Isadora Duncan's "My Life"

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses Isadora Duncan's book "My Life" and her life in relationship to 'Section I' of Walt Whitman's poem "Song of the Open Road", which Duncan professes to be her favorite poem, probably because it reveals Duncan's specific philosophies of freedom and dance. The author points out that, in her life as a mother, a lover and a wife and her work as a dancer, who developed modern dance, Duncan broke away from conventional views seeking freedom from social and professional taboos and constraints.
The paper stresses that nature is Duncan's source of technique and dance content in which she expresses unbound freedom through her use of arms and upper body movements combined with simple steps, a style which Duncan intended to be the divine expression through the body of the human spirit.

From the Paper:

"The fourth stanza in "Open Road" moves on to a depiction of nature, as well as acceptance. The sufficiency that he finds in nature feeds the poet's freedom. Isadora Duncan finds in the freedom of nature the freedom of her inner expression. She was born at the seaside: "...I have noticed that all the great events of my life have taken place by the sea. My first idea of movement, of the dance, certainly came from the rhythm of the waves." Thus the freedom and movement that make up the radical free-form dance style that was Duncan's invention, are profoundly inspired by the sea. Again, the restriction placed upon her by the public school is sharply juxtaposed by the afternoons when she danced and played next to the sea. Duncan is also much influenced by the stars and astrology."

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