did ballet and should be considered for a needed renovation of the old system. Excelsior also aired the results of a survey it had conducted on the controversial subject: "Tutu vs. Peplum—Will Isadora Duncan Reform Our Corps de Ballet?—Freedom of Art vs. Tradition—What Are the Big Stars Saying?"

The first "big star," Mme. Rosita Mauri, who was then in charge of dance training at the Opéra, spoke well of Isadora, but defended traditionalism. A dancer could no more divorce herself from the established disciplines of the profession than a writer could violate grammatical rules. Opening the doors to innovation, as Boncour suggested, could not work. "Classic dances [ballet] cannot be changed and the tutu remains the only costume appropriate for the dancer." Of course she had seen Isadora and her pupils who were so wonderfully graceful, but never could one of the children accomplish what the children of her own studio did. "Look at her!" She indicated to the Excelsior interviewers a thirteen-year-old child in tights and a pink and white tutu, with a strong, supple, arched back, momentarily wobbling to balance herself on left pointe.

The ballet mistress at the Opéra-Comique, Mme. Marquita, was cautious about giving an opinion, not having seen Isadora in concert. "I did not know that she had already become a school."

The reporters next caught up with the famous Mme. Carlotta Zambelli, who was rehearsing on stage at the Opéra. A champion of ballet, she was reluctant to talk, but told them straight away: "What Isadora Duncan does is not very difficult; one has only to move the legs freely. We could perform her work easily, but the reverse is not true." One reporter tenaciously pressed the point further. Isadora Duncan, he advised, had been through a thorough physical training in preparation for her dance and had as strong a technique as she. Zambelli's reply: "You think so? It would show." She terminated the interview with that, and proceeded to transform herself into a Snow Fairy.

"Aflutter, pretty, amiable, and in a feathered hat," Mme. Regina Badet limited her interview to five minutes; she was late for her rehearsal at Gemier's. The subject of Isadora Duncan merited some sympathy from this ballet mistress. Isadora's was an art that offered much of interest, but was unlikely to realize any permanent success because, Mme. Badet explained, "the Opéra is so solidly entrenched an organization that to penetrate it will be most difficult." However, she could recognize the benefits of new ideas on the old traditions. "We are martyrized, you know, in childhood … they deform and dislocate us. Very fortunate are Isadora's young girls who are let free to dance and follow their own instincts."

The central figure in the controversy had the final say. Isadora Duncan's studio, where the interview took place, was located in the Hôtel Biron on rue Varennes (the current Rodin Museum). There, she told her visitors, she spent hours daily working on her technique and compositions, "proving well that what she does is not all that easy." (The composition in preparation on that occasion was her new version of Orphée et Eurydice.) She professed to not being entirely familiar with Paul Boncour's report on the state of the arts or aware of any investigation into her dance, but, in general, she was of the opinion that most people were mistaken about what she believed.

In the nine years since her arrival in Paris, Isadora claimed to have become much wiser, talking less and doing more. She accepted the fact that her art had no chance of supplanting the classical dance because it was not an art of the theater. Hers was a self-sufficient art expression, and her true ambition was to focus on founding a school of fine arts in a milieu of painters and sculptors, where the plastic arts would become an official study and where she could expound and reveal the principles of her work in dance and train future exponents of her ideas. She expressed distress over "the wretched imitations they do of me," and desired only to be left alone to live quietly, read, and listen to music. "I have nothing more to say now. I have already talked too much."

Isadora's fuller version of Gluck's long-surviving opera, Orphée et Eurydice (a short suite of pieces from this opera dated from her early programs, c. 1900), was completed by the close of 1910 and presented at the Chêtelet Theater on January 18, 1911, with the participation of singers, a chorus, and the Colonne Orchestra. The Orphée was the second Gluck adaptation to reinforce the public's recognition of the dancer as an artist. She was not solely a captivating charmer and invigorating spirit in the music of Strauss, Schubert, Brahms, and Chopin but an earnest interpreter of simple and powerfully beautiful musical scores, capable of integrating great music with human gestures of dramatic truth and eloquence. Whenever it appeared in Paris, Isadora's Orphée was announced in the press as a cultural event of commanding magnitude; all were summoned to the theater.

Walter Rummel, Isadora's musical advisor and accompanist, some years later, wrote on the dancer's interpretive approach to Orpheus. Her role was neither representative of the word nor illustrative of the dramatic action. She placed herself within the panorama of the narrative as did the Greek chorus in the performance of ancient tragedies, rendering "the primordial and impersonal emotion that rises from the innermost depths" of the character in the drama. Such emotion, Rummel stressed, could not manifest itself other than through music, and only the dance could make it visible. Thus the chorus (Isadora's role) was not a depiction of the story development; it assumed the silent and concentrated focus of the drama's emotion, "the distillation of its passionate essences."

