S. Hurok Presents; A Memoir of the Dance WorldHurok, Sol
History
S. Hurok Presents; A Memoir of the Dance World
Hurok, Sol
Ballet -- History
As for the ballet, she continued to have none of it. She once remarked:
“The old-fashioned waltz and mazurka are merely an expression of sickly
sentimentality and romance which our youth and our times have outgrown.
The minuet is but the expression of the unctuous servility of courtiers
at the time of Louis XIV and hooped skirts.”
Isadora’s European successes led to the establishment of schools of her
own, where her theories could be expounded and developed. The first of
these was in Berlin, and as her pupils, her “children,” developed, she
appeared with them. When she first went to Russia, the controversy she
stirred up has become a matter of ballet history; and it is a matter of
record that she influenced that father of the “romantic revolution” in
ballet, Michel Fokine.
Russia figured extensively in Isadora’s life, for she gave seasons
there, first in 1905, and again in 1907 and 1912. Then, revolutionary
that she was, she returned to the Soviet in 1921, established a school
there and, in 1922, married the “hooligan” poet, Sergei Essenin.
Throughout her life, Isadora had denounced marriage as an institution,
disavowed it, fought it, bore three children outside it, on the ground
that it existed only for the enslavement of woman.
There had been three Duncan seasons in America before I brought her, in
1922, for what proved to be her final visit to her native country. The
earlier American series were in 1908, when she danced with Walter
Damrosch and the New York Symphony Orchestra, at the Metropolitan Opera
House, prior to a tour; in 1911, when she again danced with Damrosch;
again in 1916, when she returned to California, early the next year,
after a twenty-two years’ absence. She also visited New York, briefly,
in 1915, impulsively renting a studio at Fourth Avenue and Twenty-third
Street, with the idea of establishing a school. It was during this brief
visit that she made history of a kind by suddenly improvising a dance to
the French national anthem at the Metropolitan Opera House.
As I have pointed out, enlightened dance criticism, so far as the
newspapers were concerned, in those days was almost non-existent. For
those readers who might be interested, however, there are available, in
the files of _The New York Times_, penetrating analyses of her
performances by the discerning Carl Van Vechten.
The story of Isadora’s intervening years is marked by light and shadow.
Hers was a life that could not long retain happiness within its grasp.
Snatches of happiness were hers in her brief association with England’s
greatly talented stage designer, that misunderstood genius of the
theatre, Gordon Craig, the son of Ellen Terry, by whom Isadora had a
child; and yet another child by the lover who was known only as
Lohengrin.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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