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Dancing the Future, Performing the Past: Isadora Duncan and Wagnerism in the AmericanImaginationAuthor(s): Mary SimonsonSource: Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Summer 2012), pp. 511-555Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jams.2012.65.2.511 .

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Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 65, Number 2, pp. 511–556 ISSN 0003-0139, electronic ISSN1547-3848. © 2012 by the American Musicological Society. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permissionto photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website,www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/jams.2012.65.2.511.

Dancing the Future, Performing the Past:Isadora Duncan and Wagnerism in theAmerican Imagination

MARY SIMONSON

In the summer of 1908, after nearly ten years abroad, “barefoot dancer”Isadora Duncan returned home to the United States an icon. Duncan hadcaptivated audiences in London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna with her lyrical

interpretations, unique movement style, Grecian tunics, and bare legs. Assculptor José Clará wrote after witnessing a performance in Paris, “When sheappeared, we all had this feeling that God—that is to say Certainty, Simplicity,Grandeur, and Harmony—that God was present. She awakened or recreatedall the fervors of the Ideal and of art; the finest dreams and highest visionswere born and unfolded through the magic of her movements.”1 Americanaudiences and critics were curious—and skeptical. Who was this long-lostAmerican woman who did but dance, without the requisite accompanyingskits, songs, or recitations, and who shunned vaudeville and its audiences in fa-vor of concert halls? A Variety writer noted after one of her first performancesin August of 1908, “It is a fairly safe venture that a good percentage of theCriterion’s audience who lent their applause to the none too plentiful gaiety ofthe evening did so because they thought it was the proper thing to do and notbecause they found real delight in Miss Duncan’s performance.”2

Yet Duncan quickly found her American niche. By November of 1908, shewas dancing at the Metropolitan Opera House before rapturous crowds to theaccompaniment of conductor Walter Damrosch’s New York SymphonyOrchestra. Undoubtedly, Duncan’s association with the well-regarded andwell-connected Damrosch was an important part of her acceptance. Equallyimportant to her American success, however, was Duncan’s connection with

I am deeply grateful to Joseph Horowitz, Elizabeth Hudson, and Richard Will for their in-sights and encouragement, to the anonymous readers of this Journal for their suggestions, and toColgate University for generously funding this work.

1. Clará, “Isadora Duncan,” L’art décoratif, August and September 1913, 107.2. At this performance, Duncan danced Iphigénie and Dance Idylls. “Isadora Duncan,”

Variety, 2 August 1908, Isadora Duncan clippings file, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, NewYork Public Library of Performing Arts. The Criterion (also called the Lyric) was part ofHammer stein’s Olympia Theater, located on East Broadway between 44th and 45th, and fea-tured primarily vaudeville performances until 1915, when it began to show movies as well. SeeHenderson, City and the Theatre, 246–47.



512 Journal of the American Musicological Society

3. Indeed, as Carrie J. Preston suggests in an article on Duncan’s modernist tendencies,scholars exploring Duncan’s life and career seem prone to assume parallels between her dance aes-thetics and the “excessive” written style and narrative of her autobiography, My Life. As a result,Duncan is frequently fetishized as a dilettante and improviser, and further, as a dancer rather thana choreographer. Because of this, I believe, Duncan has rarely been explored in relation to theworld in which she performed; moreover, scholars and critics have tended to underestimate theextent to which Duncan consciously constructed her identity, made aesthetic decisions, and posi-tioned herself in relation to other performers, choreographers, and composers, and in relation toher audiences. One notable exception to this trend is Daly’s Done Into Dance. See Preston,“Motor in the Soul.”

4. Daly’s prologue summarizes these various resonances; see Done Into Dance, 2–21. Theways in which the dance of Duncan and numerous other female performers reflected and helpedto shape early twentieth-century American culture is also discussed in Tomko, Dancing Class.

5. Daly, Done Into Dance, 6.

Richard Wagner’s aesthetics, compositions, and artistic theories. Carefullytrading on American familiarity with and reverence for Richard Wagner,Duncan choreographed dances to music extracted from Wagner’s music dra-mas, troped on his aesthetic theories and writings in her own speeches and essays, and regularly related tales of her performance at Bayreuth in 1904 atthe invitation of Cosima and Siegfried Wagner. Conjuring herself as a sort of rebellious twentieth-century disciple of Wagner, Duncan embodied a second-generation strain of American Wagnerism that seamlessly mixed nineteenth-century aesthetics and Victorian cultural values with twentieth-centurydebates and discourses on the female body, movement, and evolution.

In this article, I explore Isadora Duncan’s relationship with RichardWagner’s works, theories, and performance practices, and the evolving brandof Wagnerism that she helped to generate. Accounts of Duncan’s career havetended to gloss over the close connection between the works and ideas ofthese two artists; indeed, scholarship on Duncan has largely been devoted to her unique, improvisatory movement aesthetic and unorthodox career trajectory—in short, her individuality.3 As a result, her relationships with otherartists and her position within the larger cultural milieu tend to be ignored.Yet at precisely the moment that psychology, evolution, photography, the re-vival of the Olympic Games, debates over birth control, and scientific advancessuch as X-rays all explored and reimagined the human body, Duncan presenteda new sort of (female) body onstage and in her theories.4 Further, just whenmany Americans sought moral reform, new modes of spirituality, strongerconnections with nature, a national selfhood, and a means of self-expression,Duncan attempted to create a style of dance that simultaneously addressedthese wants and depicted the search for identity, meaning, and beauty.5Indeed, Duncan’s theories and choreographies emerged within a rich, transat-lantic web of influential thinkers and the twentieth-century cultural milieumore broadly. Whereas scholars have focused on Duncan’s position as part ofa cadre of progressive figures such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Walt Whitman,however, the key influence of Richard Wagner and mid-nineteenth-century



Isadora Duncan and Wagnerism in the American Imagination 513

aesthetics is acknowledged only in passing. I look both forward and backwardhere, discussing Duncan as a twentieth-century artist who was also well versedand deeply invested in many nineteenth-century artistic theories and tradi-tions. The article consists of three sections: the first outlines Duncan’s careerand movement style; the second examines the ways in which Duncan invokedWagner in her writings, specifically “The Dance of the Future”; and the thirdexplores Duncan’s Wagner dances. Based on these ideas, I reflect on whyDuncan’s Wagnerian self-construction was so significant to turn-of-the-century American audiences and critics, and why it remains so today. InDuncan’s dance and her artistic aesthetic, Victorian ideologies and early twentieth-century visions knit together, strands of Wagnerism entwining with those of modernism. As Duncan’s career demonstrates, the echoes ofWagnerism in early twentieth-century life were not residual but resounding.

Isadora Duncan and the American Imagination

The youngest of four children, Isadora Duncan was born in the spring of1877 in San Francisco. Raised in California by a free-spirited, imaginative single mother who worked as a music teacher, Duncan’s childhood was filledwith classical music, poetry, Shakespeare, art, and nature. She reportedly spenthours playing and dancing on the beach as a child and, as a teenager, taughtmovement and dance to children. Duncan claims to have had no formal train-ing herself; in her autobiography, she recalls attending only three ballet lessonsbefore telling her teacher that the movements were “ugly and against nature”and abandoning the classes in favor of her own experimental, expressive aes-thetic.6 She did, however, take dance and gymnastics classes at the OaklandTurnverein, a German-American club, and may have continued to study balletas a young adult.7

Unable to secure performance engagements on the West Coast—theatermanagers accustomed to hiring shapely “skirt girls” and exotic cootch dancers

6. It is likely that Duncan did not completely dismiss ballet as quickly as she claims in her au-tobiography. Studio pictures of Duncan from the 1890s show her dressed in ballet slippers andlace dresses; as Macdougall (“Isadora Duncan and the Artists,” in Magriel, Isadora Duncan, 37)suggests, it was not until Duncan arrived in Europe and was influenced by London- and Paris-based artists that she fully abandoned standard (albeit Americanized) versions of ballet costumesand techniques for the “free” dance, tunics, and bare feet that characterized her adult aesthetic. InDone Into Dance (p. 69), Daly argues that Duncan may actually have been dismissed from balletclasses after disagreeing with instructor Jay Mastbaum over piano tempos. For additional informa-tion on Duncan’s life and career, see Kurth, Sensational Life; Blair, Portrait of the Artist ;Macdougall, Isadora; and Manning, “Isadora Duncan.”