André Nède's January 18, 1911, article, "Isadora Duncan at the Châtelet," provided a preview of the major scenes of her Orphée, a run-through as helpful to his fellow Frenchmen as today's readers:

The orchestra will play the overture, the curtain will rise, and the chorus will be heard; Orpheus's companions lament the death of Eurydice and Miss Duncan will dance these lamentations. At Eurydice's tomb she becomes Orpheus, who can be recognized by the grief that marks her pantomime. She is alone on stage.

For the performance, there were usually two voices—Orpheus (contralto) and Eurydice (soprano)—and a small chorus, all seated among the orchestra players. On stage, Isadora constituted the entire spectacle.

The orchestra plays the dance of the lost souls and we are now in Hell. A harp is heard, Orpheus's arrival is announced, and the chorus begins the melody of the lost spirits. Miss Duncan dances the dance of these wretched souls.… The following scene transfers to the Elysian Fields, where Miss Duncan, in her dance, reveals the now happy shades leading Orpheus toward Eurydice.… The end of the poem is the triumph of love, and Miss Duncan dances the processions, the sacrifices, and the placing of flowers on love's altar.

There was no unanimity among the critics. Paul Souday's response to the Châtelet Orphée found Isadora's choice of music faulty. "Even a dancer such as Isadora Duncan cannot alone adequately synthesize a complete lyric drama." He thought her meanings were obscure as she shifted her portrayal from that of Orpheus to that of the Shades who obstruct her entrance into Hades. Strange and disconcerting though, "it was not at all unbecoming or tiresome." As for the rest of Isadora's program, Souday commented that "Miss Duncan merited the most glowing of compliments."

A personal apprehension was disclosed by André Marty in his February 1911 Comoedia Illustré article, "Isadora Duncan at the Châtelet." Might she not in her latest undertaking perhaps destroy the sublime memory of her earlier perfection, "treasured in us like a jewel?" His fear that the "new" that might shatter the spell of the "old" dissolved upon seeing "the priestess" once again. Sometimes the same, sometimes different, Isadora was always beautiful to Marty.

Isadora's handling of the beginning of Orphée's second act demonstrated to the reviewer how deep intuition and artistic intelligence could inject art with an exceptional character. While the off-stage voice of the hero was pleading for the return of his Eurydice, the dancer began moving to the haunting theme of the lost souls—she had become one of those pitiful, infernal creatures, wandering along the banks of the Styx. "At no moment in this dance could one say her gestures recreated figures from the Sistine Chapel … still, Michaelangelo's name was on everyone's lips. She does not imitate the great creator, but by her energy and superhuman effort she rises to the height of his genius."

Pierre Lalo, the brilliant son of composer Edouard Lalo, was music critic for Courier Musical, Comoedia, and Le Temps. He was an arch conservative, known for his astuteness and caustic wit. With Isadora he made little progress, despite his undiminished antagonism. His lengthy critique ignored direct reference to the Orphée première, tackling instead her ideas and doctrines and their fallacies. Altogether peculiar in view of its past disdain was Paris's unwholesome infatuation with her dances and her bare feet. "There is not in what she does today any less pretension or less mediocrity than at another time." But it was Isadora's remark in Excelsior, to the effect that a collection of more or less arbitrary steps does not constitute an art, that incited Lalo to the virulence of his critique.

The classical dance to which the dancer had referred was an art, Lalo asserted, because it defined its gestures and attitudes with precision and eliminated "useless, obscure motions." Ballet cultivated, developed, and perfected a style by "logically studied methods based on a body of rules." Citing Gautier and Mallarmé, who were fervent admirers of the ballet, and pointing to Degas, the greatest painter of the day, who esteemed ballet sufficiently to devote a significant portion of his work to studies of it and its practitioners, Lalo challenged Isadora to make such a claim for herself. "Merely fluttering about and trying to express her soul, this presumptuous American, without any understanding of the medium, not even a shadow of technical competence, thinks she is creating a revolution.… She seems entirely devoid of a musical sense … like one of those Anglo-Saxons of whom Nietzsche said, 'they possess no music in them.'"

