Isadora Duncan
By Zhanna Tekleva
6.05.2014
Most everyone has their idols, including me, I also have a person who inspired me — Isadora Duncan. Her nickname “Mother of Modern Dance”. She was a trailblazing dancer and instructor whose emphasis on freer forms of movement.
Why I admire her?
er family was very poor. From childhood, Isadora learned to depend on her own resources, to take what she needed from a situation and then move on Isadora taught dance lessons to local children to earn extra money. She began teaching when she was only five years old. Isadora wanted to make dancing her life’s work. And she wanted to live by her own rules, not by what other people thought was right or wrong. The kind of dancing Isadora wanted to do was new and different from other dances at the time.
When she was eighteen years old, Isadora urged her mother to move to Chicago and then to New York. She found work in several dance companies or groups of dancers. But she had to dance as she was directed to do. She did not dance alone on the stage and could not become the “star” of the show. And soon it was hard to find jobs that paid her enough money just to survive. In a short time, she was out of work and poor once again.
But she didn’t give up. Isadora Duncan arrived in London. She visited the British Museum every day for several month and studied Greek vases and sculpture with their images of ancient Greek women dancing. In one day she danced for a large audience at London’s Lyceum Theater.
The people liked what they saw. People began to think of her as a great talent. Isadora Duncan moved on to Paris, Berlin, Vienna and the other great cities of Europe. She danced and opened dancing schools that integrated dance with other types of learning. She had become the most famous dancer in the world.
Isadora Duncan
said:
In my school, I don’t teach the children to imitate my movements… but to make their own. Because The dancer of the future will be one whose body and soul have grown so harmoniously together that the natural language of that soul will have become the movement of the body. This is the mission of the dancer of the future.
And when I keep imaging her dancing and her not easy way across the stages of Europe and America, These thoughts giving me courage to remain true to the beliefs that propel me.
Данное эссе было написано Жанной Теклёвой 6 мая 2014 года для устного рассказа на английском языке во время учёбы на втором курсе в РЭУ им. Плеханова.
Оформлено в статью на медиуме 15 января 2015 года Андреем Крыниным.