7. Daly suggests that Duncan most likely studied with Marie Bonfanti, an Italian ballerinawho performed in The Black Crook and then opened several dance schools in New York; she sug-gests that Duncan may also have studied with Katti Lanner later in London; Done Into Dance,69–71.




told Duncan that her dancing was more suitable for a church than a theater—and plagued by constant financial problems, Duncan and her family headedeast in 1896.8 She was spotted in Chicago by impresario Augustin Daly andinvited to join his theater company. Performing in a variety of productions including A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Geisha in New York and on a European tour, Duncan slowly carved a space and a name for herself in thestage world. Yet it was not the space that she wanted: disillusioned with the constraints and demands of theatrical performance (including requeststhat she not only dance but act and sing) and frustrated with Daly’s failure to“make use” of her “genius,” Duncan eventually resigned from the companyand again attempted to secure solo dance engagements.9 She managed to se-cure invitations to dance in the drawing rooms and villas of a number of soci-ety women in the final years of the century, as well as at the Waldorf-Astoriaand the Carnegie Lyceum in New York. As she performed at the “afternoonsoirees” of Mabel Dodge and Mrs. Nicholas Beach, in afternoon entertain-ments at the Carnegie Lyceum in New York City, and at benefit dances at-tended by elite women in New York, Chicago, and Newport, Rhode Island,Duncan’s name regularly appeared in the Society pages of the New York Timesin the final years of the century. According to an 1899 New England HomeMagazine, Sarah Todd Astor settled Duncan’s future “as far as the FourHundred are concerned” when, after seeing Duncan’s danced interpretationof Omar Khayyam’s immensely popular Rubaiyat in Newport, she “invitedMiss Duncan to sit by her upon a divan and talked with her for twenty min-utes.”10 Yet by 1899, unsatisfied with her opportunities and the response ofaudiences and critics, and again in tenuous financial circumstances, IsadoraDuncan was, once more, ready to move on. The family continued east, settingsail for Britain as passengers on a cattle boat.

In Europe, Duncan’s fortunes improved. Under the tutelage first ofLondon music critic John Alexander Fuller-Maitland, then of dancer LoieFuller, and then of British actor, director, and designer Edward Gordon Craig(with whom Duncan also had a romantic relationship that resulted in a daugh-ter, Deirdre), she honed her movement style, “elevated” her musical selec-tions, and established an extensive network of artists, patrons, and friends.Embraced by audiences across the continent as an artistic and cultural icon,Duncan quickly made Europe—Berlin, Paris, and Moscow in turn—her homeand primary place of performance. Yet Duncan never shed her American iden-tity or ties.11 Once established in European circles, Duncan regularly visited

8. Duncan, My Life, 25. Daly describes this episode, and early twentieth-century Americanconceptions of dancing at length; Done Into Dance, 156–59.

9. Duncan, My Life, 41.10. Beckwith, “Poetry of Motion,” 246.11. Indeed, as Daly has noted, it was precisely this “Americanness”—“her outspokenness, her

expansiveness, her ambition,” her “pioneer” mentality—that so entranced her European fans;Done Into Dance, 8.




the United States, particularly New York City. She toured for four months in1908, with stops in New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Rochester, Buffalo,Chicago, St. Louis, and Washington, DC, first under the management of im-presario Charles Frohman and then with conductor Walter Damrosch and hisNew York Symphony. In 1909, she spent a month performing with Damroschand his orchestra throughout the Midwest—Madison, Milwaukee, St. Louis,Cleveland, and Minneapolis—before closing in New York City.

The European seal of approval—and that of Walter Damrosch—did thetrick. At the start of her 1908 tour, American audiences “yawned and sneeredand mourned for ladies in spangles” more typical of Broadway popular enter-tainments. But to judge from newspaper and magazine reports, critics and audiences quickly grew smitten.12 By October, she “secured an ovation fromthis very audience who, with tears in their eyes, would not leave the theatrewithout encore after encore”; at performances in Chicago in November, fansreportedly “roared” for encores, craning to see her movement and gasping “in delight.”13 Her two-month tour with Damrosch and the New York Sym -phony in 1911 returned to Northeast cities, Chicago, and St. Louis, and dur-ing the 1914–15 season, she arrived with her Duncan Dancers for nearly ninemonths of performances in New York venues including the MetropolitanOpera House, Carnegie Hall, and the Century Theater. She appeared at theMet for three concerts in November of 1916, and again for biweekly perfor-mances in the fall of 1917 under the baton of Oscar Spirescu, before travelingto California to perform with pianist Harold Bauer in San Francisco and afifty-piece orchestra conducted by Spirescu in Los Angeles. Her final U.S. tourin 1922 was perhaps her most extensive: over four months, Duncan per-formed throughout the northeast as well as in Chicago, Milwaukee, KansasCity, St. Louis, Memphis, Detroit, Cleveland, Toledo, and Baltimore; conduc-tors Max Rabinowitch, Nahan Franko, Modest Altschuler, and Gustav Strubeled the accompanying orchestras. Though Duncan’s American concerts wereattended by a mix of men and women of various classes, and included many

12. My account of Duncan’s American activities is based on a thorough survey of the exten-sive materials available in the Irma Duncan Collection of Isadora Duncan Materials and theIsadora Duncan clippings file, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library of thePerforming Arts, as well as a survey of reviews published in the New York Times, the New YorkTribune, the Washington Herald, the Washington Times, the Boston Evening Transcript, and theEvening Public Ledger (Philadelphia).

13. Roberts, “Dance of the Future,” 56; Duncan, My Life, 211–12; “Girl’s Art Dance Airy asHer Garb,” Chicago Tribune, 1 December 1908; Irma Duncan Collection of Isadora DuncanMaterials. The exception to this was her final visit, which came in the years following the First RedScare. Before she was allowed to enter the country, Duncan was questioned at Ellis Island abouther politics, her marriage to Soviet poet Sergei Esenin, her decision to live in the Soviet Union,and her red costumes and hair. Several cities on the tour threatened to cancel performances, citingher Bolshevism and political sedition, and Duncan’s tour was ended prematurely. After she left inFebruary of 1923, her citizenship was questioned and then revoked. Kurth, Sensational Life,456–72.




radicals, artists, and intellectuals, Duncan remained most popular with middleand upper class women.14 Not only did they comprise the majority of her au-diences, the extensive American press coverage of Duncan was frequentlyaimed at women: in addition to previews and reviews of her performances,tales of Duncan’s romantic exploits, essays regarding her views on marriage,and reports on her dancing schools were regularly featured both in women’smagazines and on explicitly named women’s pages in daily newspapers.15

Even those women unable to see Duncan in concert due to geographic andeconomic constraints had access to her life, looks, and ideas.

Duncan’s dances were unlike those familiar to most turn-of-the-centuryAmerican audiences: she performed neither the marvelous feats of balance,agility, and delicacy made famous by Russian ballet dancers Anna Pavlova andMikhail Mordkin, nor the seductive shimmies and kicks familiar from vaude-ville and burlesque stages. Indeed, as one reporter noted, “You do not recall asingle ‘step’ of all the dancing,” as Duncan “has no practiced ‘stunt’ to re-member and repeat.”16 Instead, Duncan danced alone onstage in upscale theaters and opera houses, accompanied by the music of such composers asBeethoven, Gluck, and Wagner. Though no film recordings of Duncan’sdance survive, footage and recollections of Duncan’s protégés and their stu-dents, as well as illustrations and descriptions by contemporary artists and crit-ics offer a compelling picture. In place of a traditional ballet costume or risquéoutfits of contemporary popular dance, Duncan performed loosely wrappedin a flowing tunic secured by an elastic band that crisscrossed between herbreasts and wound around her waist and hips; in place of the codified move-ment vocabulary of ballet or the wild gyrations of the popular stage, Duncanperformed series of “natural” and simple movements, her body moving as asingle, integrated whole (see Fig. 1). Movement radiated effortlessly from hertorso—specifically, her solar plexus—outward through each of her limbs inwaves. Her lower body was solidly grounded, anchored through her flat barefeet to the stage; her upper body seemed suspended, chest and face frequentlyupturned toward the heavens. With her rib cage lifted and pressed forward,head often thrown back as if trailing behind, she led with her torso, “all herfrontal surfaces—throat, chest, midriff, abdomen, thigh—rushing forward atonce, accentuated by the contrasting effect of her thrown back head.”17 (See

14. Daly, Done Into Dance, 18.15. For example, the New York Tribune featured a “Woman’s Varied Interests” page; it in-

cluded articles on Duncan’s schools and other activities. See “Fifty Perfect Human Beings to BeIsadora Duncan’s Legacy to the World,” New York Tribune, 27 November 1914, 5; “MissDuncan Might Teach Educators,” New York Tribune, 29 March 1915, 7. For an example of dis-cussion of Duncan’s romances, see “Newest Romantic Outbreak of the Romantic Singers,”Washington Times [Final Edition], 14 September 1919.