Under attack were Isadora's "false simplicity and affected naiveté." Lalo, with his well-known anti-German prejudice, called the children from her school "heavy little girls from beyond the Rhine, whose ankles were as thick as their thighs … their naked legs skipping around monotonously while following Miss Duncan in a row." The public, who aided and abetted her successes, were not spared his attack. "They are the dupes of a Parisian pro-Duncan coalition composed of snobs: ring-leaders, agitators preying on the bovine throng, who blindly follow the caprices of fashion." He found incomprehensible "their stupid tendency to confuse the amateurish, underdeveloped efforts of the foreigner with those of a genius." Denying any prejudice on his part, he pointed to his acceptance of the foreigner "who is a Wagner, Tolstoi, or an Ibsen—not a Puccini, Caruso, or an Isadora Duncan."

Composer Reynaldo Hahn's music review of an Orphée performance given by Isadora in March 1913 at the Trocadéro was critical of her treatment of the Gluck score. "Regretfully, I must confess that this Orpheus is not an example of her notable art I prefer." He faulted her disregard for the composer's tempo markings, the vagueness of her interpretation of Eurydice, of Orpheus, and the Blessed Spirits, which ultimately undermined her artistic intentions. Furthermore, the Gluck music bore characteristics of eighteenth-century operatic style quite incompatible with the dancer's attempt to apply it to movements of the Chorus in Greek tragedy. In Act Three, "The Elysian Fields," mention is made of seven of the pupils led by Isadora, who became the "living realization of all sylvan myths.…" The renowned dramatic actor Mounet-Sully recited the prose uniting the narrative extracts, while the distinguished singer Rudolf Plamondon sang the role of Orpheus.

When Hahn turned to the Schubert numbers on the program, his review lightened. There was, in Isadora's ease of rhythms, in her serenity and tranquility of repose, that which excited in the spectator "a penetrating sense of well-being, to be alive and to feel the world so acutely." What irresistible magic in her forms and exhilarations in her vigor, the critic marvelled. He would not find the term "genius" excessive in one who could realize the summit of beauty and emotion attainable by a human being. "In those moments where beauty and emotion fuse and climax, something of the immortal floats about the dancer; she wanders in a divine ray, in a mist where all works of art circle in unison with her … As Goethe once said: 'Hold this moment, do not flee, you are so beautiful!'"

One of a favored circle of journalists whose supportive reviews were appreciated by Isadora, Michel Georges-Michel attended her performances in late November 1911 at the Châtelet. In his "Les Ennuis et les Rêves d'Isadora Duncan" ("Isadora Duncan's Anxieties and Dreams") that appeared on December 3 in Gil Blas, Georges-Michel made note of the seven young pupils, "the little dancing roses," who entered the stage and stood within the blue shadow of the heavy curtains. At that point Isadora approached the footlights, crossed her arms, and addressed the rather surprised audience: "Look at these children. They are healthy and robust; eyes are clear and no one is tired or weakened. To the contrary, listen as they breathe freely. Do you think it is wrong for them to dance?"

What prompted the brief and unexpected speech became apparent to Georges-Michel when, in her dressing room, Isadora told him: "I am pampering a big dream—my school of dance. I want not 50, not 500, but 5,000 pupils. The dance is play, it is art, health, joy and poetry. I would wish for the whole world to dance with me! And the whole world, even with its idiosyncracies, delusions, pathos and passions and would come to realize a more pleasurable existence." How should she not be irritated, Georges-Michel wrote, when that very day, she had been informed by a reputable critic that her pupils were to be the subject of an investigation? A prominent society member found objectionable the commercial exploitation in Parisian theaters of young children, parading around in skimpy outfits and baring their naked legs. Moreover, Georges-Michel added, Mme. Duncan was apprised by her informant that all young children dancers in Europe usually wound up as prostitutes—lost by the time they reached the age of fifteen!

There was more to come. Isadora herself was threatened with cancellation of her concerts if she dared to appear in her transparent veils for what was described as her "sensuous" "Bacchanale" from Tannhäuser. The daily papers made it known that a police deputy was to be on hand in the theater to enforce the restraining order on her attire (waiting to close the curtain at the first drop of her modesty). The harried dancer tried to put the matter into some rational perspective with a letter to the newspapers. She was hoping to diffuse the situation by clarifying her personal concept of Wagner's score and her choreography. Those familiar with Isadora's interpretation of this music were equally cognizant of her belief that the spirit of the dance must transcend the corporeal, so that in the treatment of the love and carnal themes suggested in the music, only the imagination was titillated, not the flesh. To Georges-Michel she vented her frustrations: "If they annoy me about this, I will dance in a forest naked, naked, naked … with the song of birds and elemental noises for an orchestra."

To unruffle feathers, Isadora wore for this performance (according to one source) a double layer of light scarves. Inevitably, with all this commotion, public anticipation was high for the "Bacchanale" and the audience, not disappointed in the overall presentation, had actually awaited a less restrained interpretation. All in all, things proceeded without incident. Isadora was seen leaving the theater wrapped in ermine from head to foot, utterly fatigued and utterly delighted.