16. Roberts, “Dance of the Future,” 53–54.17. Daly, Done Into Dance, 42. Daly’s description, quoted here, is based on the drawings of

José Clará, held by the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for thePerforming Arts.




Figure 1 Isadora Duncan in a Grecian costume, photographed by Elvira in Munich, ca. 1904.Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor,Lenox and Tilden Foundations.


http://www.jstor.org/action/showImage?doi=10.1525/jams.2012.65.2.511&iName=master.img-000.jpg&w=310&h=485



Fig. 2.) Her back flexible, arms often raised overhead or extended out to theside, each step and each movement of her limbs melted into the next in a fluid,seemingly inseparable string of gestures; this impression was only heightenedby the drape and flow of her tunic’s supple fabric. As critic H. T. Parker wroteafter seeing a performance, “She moves in long and sensuous lines across thewhole breadth, or the whole depth of the stage. Or she circles it in curves ofno less jointless beauty. As she moves, her body is steadily and delicately undu-lating. One motion flows or ripples or sweeps into another. . . . No deliberatecrescendo and climax ordered her movements, rather they come and go inendless flow as if each were creating the next. . . . The joy and the dance are asinnocent, as free from self-consciousness as though there were no one tosee.”18 As improvisatory and free as these gestures were, though, they seemeddriven and inspired by a sense of bodily energy and support. Movements andgestures extended outward from her supported, energized center to the tips of her limbs, “gradually following a rising curve of inspiration.”19 Upon seeinga dancer trained by Duncan, critic Edwin Denby mused, “The support seems . . . always active, always a little stronger than the gesture in energy and justahead of it in time,” driving the movement like a sort of motor.20 Indeed,Duncan herself used the metaphor of a motor to describe her dance, likeningher impulses to a “motor in my soul.”21

If Duncan’s movements seemed to originate in her solar plexus, their inspi-ration originated in her musical accompaniment. Musical structure and dancestructure were often one and the same: the musical rhythms and phrases wereclearly visible in the rhythms of her steps and gestures, and in the larger formaldesign of much of her choreography. Duncan’s legs typically marked thepulse, her upper body expressed general melodic shapes and dynamic levels,and changes in direction or height corresponded with musical phrases. Severalviewers noted how Duncan’s gestures seemed to spring into life as “the in-stinctive translation of the rhythm and . . . mood of the music.”22 Further,

18. Parker, “Dancer Whose Art Is All Her Own,” Boston Evening Transcript, 28 November1908; repr. in Parker, Motion Arrested, 59–60, at 59.

19. Loewenthal, Search for Isadora, 9.20. Denby, “With the Dancers,” Modern Music, 22 (March–April 1942): 198–99; repr. in

Denby, Looking at the Dance, 338.21. Duncan, My Life, 180. A variety of scholars have also used the term in their descriptions.

Lillian Loewenthal, a third-generation Duncan dancer, writes, “Working much like a motordoes—in a progressive development—a single movement from an initial impetus gradually fol-lows a rising curve of inspiration, up to those gestures that exteriorize the fullness of feeling,spreading even under the impulse that has swayed [the dancer].” Loewenthal was taught by JuliaLevien, who was taught by Duncan’s student Anna; Loewenthal, Search for Isadora, 4–5.

22. Parker, “Dancer Whose Art Is All Her Own,” in Motion Arrested, 59. For additional reviews that discuss the close relationship between choreography and music in Duncan’s pieces,see, for example, Gertrude Norman, “Isadora Duncan and Her Greek Barefoot Dances,” TheatreMagazine (February 1905), Isadora Duncan clippings file; “Miss Duncan Scores in NewDances,” New York Times, 29 August 1908, 9; J. R. Hildebrand, “Miss Duncan Seen in a NewProgram,” Washington Times, 8 March 1911, 9.




Figure 2 Isadora Duncan, photographed by Arnold Genthe between 1915 and 1918. JeromeRobbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox, andTilden Foundations.




Duncan’s dances tended to reflect not only what was considered the emo-tional character of a piece, but the density of musical events as well. Yet thechoreomusical interactions that Duncan created can hardly be reduced tomickey-mousing. Duncan’s student Marie-Theresa notes that Duncan

was never concerned with the exact beat, but made her movements follow thebroader line of rhythm with an unerring sense of musical flow, breathlesslyholding back at times, enhancing the accent by a sharp turn or with vigorousmovements of her legs, accentuating the principal modulation. In the more ex-pressive slow largos and adagios of dramatic intensity, she followed the transi-tions of the musical themes with an uncanny suspense of motion, relying on theinner part of the composition.23

Such descriptions suggest that Duncan’s dances did not “follow” the musicalaccompaniment, but rather, staged a dialogue of sorts between music andmovement.

Perhaps most remarkable, though, was the abstract, nonrepresentationalquality of Duncan’s performances.24 As one viewer noted, “It is not dancing,tho’ dancing is of it. It is vital motion, expressing emotion . . . it has structureand design, but so closely allied to its beauty and grace that it can only be per-ceived, not seen.”25 Alone on the stage, Duncan managed to create a sense ofperformative interaction through her use of bodily opposition and resistance:muscles would tense and release, arms would stretch one way as her torsotwisted the other, or her chest would sink to the floor, one knee rising to meetit, as her straight arms, behind her, levitated upward. Her dances were full ofreadily recognizable, meaningful gestures, and yet they did not seem pan-tomimic: carefully integrated into her flowing movements, these gestures wereless overt semiotic markers than windows into larger meanings in motion.Indeed, Duncan onstage was not a single dancer. Fascinated—like manyRomantic and Victorian artists—with the culture and aesthetics of ancientGreece, particularly Greek tragedy, Duncan aspired to dance the role of the“chorus,” an impersonal, abstract “vehicle of emotion.”26 Distancing herselffrom narratives and even a single identity, Duncan also aspired to the sort of

23. Marie-Theresa Duncan, “Isadora, the Artist, Daughter of Prometheus,” in Walkowitz,Isadora Duncan in Her Dances, 5. Marie-Theresa Duncan is no blood relation to IsadoraDuncan; she and five of Duncan’s other students were legally adopted by Duncan and used herlast name professionally.

24. A number of Duncan’s contemporaries were likewise interested in non-narrative, abstractmovement, including Loïe Fuller, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn; similar practices developed byEmile-Jacques Dalcroze and François Delsarte were also popular and influential at the time. Formore on these trends, see Kendall, Where She Danced; and Ruyter, Reformers and Visionaries. Foradditional information on Loïe Fuller and Maud Allan respectively, see Albright, Traces of Light;and Shelton, Divine Dancer.

25. Bolton Hall, “Isadora Duncan and Liberty,” quoted in Dionysian, performance pam-phlet, 1914; Isadora Duncan clippings file.

26. Daly, Done Into Dance, 148.




autonomy that by the turn of the twentieth century was so highly regarded inmusic.27 As Parker wrote in 1908, Duncan’s dancing had “no purpose but toachieve its own beauty and to make responsive emotion to itself. Everywhereit cultivates fineness, in its rhythm, its harmonies, its shading and suggestions.Everywhere it cultivates a chastity of motion and expression that gives it a spir-itual quality, a disembodied and poetic sensuousness.”28

(Re)Writing Wagner

In March of 1903, Isadora Duncan offered a series of programs at Berlin’sKroll Opera House. Critics struggled to understand what they had seen and toaccount for the enthusiastic crowds of young artists who attended night afternight. Hoping for clarification, the Berlin Presseverein requested that Duncangive a short speech explaining her dance. Duncan happily complied, present-ing “Der Tanz der Zukunft” (“The Dance of the Future”) to the press corpsjust days later. In a speech that probably lasted just under thirty minutes, shetold reporters that she strove to unite body and soul in her dance, allowingthem to grow “so harmoniously together that the natural language of thatsoul will have become the movement of the body.”29

Despite its origins, “The Dance of the Future” is less an explanation ofDuncan’s Berlin performances than an account of the artistic values and visionof dance that she went on to spend much of her career perfecting. Recordedin a blue copybook, “The Dance of the Future” is Duncan’s earliest and per-haps most complete manifesto; it is a record of both her conception of dance,and—more important to the context of this article—her ways of presentingherself to her audiences. Further, this brief document reveals the extent towhich Duncan’s own aesthetics, ideals, and modes of self-presentation were

27. For a discussion of the evolution of the concept of absolute music, as well as Wagner’s re-lationship with the term, see Dahlhaus, Idea of Absolute Music, 18–41.