The death of Isadora's children in 1913, followed by the four-year war that engulfed first Europe and subsequently the United States, brought years of disruption and turmoil to Isadora's life. She restlessly kept moving with more and more concerts in the United States, as well as South America; in between she returned to France, where she presented in Paris, in April 1916, two benefit performances to aid French war relief and did a short tour of the provinces in recital with a piano accompanist. The French press kept track of it all.

Isadora's first major reappearance in Paris after the war took the form of a year-long Festival of Music and Dance throughout 1920. This year celebrated two decades since the dancer's arrival in Paris in 1900. Art critic Waldemar George, in an article on the new dance, addressed part of his essay on the now familiar and reputable artist and the implications of her dance. A broad and rhetorical question framed the purport of his assessment. Could the dance have the potential for becoming a viable art, one no longer peripheral, but within the scheme of the modern esthetic? He believed it could and found in Isadora the initiator and the reactivator, evidence of the renewal of this medium and the new spirit infecting the plastic arts. She had, in the twenty years of her opposition to the balletic tradition, brought credibility to a technique at first thought to be based solely on intuition. Surprisingly and more precisely, George viewed this technique as stemming from a perfect knowledge of the rules of rhythmic structure. This is an art, he reasoned, that could be learned and taught with authenticity.

The press had been informed by Isadora that her dance now had a new character. The horrendous events affecting the world had deeply touched her and she desired to express through her dance ideas and emotions more relevant to those experiences shared in common by all people. It was her earnest wish to offer some consolation to the sorrowing and to the afflicted.

Afflicted but not consoled by Isadora's words was Paul Abrams who, in an article in March 1920, vented a wary response. He addressed himself to the men of his generation who were witness, as was he, to two events in the art of choreography—both indelible, "never to be stricken from memory." The first came with the entrance of the Ballets Russes, the decors of Bakst, the performances of Nijinsky, Karsavina, and Rubenstein, and the sumptuousness of the Orient. The second landmark event, less ostentatious but more profound and memorable in its appreciation and alliance with the values of beauty in the classical sense, was the appearance of Isadora Duncan. Then Abrams got to the heart of his displeasure. He and several of his colleagues had received letters from the dancer in which she promised a departure from the earlier character of her dance. He was apprehensive. For Isadora to complicate or even to become pretentious just to produce other effects "which she little needs" worried him. It would be, he commented, "like having grains of pepper thrown into a glass gilden by the Hellenic sun and filled with wine from Samos."

Newspapers carried the announcement of Isadora's concert dates and program schedules with a jubilation befitting the return of Ulysses to Ithaca: "A date in the History of Beauty," "She will reclaim her Apostolic Esthetic." As the momentum gathered, her appearances took on the dimension of immense cultural happenings—masterpieces from the greatest composers and the most acclaimed dancer of her epoch together in the prominent theaters of Paris. Isadora began her concert series at the Trocadéro in March and April, continuing at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in May and June, again performing at the Trocadéro in November and December, this time with the Isadorables, finishing at the Champs-Elysées, again with the Isadorables, in January 1921.

Paris resounded with the "big guns" of Isadora's creative achievements, the mainstays of her career and her artistic signature, Iphigénie and Orphée, the sensitively probed works of her maturity, Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 in B minor (1916), César Franck's Redemption (1916), Liszt's Les Funérailles (1918-1919) and his Bénédiction de Dieu dans la Solitude (1918-1919), her revised and enlarged excerpts from Wagner's Parsifal, and her gestural dramatization of the French anthem La Marseillaise (1915-1916). For her numerous "loyalists" Isadora tossed floral bouquets in the form of the beloved Schubert, Brahms, and Chopin waltzes, which rekindled treasured remembrances of the vivacious and nimble Isadora of her younger days.

The cavernous, antiquated, and acoustically faulty Trocadéro did not impede the tumultuous reception accorded Isadora. Across its enormous stage had passed France's great orators, beribboned men of state, and members of L'Académie Française. Isadora now stood there in her light peplum and bare feet, first expressing her gratitude to the full house for so grand a welcome and then announcing her plan to endow Paris with a school of the dance. She called on her faithful followers to aid her in her task. "I have but opened a door. This door must never be allowed to close." On hand and in good number were the members of the press, many familiar figures reconvening for such an auspicious occasion. Seen with some frequency during the gala season were the notables among artists and intellectuals in Paris, several of whom would continue to cast their shadows over cultural events for some time to come: Gabriel Astrac, Henri Bidou, René Blum, Colette, Kees van Dongen, Lanvin, Louis Jouvet, Steinlen, Picasso.

As in the past, eulogistic terms—"Priestess," "Goddess," "Statue"—headlined article after article. Charles Mère described Isadora's effect on the crowds as a "magnetism of intelligence and benevolence." Fontrailles exclaimed: "She's a prodigious thing!" As Isadora danced the Marche Slav, Nozière, drama critic for Gil Blas and Au Matin, was seen standing in his loge, writing and uttering "She is an entire temple, this woman!" The crusty critic of L'Oeuvre, known to his colleagues as La Fouchardière, grumbled aloud: "To dance to Wagner with this corpulence … this Isadora! I must do an article, but … cannot handle it with this woman. She's a national glory!"

Following are some of the collected impressions of the Schubert Funeral March (Marche Héroïque) composed by Isadora in 1914 as a memorial to her children.

The Goddess appears; first, a pale shadow moving against the tall, dark backdrop.… The years, heavy with grief and anguishes, have weighed oppressively on the shoulders of the divine Iphigenia who not long ago danced on the shores of Aulis.

Still and white in long vertical folds and staring with an inexpressible sadness … the poses, the walk of the great artist suffice to cause spectators to tremble.

The sadness and gravity of the Funeral March, a dance? No—it is a mute tragedy.

For Isadora's fans, her return to the Trocadero with her Orphée was a time for elation. Her performances of December 11 and 16, 1920, featured singers M. Francell of the Opéra Comique, Rudolphe Plamondon of the Opéra, Mme. Marcelle Doria and an ensemble of Singers from Saint Gervais, and eighty musicians from the Concerts Colonne Orchestra with the much admired conductor Georges Rabani.

Sublime and "hieratic," Isadora took charge, reported critic Guillot de Saix. On this occasion her Orpheus took on a particular dignity. While interpreting the Gluck score, yellow, violet, and red lights created a phantasmagoric atmosphere. Guillot de Saix noted how the composer Gluck had transcended his epoch, but how the dancer in her turn had surpassed the composer. He called attention to how she had rejoined the statuary of antiquity, of how she brought animation to the paintings of da Vinci. She now led her audience as she dreamily wandered from the tomb of Eurydice to the infernal caverns where monsters and furies became tamed by the strumming of Orpheus' divine lyre, and when she guided them into the Elysian Fields studded with flowering narcissus, artists in the hall watched this scene with ecstatic eyes, believing they were seeing live before them, their own dreams.

During Easter week in April 1920, Isadora offered a "Spiritual Concert" that featured the Childhood of Christ of Berlioz, the Redemption of César Franck, and the Holy Grail music from Parsifal of Wagner. Leading into his review of the concert, Pierre Seize asked a question: "Who, then, said this woman was a dancer? The most agreeable of mimes, a tragedian, perhaps, a sculptor, as well. A dancer? Truly no!" Appraising Isadora, Scize regarded her as a sculpture of flesh with movements ecstatic and of prayerful supplication; he beheld in her the collision of two worlds—ancient and modern, Dionysus in full sunlight and Jesus in Christian austerity: the reign of humiliation and sacrifice. "And when the splendid statue of flesh finally lies outstretched under its shroud as the bells and fanfares of the Grail ring out a new Assumption, we realize that something august came to pass here—a kind of Mass for paganism crucified. But who, then, who said this woman was a dancer?"

Well regarded and of established reputation within the community of writers was Fernand Nozière, alias Guy Launay. Under either name he was a staunch partisan of Isadora, strongly receptive to her form of dramatic expression and humbled by the physical beauty of her movements. Throughout the year-long extravaganza his reviews recorded some of the details and on-stage actions in the lesser known choreographies. In his sensitivity to his subject, Nozière was able to depict clearly the physical woman as well as her creative spirit, and her intellectual and psychological influence on the spectator.

Observing her during the Easter week concert, Nozière profiled Isadora noting that she had the decorative beauty of the angels imagined by the artists of the Renaissance. Her arms extended were caressing, "heavenly nourishment"; the slope of her neck, the clearness of the gaze, and the smile on her lips were "evocative of those Botticelli compositions … of a religious serenity." (César Franck's oratorio in three parts, Redemption, was based on a poetic text that set forth and acclaimed the spiritual reformation. Isadora danced only the second part, the "Symphonic Interlude," in which she conveyed the regenerative transformation of mankind's depravity into the age of enlightenment. It was first performed on April 9, 1916, at the Trocadéro for a war charity matinee.) Noziére began by describing Isadora as having risen from the dust. First sitting, then kneeling, she executed a sequence of positions that were forceful and tremendously stirring, "calling to mind Bourdelle's sculptural studies of the torso." With deliberate resolve she steadily pulled herself upward, "as the seed raises itself to the sun. Standing erect, her hand signals the canopy of heaven and the revelation of divinity. It is simple and it is great."