28. Parker, “Dancer Whose Art Is All Her Own,” in Motion Arrested, 61.29. Duncan, “The Dance of the Future,” in Art of the Dance, 62. The essay was originally

published as a German pamphlet, Der Tanz der Zukunft (Leipzig: Eugen Diederichs, 1903).“The Dance of the Future” marks one of the earliest tangible connections between the art, the-ory, and careers of Isadora Duncan and Richard Wagner. There is no record of when she becamefamiliar with Wagner’s writings and music dramas. In 1900, while Duncan performed atLondon’s New Gallery, Fuller-Maitland suggested that she elevate her musical selections, and en-couraged her to use Chopin; she met early-music specialist Arnold Dolmetsch at the same time,and he may have been responsible for her experiments with the dance music of Lully, Monteverdi,Couperin, and Rameau. It is possible that Duncan first encountered Wagner’s writings and musicdramas during her German and Austrian tour in 1902 and 1903. See Kurth, Sensational Life,60–65. Though there is no mention of Wagner in her autobiography or any secondary sources,Macdougall (Isadora, 72) notes that while in Munich, Duncan became acquainted with a numberof writers, philosophers, and artists, through whom she was introduced to Nietzsche’s ideas, aswell as those of Schopenhauer and Kant.




influenced by Wagner. Here, Duncan invokes the words and theories ofWagner’s 1850 manifesto, Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (“The Art-work of theFuture”); it was while writing this speech, Duncan notes in her autobiography,that she truly realized the power of intellectual discourse as a corollary to herart, a relationship that was fundamental to Wagner’s own career.30 Perhapsmost importantly, Duncan employs the cultural capital, authority, and status ofWagner and other male cultural giants such as Charles Darwin and ErnstHaeckel to validate her own cultural relevance. Yet these giants simultaneouslyserved as the springboard from which Duncan launched herself: carefully re-casting their words in her own mold, Duncan effectively shaped her owndanced aesthetic and persona for her audiences.

By the time that tales of Duncan’s “Dance of the Future” began appearingin the United States courtesy of foreign wires and reporters abroad, Wagner’sartistic theories, especially those described in “The Art-work of the Future”and Opera and Drama, were quite familiar to many Americans. Indeed, asJohn Dizikes and Anke Finger have made clear, Richard Wagner’s goals andideals were introduced to Americans long before his music dramas were regu-lar fare on American opera stages.31 Excerpts of his writings were publishedfirst in a collection entitled Art, Life and Theories of Richard Wagner in 1875,and then again in a series of articles in the North American Review four yearslater; in 1893, finally, Henry T. Finck published a two-volume biographicaltome about the composer.32 Critics, sharply divided in their opinions ofWagner’s ideologies, regularly discussed and debated his theories. HenryKrehbiel and Gustav Kobbe championed Wagner and his music, outlining histheories for readers unfamiliar with them and working to debunk commonlyheld misconceptions.33 Other critics, including John Sullivan Dwight, JamesGibbons Huneker, and John Knowles Paine, were less charitable, openly criti-cizing the direction and quality of Wagner’s musical “innovations” and cri-

30. Daly, Done Into Dance, 29.31. Dizikes, Opera in America, 236; Finger, “The Poetics of Cultural Unity,” 131. Arrange -

ments of and excerpts from Wagner’s works were performed as early as 1852 in American concerthalls and bandstands. Complete staged productions of most works were not performed until thefinal years of the 1870s, and it was not until the mid-1880s (and the introduction of German sea-sons at the Metropolitan Opera House) that the music dramas were regularly performed.

32. Richard Wagner, “The Work and Mission of My Life”; part 1 of the series appeared inAugust and part 2 appeared in September. Harold Briggs has argued that though Wagner is listedas the author of these works, they were probably written, or at least overseen, by music scholarHans von Wolzogen. The excerpts are book-ended by passages tailored specifically to Americanaudiences. See Briggs, “Richard Wagner and American Music-Literary Activity,” 277. The 1893work by Finck is titled Wagner and His Works.

33. Krehbiel, for example, wrote an article entitled “How to Listen to Wagner’s Music: ASuggestion,” which uses musical examples to illustrate Wagner’s theories, advises readers thatWagner used the phrase “artwork of the future” rather than “music of the future,” and suggeststhat the phrase “leading motive” is less accurate than “leitmotive.” For a detailed overview of theappearances of such articles on Wagner in these and other periodicals in the second half of thenineteenth century, see Briggs, “Richard Wagner and American Music-Literary Activity.”




tiquing the “contradictions” and errors of his writings.34 Yet supporters and de-tractors alike agreed that Wagner’s theories were worthy of attention and press;readers of journals as diverse as The Musical Courier, Harper’s, and CenturyIllustrated were treated to articles emphasizing the originality and profundityof Wagner’s ideals.35

Much of the debate that surrounded Wagner’s writings in the UnitedStates was likely the result of the complicated, ever-shifting nature of his the-ory of the unified total art-work. Wagner’s concept itself was not unprece-dented. Rather, the Gesamtkunstwerk effectively condensed a variety of artistictrends articulated by German artists and thinkers including Ludwig Tieck,E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: eighteenth-century ideasabout the limits of art, the Romantic myth of artistic unity and search for co-herence between music and poetry, and the quest for an independent Germanculture and national identity rooted in language.36 Yet Wagner’s Gesamtkunst -werk was hardly a precise, readily realizable concept; rather, it was a vague, ill-defined goal that, over the course of his career, writings, and works, wasconstantly in flux. The Gesamtkunstwerk of “The Art-work of the Future”was, on one hand, an aesthetic vision: a work of art that synthesizes individualgenres into a unified, total effect. At the same time, it was a political, social vi-sion of art that expressed the thoughts, feelings, and goals of the Volk, a cul-tural philosophy of social reunification that offered few hints as to its practical,artistic application.

Such guidelines, particularly in relation to the synthesis and equal collabo-ration between music and poetry, emerge in Wagner’s next piece of writing,Oper und Drama (1851), yet by 1854, after encountering Schopenhauer’stheories, Wagner again retraced his route to the Gesamtkunstwerk, calling notfor the integration of music and poetry, but for a music and poetry that existedin parallel, music “commenting” on the drama without necessarily beingstrictly tied to language, and a poetry that itself was a musical form. With eachsuccessive composition and treatise, the emergence of music’s meaning be-came less and less dependent on its linkage with words. The union betweenpoetry and music thus slowly evolved into poetry’s subordination to music,and the Gesamtkunstwerk itself became less a coherent strategy than an ab-stract goal that might be reached by a variety of routes.

In “The Art-work of the Future,” however, Wagner’s notion of theGesamtkunstwerk was still at its most abstract and utopian. Since the fall ofGreek drama, he argues, each of the arts (dance, music, and poetry) has devel-oped separately, practitioners of each vainly attempting to erase the genre’s individual deficiencies and sterility in order to generate an illusion of synthesis

34. See, for example, Paine, “New German School of Music,” 218; and Dwight, “RichardWagner and His Theory of Music,” 254. Both are discussed at length in Briggs, “Richard Wagnerand American Music-Literary Activity.”