For her picturesque movement images to Berlioz's L'Enfance du Christ, Isadora brought a quality of light and the sparkle of joy. Through Noziére's eyes, a woman lingered maternally before the divine child, lovingly regarding his slumber. She smiled to him, rocked him, and suddenly, "accompanied by flutes and harp, she goes off seeking wondrous gifts for him: brilliant, full flowers, fruits of luscious shape and color, rich fragrances." All the while, the critic observed, the dancer scarcely touched the floor, gliding with an ethereal grace that enveloped onlookers, including Nozière, in an atmosphere of awe.

Of Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony Noziére reported the following:

The orchestra plays the Adagio [first movement]. The Scherzo [second movement] inspires Isadora. She is the Isadora Duncan we have known, the one who runs blithely across the green and gathers a flower, who dances in sunlight, and who abandons herself to her youthfulness. It is the Isadora of yesterday—the one numerous ballerinas have imitated; she now appears to be imitating herself. But the Allegro Vivace [third movement] reveals the new Isadora Duncan … She has become the very symbol of battle—of its intoxication, its sadness, its glory. With her index finger she seems to have traced on the pediment of the temple a sign of heroic duty. When her forces diminish, when she seems to waver, she returns to this sacred and radiant inscription where she renews her courage and vigor … It is no longer a woman who dances—it is a divinity rousing the crowd. Behind her she urges a whole people toward a superhuman task—toward challenges, toward triumph. Alone on stage, nevertheless, a feverish procession follows, walks, and dances with her toward invisible arcs on which are inscribed the superb criteria of heroism, dedication, goodness.

It is the fourth movement, the Adagio Lamentoso, that Nozière gave testimony to Isadora's intense imagination and emotive depths. With forceful symbolism she is earth-mother in a dolorous plaint for the slain in battle. A striking metaphor for maternal grief, she kneels and weeps for the dead children of man, and with an immense, surging movement of torso and arms, she wrests them from the void, pressing them against her body, to shelter within her womb. The critic wrote: "Such feelings demand symphonic scope. Beyond words is the sublimity of these movements; the most moving, most profound and human homage that could have been rendered the dead."

No longer suggestive of Greek sculpture or Botticelli paintings, Isadora's arrangement of the march toward the Holy Grail from Wagner's Parsifal transformed her into a Wagnerian hero, "posing the eternal polemic of Dionysus and Christ, earth and heaven, darkness and light, the weight of lust, and liberation through renunciation." There was authority, subtlety, and nobility in her characterization of Kundry: "How she makes us feel the torment of doubt, the invigoration of faith, the hesitancy of anguish, the ascent toward the light." As for her Death of Isolde (dramatized on about four square feet of space), Nozière had reached a verbal impasse: "I give up explaining it; I bow before this marvel of intelligence … of the sublime artist and the creator [Wagner]."

Neither nymph nor bacchante, Isadora's art had become prouder. She was seen as a powerful sculpture, her gestures more solemn, her stances solid and her expressions intense. Criticized elsewhere for her unsatisfactory conception of the frail Isolde, Nozière questioned whether it was ever Isadora's intention to interpret the legendary princess. "It is not the heroine," Noziére conjectured, "but the very inspiration of the composer that she strives to manifest in the music. There are formidable forces of love and death in evidence here."

Music critic Louis Laloy, however, who justifiably took credit as one of the first critical voices to herald the arrival of Isadora's unusual and earnest talent, now persisted in objecting to her free adaptations from Wagner, whose music was least representational for dance purposes. Meritorious though they may be, her energetic evocations of the Ride of the Valkyries, the "Bacchanale" from Tannhäuser, or Isolde's Love-Death, were not works, Laloy cautioned, to become models for other artists of the dance, or replacements for classical ballets. "Isadora Duncan's dance is not, and cannot be, the whole dance."

Just as Isadora's Blue Danube waltz years earlier had brought ecstatic audiences to their feet, her La Marseillaise, since its first performance in wartime Paris in 1916 had ignited the public's fervor. Unsurpassed for its sheer theatrical power, this semi-mimed interpretation of man's eternal quest for freedom produced the tour de force of her career. It remained a crowd favorite whether performed in Europe, South America or the United States. Audiences wept and went wild.

Allan Ross Macdougall, friend, secretary, and biographer of Isadora, described the emotional outburst that rang through the Trocadéro in 1916 when the dancer, robed in a blood-red tunic and red shawl, mimed with "incredible intensity" the four stanzas of the French anthem: "She stood filled with patriotic fury, her left breast bare as in the Rude statue in the Arc de Triomphe which had been her inspiration …"

François Rude's 1836 sculpture relief in stone on the lower right quadrant of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris overwhelms in its personification of Liberty. The central figure of the Marseillaise herself "raises high her left arm to rally all the brave to her side. With the other hand she points her sword toward the enemy. Her legs are wide apart. Her mouth of stone shrieks as though to deafen one." An examination of the sculpture and then a closer study of the art and photographic reproductions of Isadora reveal an almost literal transfer from the physical force of the stone's gesture and its embodiment of patriotic ardor to the dancer's bodily stances and expressive demeanor.

For anti-war intellectuals and those on the political left in the United States, the dancer's overpowering effect and success in her Marseillaise were a severe disillusionment. Up to now she had been a symbol to them of "life lived frank and free"; they now rebuked their lady of liberty for accelerating American pro-war sentiments.

For quite different reasons, sounds of disapproval came from a small critical enclave in Paris. Isadora's dance translation of the French anthem during her 1920-21 festival once again raised the familiar dichotomous issue: the appropriateness of dancing to certain kinds of music, specifically a literary piece and none other than the supreme pride of France—the national anthem. It was an affront to the public! Tampering with the Rouget de Lisle poem to indulge choreographic whims was an impiety! One did not desecrate a glorious poem by dancing it. "Botch the works of foreign composers," she was told, but leave their compatriot alone.

Also biased in favor of the French "soul" as alone capable of appreciating and conveying the Marseillaise, was Emile Mas. Generally supportive of her other undertakings, he rejected Isadora's dramatization. Her fierce stances, the unattractive facial grimaces, then her unbecomingly lively change were seen as a grievous error. She understood nothing of his anthem! Less mocking than disappointed, he described how at one point in the dance when she had not stirred, one hand was finally raised up and cupped around her ear, leaving the impression that she wanted to telephone. This Marseillaise was not theirs!

The excerpt that follows appeared in print after a 1920 performance of the Marseillaise. Incomplete, it nevertheless comes closest to being a choreographed text and provides vivid clues to the dancer's movement phrase in correlation with word and music. This choreographic description ends at the point of the galvanizing refrain, "Aux Armes, Citoyens" (To Arms, Citizens), when the entire hall breaks loose into feet stamping, hand clapping, and general commotion climaxing the dance.

LA MARSEILLAISE

ALLONS ENFANTS DE LA PATRIE

The dancer places her right foot in front and raises the right arm. Hand is wide open, fingers separated, palm facing the audience, her fixed glance is in the direction of the first balcony.

LE JOUR DE GLOIRE EST ARRIVÉ

The torso is brought forward, plexus trained on the first balcony, the mouth in the direction of the second balcony and the eyes on the rim of the theater; both arms are flung backwards, lightly raised from the body and forming an angle with it of approximately twenty-two degrees. The right foot rejoins the left foot which has not moved.

CONTRE NOUS DE LA TYRANNIE

Here the dance begins. The dancer steps off with the left foot and executes a half turn of the stage while moving to the right and seeming to hold some invisible cord: it is this "pulling" that designates the "tyranny" of which the poet de Lisle speaks.

L'ÉTENDARD SANGLANT EST LEVÉ

The dancer stops point blank in the rear center stage. She raises both arms high above her head which has been thrown backward. At this moment the spot lights hit her robe with a flaming red color.

ENTENDEZ-VOUS DANS LES CAMPAGNES

The ear is thrust toward the east and the gaze becomes strangely pained; the arm at that side is stretched out to this central point; the foot of that side readies to move.

MUGIR CES FEROCES SOLDATS

The dance begins again here and the dancer does the second half turn on stage while pushing with feet and hands against the on-rushing forces. The forcefulness of the feet is obtained by first causing the thighs, then the calves, to quiver. As for the hands, the powerful vibrations from the upper arm muscles tremble down through the entire arm, through the palms.

ILS VIENNENT JUSQUE DANS NOS BRAS

The dancer has returned to center stage. Starting first with the left arm, she slaps herself across the right arm, then, simultaneously on both arms, each with only four fingers of the opposite hand.

ARRACHER NOS FILS, NOS COMPAGNES

There are gestures of wresting, battle, struggle, resurge, and at the end, despair. The wresting on "arra," the battle on "cher nos," struggle on "fils nos," the resurge on "comp," despair on "gnes." These movements must be synchronized to produce their full effect.