35. Dizikes, Opera in America, 236.36. Daverio, “ ‘The Total Work of Art’ ”; see also Aberbach, Ideas of Richard Wagner.




and wholeness. Separated from her sister arts, Wagner rails, dance “must [. . .]take refuge from prostitution in absurdity, from absurdity in prostitution! Oglorious dance! O shameful dance!”37 Through a series of often “franticallytailored” historical surveys and critiques of each of the “sister arts,” Wagnerlays out a general plan for the aesthetic synthesis of the arts into a dramaticform in which no one genre overwhelmed or prescribed any of the others.38

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, uniting poetry and music, marked an enor-mous step forward: music, redeemed, entered the “realm of universal Art.”39

The final step, Wagner writes, is the “perfect Art-work of the Future . . . theuniversal Drama to which Beethoven has forged for us the key.”40 Yet despitethis unified vision, there is an implicit devaluing of dance throughout the text. Wagner argues that art must appeal to both the eye and the ear to be successful—the “singing and speaking man must necessarily be a bodily man;through his outer form, through the posture of his limbs, the inner, singingand speaking man comes forth to view,” he writes.41 Yet he simultaneously ar-gues that it is the ear—and music—that offers the deepest and most directform of communication, enabling man not only to impart “the feelings of theheart” associated with visual arts, but “the feeling of its fellow.”42

Duncan’s familiarity with, and admiration for, Wagner and his work ismade abundantly clear in “The Dance of the Future.” She, like Wagner, in-vokes ancient Greek drama as an ideal, privileges notions of unity and organi-cism, and even borrows specific words and phrases—those in her title, forexample—directly from his writing. Yet as closely connected as the two docu-ments seem, there are also important, often subtle ways in which they diverge

37. “Sie, ohne deren höchste, eigentümlichste Mitwirkung das höchste, edelste Kunstwerknicht zur Erscheinung gelangen kann, muß—aus dem Vereine ihrer Schwestern geschieden—vonProstitution zur Lächerlichkeit, von Lächerlichkeit zur Prostitution sich flüchten!—O herrlicheTanzkunst! O schmähliche Tanzkunst!” Richard Wagner, Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft, 98; trans.in Wagner, Art-work of the Future, 110.

38. Stein, “The Art-work of the Future,” in Richard Wagner and the Synthesis of the Arts, 62.39. “Die letzte Symphonie Beethovens ist die Erlösung der Musik aus ihrem eigensten

Elemente heraus zur allgemeinsamen Kunst.” Wagner, Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft, 115; trans. inArt-work of the Future, 126.

40. “[. . .] das vollendete Kunstwerk der Zukunft, das allgemeinsame Drama, folgen, zu demBeethoven uns den künstlerischen Schlüssel geschmiedet hat.” Wagner, Das Kunstwerk derZukunft, 115; trans. in Art-work of the Future, 126.

41. “[. . .] der singende und sprechende Mensch muß nothwendig leiblicher Mensch sein;durch seine äußere Gestalt, durch das Gebaren seiner Glieder gelangt der innere, singende undsprechende Mensch zur Anschauug.” Wagner, Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft, 87; trans. in Art-workof the Future, 100.

42. “Durch den Sinn des Gehöres dringt der Ton aus dem Herzensgefühle wiederum zumHerzensgefühle.” Wagner, Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft, 79; trans. in Wagner, Art-work of theFuture, 91. Mary Ann Smart has discussed Wagner’s treatment of gesture in his writings and mu-sic dramas, closely examining his arguments in his 1851 Opera and Drama, focusing particularlyon the arguments made in Opera and Drama and writings on gesture, particularly his evolvingviews in Opera and Drama. See Mimomania, 163–204.




from one another. First and foremost is the role of dance as an individual art.For Duncan, dance alone is not necessarily “shameful” or isolated, nor does itrequire drama to revive it. Rather, her dance of the future is holistic, drawingon nature, religion, science, music, emotion, and experience; it is poetry inmovement. While Wagner calls for the unification of separate arts, noting thateach art “can only bare its utmost secret . . . through a mutual parleying withthe other arts,” Duncan argues that all art is based in dance, and that move-ment and dance—not drama—will “develop the highest form of the humanbody.”43 This movement, and all of dance, comes directly from nature, fromthe “movement of waves, of winds, of the earth,” and from our natural ten-dency to move in harmony with nature.44

Central to Duncan’s self-construction was the Hellenist aesthetic thatgripped turn-of-the-century artistic culture—or at least the imagined Greecedescribed by art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann and poets includingJohn Keats and Lord Byron a century earlier. Duncan argued that the Greeks,“in all their painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, dance, and tragedyevolved their movements from the movement of nature . . . that is why the artof the Greeks . . . has been and will be the art of all humanity for all time.”45

Yet throughout the course of history, she argued, we as people, as dancers,have been increasingly restricted, and our movements and dances—especiallyballet, her favorite straw man—are an expression of those restrictions. As wereach the end of civilization, Duncan writes, articulating a vision of history as asort of outwards spiral, we will again return to nature, to a literal and figurative“nakedness.”46 “From what I have said,” Duncan cautions her audience, “youmight conclude that my intention is to return to the dances of the old Greeks,or that I think that the dance of the future will be a revival of the antiquedances or even of those of the primitive tribes.” But this was not so. ForDuncan, the dances of the Greeks were less a goal than a tactical strategy thatallowed her to position her dance as a natural, unified form of high art, farfrom modern popular dance and its unruly bodies. To return to the dances of

43. In Wagner’s mind, it is drama that is the highest form of art, and “each separate branch of art can only be fully attained by the reciprocal agreement and co-operation of all the branchesin their common message.” “Jede einzelne Kunstart vermag der gemeinsamen Öffentlichkeitzum vollen Verständnisse, nur durch gemeinsame Mitteilung mit den übrigen Kunstarten imDrama sich zu erschließen, denn die Absicht jeder einzelnen Kunstart wird nur im gegenseitigsich verständigenden und verständnisgebenden Zusammenwirken aller Kunstarten vollständig er-reicht.” Wagner, Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft, 178; trans. in Art-work of the Future, 184. IsadoraDuncan, “Dance of the Future,” 58–59.

44. Duncan, “Dance of the Future,” 54. For an extensive discussion of the role of nature inboth Duncan’s conception of dance and contemporary American thought, see Daly, Done IntoDance, 88–117.

45. Duncan, “Dance of the Future,” 58. For more on turn-of-the-century Hellenism in theUnited States, and particularly women’s fascination with ancient Greece, see Fiske, HereticalHellenism; and Winterer, Mirror of Antiquity and Culture of Classicism.

46. Duncan, “Dance of the Future,” 55.




the Greeks was not a regression, but an evolution: it marked a reclamation ofthe body as a “harmonious expression of [Man’s] spiritual being.” Further,Hellenism offered a route by which to return—and paradoxically, to evolve towards—the “simple life” so avidly sought by many late nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century scholars and citizens.47 Thus, Duncan’s Hellenism connectspast (ancient Greece) with present (modern America).

The trope of evolution functions on a second level as well. In the dance ofthe future, movement itself evolves. Ballet is a series of “sterile,” isolated posesperformed in succession, Duncan argues, cleverly borrowing from Wagner’svocabulary to align the ballet with Wagner’s impotent individual arts, and, byextension, to reenvision dance as a natural, fulfilling, life-affirming endeavoron a par with Wagner’s total artwork.48 Duncan’s desired movement vocabu-lary consisted of a series of gestures, each of which developed out of thatwhich preceded it, and generated that which followed, “each in turn to givebirth to others in an unending sequence of still higher and greater expressionof thoughts and ideas.”49 Thus, not only would each movement derive fromthat which preceded it, but each would, in turn, improve upon—evolve fur-ther than—the last. With each gesture, the dancer of the future promised tobecome more artistic, more meaningful—an increasingly skillful dancer, ahigher spiritual being.

Duncan’s references to birth are clearly intended to perform and reinforcean alliance of nature and dance. Yet they also reflect an ideology of organicismthat is reminiscent both of Wagner’s own values and of nineteenth-centurymusical values more broadly.50 In her rhetoric and her dance, Duncan investsin the same sort of autonomous, internally unified work valued by music crit-ics and composers since the emergence of the work concept and ascent of ab-solute music at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Indeed, much ascritic E. T. A. Hoffmann’s reviews of Beethoven’s symphonies connect thesublime with motivic unity, so too does Duncan turn towards organicism as autopian ideal.51 Each dance movement—read motive—was to be intimatelyrelated to that which preceded it and that which followed, guided by an over-arching “truth” of the dancer’s physique and nature.52 Within movements,too, Duncan called for coherence: rhythm, form, and design were to corre-spond with and derive from one another, creating an internal unity of intent

47. Ibid., 62.48. Ibid., 56.49. Ibid., 57.50. Solie, “Living Work”; Kerman, “How We Got Into Analysis, and How to Get Out.”51. Hoffmann, “Review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.” For more on nineteenth-century

aesthetics and their role in the music criticism of Hoffmann and his contemporaries, see Bonds,“Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Music.”

52. Duncan was careful to note that, as movement should correspond to and derive from thebody that was moving, each dancer’s movements should be individual and unique. Duncan,“Dance of the Future,” 58.




and meaning similar to that intended in Wagner’s music dramas. Yet asDuncan went on to note, each dancer’s movements should be drawn from the earth’s movements, which were a microcosm of the movement of the universe; the “dance should simply be, then,” Duncan wrote, “the naturalgravitation of an individual which in the end is no more nor less than a humantranslation of the gravitation of the universe.”53 Not only is each movementconnected to those that surround it, but each dance is a manifestation of a single, universal movement system.

Duncan’s repeated invocation of birth also introduces a link between femi-ninity and dance, implicitly figuring Duncan’s dancer of the future as female.But who is this elusive dancer? It is easy to assume that Duncan is speaking ofherself; after all, her speech was a response to and explanation of her recentperformances. Yet Duncan’s dance of the future, she reiterates throughout hermanifesto, is a philosophy rather than a technique. This dance is not a systemof movement, but rather, a means of thinking about movement: each dancer’sgestures, as a result, are unique, inspired by her own responses to her body,her musical accompaniment, and the world around her. The dancer of the fu-ture is not a single person but an endless lineage of dancers. Just as Duncancalls for evolution of movement, then, she simultaneously calls for the evolu-tion of dancers. “My intention is,” she notes, “to found a school, to build atheatre where a hundred little girls shall be trained in my art, which they, intheir turn, will make better. I shall not force them to study certain definitemovements; I shall help them to develop those movements which are naturalto them.”54 Throughout her essay, Duncan is almost coquettishly demureabout her creativity, her genius; as she notes about halfway through the text,“I intend to work for this dance of the future. I do not know whether I havethe necessary qualities: I may have neither genius nor talent nor tempera-ment.”55 What she does know, however, is that she possesses the will and en-ergy necessary to take the first steps toward the dance of the future: she canprovide a nurturing and supportive environment to children, and allow the dance of the future to evolve naturally through these children. With yetanother invocation of evolution, Duncan trades the role of creative genius forthe role of visionary: Duncan cannot possibly be the dancer of the future or

53. Ibid., 55.54. Ibid., 61. Duncan did found several schools. The first was established in Grunewald,

Germany, in December of 1904 and closed in the Spring of 1908; though it was called theIsadora Duncan School of Dance, it was conceived as a family endeavor, and Duncan’s sisterElizabeth served as the director. The second was opened in Bellevue, France, in June 1914, butwith the outbreak of World War I, Duncan turned the building over to Les dames de France touse as an army hospital, and moved her students to New York. Finally, in 1921, she opened astate-sponsored school in Moscow. A thorough history of Duncan’s schools is offered in Kurth,Sensational Life, 151–73, 311–24, 420–26; the first two schools are also discussed, and the found-ing of the third mentioned in Duncan, My Life, 185–211, 315–32, 374.





perform the dance of the future, for she exists in the present. She can onlyplant the seeds, giving “birth” to dancers of the future, to movements that willmove forward into new movements. She can only be a “mother,” teaching herdancers to develop their own movement systems and to pass this practice forward to the dancers of the future. Just as each gesture should organicallydevelop into that which follows, so too should each generation of dancers simultaneously refine and hone Duncan’s vision of the dance, allowing it toevolve with each successive movement in each successive body.

Duncan’s invocations of unity and organicism simultaneously highlight theWagnerian aspects of her philosophy and align her with still-potent Romanticartistic values. Her repeated references to evolution, on the other hand, add toher essay an aura of scientific currency. By the 1870s, various philosophies ofbiological evolution were prominent in American culture. Darwin’s texts Onthe Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) were both readilyavailable to middle- and upper-class American men and women; evolutionaryideas were also popularized through the writings of scholars such as JohnFiske, who articulated and explained the theories of Darwin, Huxley, andHaeckel in his 1874 Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy.56 Debates raged regardingthe relationship between evolutionary mechanisms and religious beliefs, theheritability of acquired characteristics, and whether variations were the prod-uct of natural selection, external factors, or “intelligent choice.”57 Discussionsof social evolution were equally prominent. In The Principles of Biology (1864),British intellectual Herbert Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,”arguing that evolution generated not only biological selection, but racial andsocial selection as well.58 On the heels of the enfranchisement of black menand amidst an influx of immigrants, such theories were frequently employedto reassure white Americans, particularly white men—seemingly the “fittest”and most civilized—that their elite status was secure. They were also used assupport for a laissez-faire capitalism and social development. As WilliamGraham Sumner and others argued, charity and social state programs chal-lenged nature’s “law,” hindering the mechanisms of natural selection; more-over, it was assimilation and the embrace of “civilized” values that would leadto uplift, not charitable “gifts.”59 Given the utter pervasiveness of Darwinismand evolution at the turn of the century, as well as contemporary Americanfascination with science and progress more generally, Duncan’s own refer-

56. Darwin, On the Origin of Species ; idem, Descent of Man; Fiske, Outlines of CosmicPhilosophy. For more on Fiske’s influence in the United States, see Hawkins, Social Darwinism inEuropean and American Thought, 106–9.

57. Hawkins, Social Darwinism, 199. For discussions of Darwinism and evolutionarythought in American culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see also Numbers,Darwinism Comes to America, 24–75; Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought; andBoller, American Thought in Transition.

58. Spencer, Principles of Biology.59. Newman, White Women’s Rights, 52–55; see also Hawkins, Social Darwinism, 109–18.




ences to evolution doubtlessly helped to cast (and validate) her dance as culturally relevant—a particular coup given the presence of dated nineteenth-century aesthetics in her manifesto.

Yet evolution is not simply a source of cultural cache in Duncan’s text.Duncan was an ardent supporter of prominent German evolutionary biologistand philosopher Ernst Haeckel: she read his books Natural History ofCreation and The Riddle of the Universe at the British Museum in 1900, thenbegan corresponding with him and eventually hosted him at Bayreuth in the summer of 1904.60 Though a proponent of Darwinism, Haeckel, likeSpencer, suggested that natural selection was not random, but a progressiontowards perfection; this construction is echoed both in Duncan’s conceptionof the development of dance styles through modern history and in her viewthat each generation of dancers advanced beyond the accomplishments oftheir foremothers.61 Further, while Duncan’s multiple invocations of evolu-tion may seem overly exuberant (not to mention overstated) at first glance, itis simultaneously reminiscent of Haeckel’s principle of recapitulation. Just asDuncan writes of parallel evolution of movements, dancers, and dances,Haeckel was well known for his claim that the “organic individual . . . repeatsduring the quick and short course of its individual development the most im-portant of those changes in form that its ancestors had gone through duringthe slow and long course of their paleontological development according tothe laws of inheritance and adaptation.”62 Finally, Duncan’s discussion ofdance as a spiritual act and “Nature” as a religion of sorts follows neatly from

60. Duncan reports reading Haeckel’s work in her autobiography, a claim that is validated in an essay by the director of the Ernst Haeckel Archive; see Duncan, My Life, 165; Schmidt, “TheRiddle of the Universe and the Dancer: Isadora Duncan and Ernst Haeckel.” Duncan’s letters toHaeckel are preserved in the Ernst Haeckel Archive at the University of Jena.

61. Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, 2:263. In Duncan’s later writings, amore Darwinian sense of natural selection emerges, as do echoes of the racism implicit (and ex-plicit) in the writings of many social evolutionists. In an essay entitled “I See American Dancing,”for example, Duncan argues that American dances and compositions based on jazz rhythms andrhythms that come from the waist down—expressions of the “South African savage”—will be sur-passed by music that allows for movement from the solar plexus. She writes, “No composer hasyet caught the rhythm of America—it is too mighty for the ears of most. . . . [T]he [evolvedAmerican] dance will have nothing in it of the . . . sensual convulsion of the South African negro.It will be clean.” In an increasingly racist and nationalist critique, Duncan goes on to note thatAmerican bodies have themselves evolved past this sort of dance and music, as well as that of the “ballet school”: the legs of American dancers are too long, “the body too supple and the spirit too free” for either (African) jazz or (European) ballet. Isadora Duncan, “I See AmericanDancing,” New York Herald Tribune, 2 October 1927, Isadora Duncan clippings. This essay wasreprinted with slight alterations in Art of the Dance, 49; an early version of this essay, with a pas-sage that resembles that above, is also included in Duncan, My Life, 358–59.