Looming large on the Duncan landscape was Fernand Divoire, editor-in-chief of L'Intransigeant, dance critic, and author of works on theater and dance. One of the most consistent and interested of witnesses to the growth of Isadora's influence on twentieth-century theater, Divoire was devoted to "Isadorism." His published writings contain major segments on her dominant choreographies and her individual artistry, on Duncanism as an art ideology, and on the Isadorables as the fruition of an ideal vision. Commenting on Isadora's 1920-1921 Paris appearances, Divoire discerned an ever-evolving artist, surprisingly more supple and diverse, "richer of fine and fluid ease, more replenished. And the curve of her gesture each time seemed larger and bolder." Divoire next saw her in 1923. He sensed, as did others, her bodily fatigue, her spiritual frailty. He made mention of the lost happiness, the many sadnesses, and the greatness: "Have they not withered and wearied her spirit?" Through Divoire's compassionate, humane words could be heard genuine empathy from one long attracted to Isadora as a person and as an artist. The body on stage that had so captivatingly articulated beauty, grace, and strength, now registered the cumulative effect of life's multiple tragedies and thwarted dreams. (Coinciding with Isadora's appearance at the Trocadéro in May 1923 was her realization that Her chaotic relationship and marriage to the Russian poet Essenin would have to be dissolved.)

Erudite, aristocratic André Levinson critiqued Isadora's concert of May 27, 1923, explaining first how repugnant it was for him to speak about the physical decay of an artist and the inevitable ravages of time, but then proceeding to do so. From the entire performance a single memory remained with him. "I see again the dancer, arms crossed as on an imaginary crucifix, torso slumped, knees bent, limbs … brutally apart. Then the head falls, the torso following it and the short hair brushes the floor. These two positions, while close to the grotesque, attain a painful grandeur." He referred to the Tchaikovsky and Scriabin that Isadora interpreted, as "music of the defeated and frenzied Russians. But it is the music that is necessary for Mme. Duncan; it is the score that provides the emotive shock, the psychological stimulant."

Levinson possessed a refinement and specialized knowledge of the theatrical arts that made his critical essays of the heretic Isadora stand in class by themselves. On record in Comoedia, Les Nouvelles Littéraires, and in many published volumes are his contributions distinguished for their precise detailing of Isadora's gesture in its physical character and subtleties of expression, in its mimetic clarity and persuasive manner of projection. But his nineteenth-century elitist sensibility found much to challenge in "the intrinsic value of her reform." He seriously questioned her claim that through the unrestricted movements of the body lay endless paths to one's identity and individuality. With his rational criticism, the sophisticated Levinson intellectualized deeper resentments toward her: her dance vocabulary was too simple, she subjugated the dance to music, she lacked formal elements in her dance, and—the source of blatant irritation to him—she dared to reject the time-honored classic traditions and scorn a distinguished esthetic order, a most venerable discipline. Ultimately, he was certain that Isadora's "negation of all doctrine" would doom her role as evangelist. All the more was his wonderment over the "psychic contagion" by which the barefoot dancer was able to win the "enthusiasm of an immense public."

There was obvious chagrin when Levinson charged Isadora with wrenching theatrical dance out of the gentle and caring hands of the privileged few, democratizing it through her open, revolutionary channels. Her dance, he contended, would release the floodgates of dilettantism and imitation. Levinson could not conceal his private dismay and frustration that the brilliant and royal art of ballet that he loved, his sacred and "golden art," his personal fantasyland, had been invaded, injured, and changed by the woman who, for the integrity of her ideals, "braved all, risked all," and who, "by a miracle of will and faith … had imprinted her seal on a whole epoch." How to explain the complacency, the impotence of ballet officialdom in not launching a coun teroffensive to Isadora's esthetic onslaught? Almost sheepishly, André Levinson surmised that they, too, had been "captivated by the glowing candor of the intrepid amazon."

Levison did not acknowledge Isadora's dance as a viable art form. His analyses were thoughtful, forthright, penetrating, and beautifully written. In essence, he appreciated her negatively, but for her convictions, her sovereign presence, and her effect on the world's perception of dance, his admiration was boundless.

These men of letters, composers, dramatists, opera and theater critics, poets, and journalists were prominent chroniclers of their time. Out of their own diversities of temperament and esthetic proclivities they presented the many facets of Isadora Duncan, all somehow valid and appropriate for the complex, larger-than-life persona and her individual imprint on a culture in transition. Their words alone, in this instance, have become the conservators of one unique being's creative existence. Collectively, their writings constitute the principal archive of Isadora's twenty-five-year effort to convert the consciousness of the world to the dance as art.