62. “Das organische Individuum . . . wiederholt während des raschen und kurzen Laufes sei-ner individuellen Entwickelung die wichtigsten von denjenigen Formveränderungen, welcheseine Voreltern während des langsamen und langen Laufes ihrer paläontologischen Entwickelungnach den Gesetzen der Vererbung und Anpassung durchlaufen haben.” Haeckel, GenerelleMorphologie, 300.




Haeckel’s own theology of “Monism,” which “recognizes one sole substancein the universe, which is at once ‘God and nature’; body and spirit (or matterand energy) it holds to be inseparable.”63

Duncan’s evolutionary trope(s) also function to displace creative responsi-bility for the dance of the future from Duncan to her students and those whofollow her. While Wagner positions his “universal drama” as a potential succes-sor to Beethoven’s “universal Art,” Duncan situates herself not as the ultimatefigure in a lineage of creative genius but rather, like many modernists, as theoriginator of an artistic evolution.64 It is the art—as opposed to the artist—that holds promise for the future: Duncan’s legacy will not be her own move-ment, her own dance, but the movements of those dancers who adopt herstyle. This self-positioning serves to reorient audience and critic expectations,as well as Duncan’s own artistic responsibility: Duncan’s performances are not a finished product but a first step. She is the figurative mother of a newbreed of dancer: her dance will develop and evolve with each student, andeach of their students, growing closer to perfection in each of the bodies thatexplores and experiments with it. This reorientation is shrewd, and at the sametime reflects an inherent difference in Wagner and Duncan’s arts: early mod-ern dance relied on oral transmission and performance in ways that Wagner’smusic dramas did not. Duncan’s legacy—like that of most choreographers anddancers—was dependent on students and followers, necessitating her locationat the beginning of a tradition rather than at its apex.

“Oh what a field is here awaiting her!” Duncan calls out, as she nears theend of the speech, any air of intellectual posturing dissolving into a series ofemotionally charged exclamations, much as occurs in Wagner’s own mani-festo. “Do you not feel that she is near, that she is coming, this dancer of thefuture! Perhaps she is yet unborn, perhaps she is now a little child,” Duncancontinues, firmly separating herself for the last time from this mythical dancerof the future and the genius she will embody—and firmly separating herrhetoric from that of Wagner’s “The Art-work of the Future.” She goes on:“Perhaps, oh blissful! It may be my holy mission to guide her first steps, towatch the progress of her movements day by day until, far outgrowing mypoor teaching, her movements will become godlike, mirroring in themselvesthe waves, the movements of growing things, the flight of birds, the passing ofclouds, and finally the thought of man in his relation to the universe.”65

Suddenly, rhapsodic as this passage is, Duncan’s themes converge: the danceof the future is aligned with nature and nature’s own evolution, the dance ofthe future is a holy prayer, a religion. And, drawing together the references to

63. “Der Monismus hingegen (ebenfalls im weitesten Sinne begriffen!) erkennt imUniversum nur eine einzige Substanz, die ‘Gott und Natur’ zugleich ist; Körper und Geist (oderMaterie und Energie) sind für sie untrennbar verbunden.” Haeckel, Die Welträtsel, 13; trans. inHaeckel, Riddle of the Universe, 20.

64. Wagner, Art-work of the Future, 126.65. Duncan, “Dance of the Future,” 63.




birth and motherhood that thread through the essay, the dance of the future isthe realm of “she,” of women.

The dancer of the future, then, will not only lead the overcivilized manback to nature and nakedness, but promises to lead women specifically to newunderstandings and appreciations of the “strength and beauty” of their bodies. “She will help womankind,” Duncan writes, “to a new knowledge ofthe . . . relation of their bodies to the earth nature and to the children of thefuture.”66 Women, Duncan specifies, are the dancers of the future; “the dancewas once the most noble of all arts,” and through the work of female dancers,it “shall [again] attain so great a height that all other arts shall be helpedthereby.”67 Yet simultaneously, it is through Duncan’s dance of the future that women will gain the necessary tools to lead humankind into the future:“She will dance the body emerging again from centuries of civilized forgetful-ness, emerging not in the nudity of primitive man, but in new nakedness, nolonger at war with spirituality and intelligence but joining them in a gloriousharmony.”68

As “The Dance of the Future” draws to a close, then, the concept of evolu-tion reappears. In her final paragraphs, Duncan ceases to write about thedance of the future and the female dancers who will create it, and beginstelling the story of the emancipated women of the future formed by thisdance. The dance of the future is not merely an aesthetic, but a process andtool through which women will revalue and transform first themselves, thentheir children and all those around them: through this dance, women willlearn to dance “the form of woman in her greatest and purest expression.”69

Here, dance is aligned with the evolutionist-tinged rhetoric embraced by turn-of-the-century white women’s suffrage organizations.70 As a result of“Christian love” and protection from the crass public sphere, such groups frequently argued, middle- and upper-class white women had evolved into refined, morally upright beings uniquely suited to the task of “civilizing”

66. Ibid.67. Ibid., 56.68. Ibid., 63.69. Ibid.70. Certainly, not all white activists embraced such rhetoric; many advocates for women’s

rights supported equal suffrage for black women. However, the public agenda of such groups fre-quently traded on racial and class inequalities, in part to appease southerners and conservative fac-tions. At times, women of color, immigrant women, and even working-class white women wereactively discouraged from participating in the country’s primary suffrage organizations; evenwhen groups welcomed these women, they often still employed rhetoric that situated women of color as morally degraded and pitiable. As scholars including Roslyn Terborg-Penn andElizabeth J. Clapp have demonstrated, many of these excluded women sought out alternativegroups: black women formed their own women’s clubs and temperance groups and campaignedfor suffrage through these organizations, and many working-class and immigrant women lobbiedfor suffrage through labor unions or aid societies. See Terborg-Penn, “Discrimination againstAfro-American Women in the Woman’s Movement”; Clapp, “The Woman Suffrage Movement”;Hewitt, Southern Discomfort; and Newman, White Women’s Rights, 56–85.




immigrants, people of color, and other “primitive beings.” They now—paradoxically enough—required access to the vote, education, and the publicsphere so as to protect their own interests, to model proper exercise of civic re-sponsibility for their children, and to restore moral order through the protec-tion and assimilation of those they deemed “uncivilized.”71 Such rhetoricenabled middle- and upper-class white women to stake claims for political andsocial power without challenging beliefs about sexual difference, women’s du-ties as mothers, or the racial superiority of whites.

Despite the increasing importance of suffrage and political equality to earlytwentieth-century American women, however, Duncan’s calls for emancipa-tion through dance carefully avoid overt reference to these battles. Indeed,Duncan was more closely aligned with the “Mutterschutz” (“mother protec-tion”) agendas of twentieth-century German feminists than with suffrage.72

For them, women’s emancipation was to be found in the reform of social in-stitutions like marriage and motherhood rather than in political institutions.73

Women, Duncan believed, should be free to engage in motherhood inside oroutside of marriage without penalty, and should be equal with men in per-sonal matters, regardless of their status in the public sphere.74 Duncan’sdancer of the future, then, was the woman of the future, the “free spirit whowill inhabit the body of the new woman, more glorious than any woman thathas yet been . . . the highest intelligence in the freest body!”75

Invocations and parallels to Wagner’s Art-work of the Future threadthrough “The Dance of the Future”: the theorizing of the future of art,metaphors of birth and death, references to the Greeks as exemplars, the trac-ing of evolving (and devolving) histories of art forms, and perhaps most im-mediately recognizable, the rhapsodic, expressive, and occasionally bombasticlanguage. Yet the true debt is not one of content and argument: Duncan dis-agrees with and departs from Wagner’s ideals as often as she affirms them.Deftly borrowing Wagner’s claims about the history and promise of the musicdrama, Duncan proposes her vision of dance—a dance of evolution, ofprocess, of female liberation, of a new philosophy of movement—as the epit-ome of all art. Just like Darwin and Haeckel, Wagner appears, in the end, as a

71. Social Darwinist rhetoric was employed by advocates of women’s rights in a wide varietyof ways, which were occasionally inconsistent and often conflicted with one another. For a sum-mary of this rhetoric, see Newman, White Women’s Rights, 23–74; see also Welter, “Cult of TrueWomanhood”; and Russett, Sexual Science. For an extended discussion of women’s rights cam-paigns in the United States, see Evans, Born for Liberty. For discussion of the similar trends in aEuropean context, see Offen, “Feminist Challenges and Antifeminist Responses.” For more onDuncan’s relationship with these ideas, see Daly, Done Into Dance, 156–77.

72. For more on “Mutterschutz” and related feminist thought, see Anthony, Feminism inGermany and Scandinavia; and Allen, Feminism and Motherhood.

73. Daly, Done Into Dance, 165.74. “No Wickedness in Ida Rogers,” New York Evening Sun, 12 January 1915; quoted in

Daly, Done Into Dance, 164. See also Duncan, My Life, 18.75. Duncan, “Dance of the Future,” 63.




ghost: conjured by name and through allusions, Duncan borrows their au-thority in order to articulate her own vision and argument.

Dancing Wagner

Isadora Duncan’s interaction with Wagner’s work was not limited to “TheDance of the Future.” Rather, her most public link to the composer, especiallyin the United States, came through her performances set to various sections ofWagner’s works. Returning to the United States to tour with Walter Dam -rosch and the New York Symphony in 1911—her third trip home fromEurope in over ten years—Duncan performed Wagner extracts including theTannhäuser “Bacchanale,” the “Dance of the Flower Maidens” from Parsifal,the “Prelude” and “Liebestod” from Tristan und Isolde, and the “Dance ofthe Apprentices” from Die Meistersinger alongside familiar pieces from herearlier tour, such as Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, Gluck’s Iphigénie enAulide, Chopin’s mazurkas, preludes, and waltzes, and Strauss’s “BlueDanube Waltz.” Duncan’s Wagner dances, it seems, were reserved for soloperformances: while touring with her Duncan Dancers during the 1914–15season and in 1916, performances featured interpretations of Schubert piecesincluding the “Unfinished Symphony,” excerpts from Chopin’s Sonata in B-flat Minor, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, and Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride.During her extensive 1922 tour, however, she revived her Tannhäuser dance,and added pieces set to the Götterdämmerung Funeral March, the “Ride ofthe Valkyries” from Die Walküre, and selections from the Wesendonck Lieder aswell. As in “The Dance of the Future,” though, while Duncan’s dances bor-rowed heavily from Wagner, employing orchestral excerpts from his works(and occasionally piano reductions of these excerpts), these dances departedfrom Wagner’s originals in crucial ways.76 Creating new pieces that wove to-gether Romantic aesthetics of unity and autonomy with twentieth-century cul-tural ideologies and modernist aesthetics, Duncan simultaneously capitalizedon Wagner’s artistic authority and cultural ubiquity, and staged an ideological

76. It seems likely that published excerpts and reductions were used, but I have not foundany record regarding the specific versions or arrangements Duncan used in the collections at theNew York Public Library of the Performing Arts or the San Francisco Performing Arts Libraryand Museum, nor is there any information in any of the secondary source material I have con-sulted. Nathaniel Shilkret, an American musician and composer who played clarinet inDamrosch’s New York Symphony during their tour with Duncan, mentions in his memoir that heserved as her rehearsal pianist during the tour in order to save the orchestra money, but he doesnot elaborate regarding the scores used. In fact, his brief account of the tour focuses on the warmweather, Miss Duncan’s minimal costumes, and frequent arguments among the men in the orchestra—particularly the brass section, who had “very little to do” but “rubberneck” duringperformances—as to whether or not she wore undergarments on stage. Shilkret, Sixty Years in theMusic Business, 33.




conflict with Wagner’s ghost. In doing so, Duncan actively positioned herselfas both a Wagnerian disciple and Wagner’s twentieth-century successor.

By the time Duncan appeared on American stages in 1911, Wagner’s musicdramas were familiar to American audiences, particularly those in New Yorkand other cities in the northeast. Excerpts of Tannhäuser, Rienzi, andLohengrin were performed as early as 1852; a complete Tannhäuser wasstaged at the Stadttheater in the New York Bowery in 1859; and by the1870s, Wagner festivals, particularly those led by conductor TheodoreThomas, were familiar events for New Yorkers and Bostonians.77 The Metro -politan Opera’s run of German seasons (1884–88) saw a host of Wagner pro-ductions: by the second of these seasons, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, and DieWalküre comprised nearly half of the performances, and the organization’sthird season featured premieres of Die Meistersinger and Rienzi.78 Tristanund Isolde was premiered at the Met in December of 1886 under the baton ofconductor Anton Seidl; he also introduced the first American Siegfried inNovember of 1887, the first Götterdämmerung in January of 1888, and thefirst Das Rheingold in January of the following year. Early in 1891, the Met di-rectors, eager for change and the increased revenue it might bring, announcedto protesting audiences that the next season would be devoted to Italian andFrench opera. Thus, for several years, Wagner’s music dramas flourished in dif-ferent venues.79 A concert version of Parsifal was performed at the BrooklynAcademy of Music in March of 1890, Walter Damrosch conducted DieWalküre at Carnegie Hall in February of 1894, and Anton Seidl began con-ducting Wagner concerts and productions at Brighton Beach and ConeyIsland.80 Eventually, Seidl was invited to return to the Met and resume hisprograms of German opera. Even after Seidl’s sudden death in 1899,Wagner’s works continued to thrive. Parsifal was staged in its first public per-formance outside of Bayreuth in December of 1903, prompting a legal battlewith Wagner’s widow. Under the management of Maurice Grau (1892–1903), the Met regularly programmed the Ring, Tristan, Lohengrin, andTannhäuser; with the arrival of Gustav Mahler in 1908 and Arturo Toscanini

77. Ritter, Music in America, 462–68.78. Horowitz, Wagner Nights, 78 and 102.79. Wagner’s works were performed at the Met in Italian during these intervening years, un-

der the batons of Luigi Mancinelli and Auguste Vianesi. Increased ticket prices made these sea-sons more profitable than the German seasons that had preceded them; however, many audiencemembers complained about the performances of Wagner in translation, and attendance actuallydecreased. Ibid., 172.

80. Seidl was also hired to conduct the New York Philharmonic after the departure ofTheodore Thomas in 1891. Joseph Horowitz has argued that even during this symphonic con-ducting stint, Seidl remained closely connected with Wagner, in part because he frequently pro-grammed Beethoven’s works, and often invoked Wagner’s own interpretations of Beethoven.Further, Horowitz notes, “Seidl was the embodiment of Wagner: his music, his conducting, hismanual ‘On Conducting.’ His espousal of Wagnerian license ensured unusual results.” Ibid., 160.




in 1910, Wagner’s music dramas remained a crucial, central part of the Met’srepertoire.

Audiences outside of New York and Boston also had access to Wagner’smusic dramas. Though most cities lacked resident opera companies like NewYork’s Metropolitan Opera, citizens were still treated to performances bytouring companies. Between 1885 and 1897, Seidl conducted Met Wagnerproductions in Brooklyn, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Louisville, Milwaukee,Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Washington, DC. Traveling Wagner festivals werealso available. In 1884, for example, Thomas conducted a festival that madestops in Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia, Portland (Maine),Richmond, and Washington, DC. As Horowitz notes, the festival was impres-sive: several performances were given in each city by a “gargantuan orchestraand chorus” and principals Amalie Materna, Hermann Winkel mann, and EmilScaria.81 Audiences, which numbered up to eight thousand per city, weretreated not only to the performance, but long programs with notes, translatedlibretti, and a handbook on Wagner’s works prepared by critic Henry Finck.82

American audiences in and out of major cities also regularly read discussions ofWagner’s artistic vision in biographies, musical periodicals, and other monthlymagazines. Novels and stories by Willa Cather, Mark Twain, and Kate Wigginfeatured tales of Wagner performances, of Bayreuth, and Wagnerism morebroadly; other U.S. literature experimented with Wagner-inspired plot con-struction and development, discarding conventions and seeking out new for-mal structures.83

Middle- and upper-class American women were particularly supportive ofWagner’s music dramas, and comprised a significant portion of the audiencesthat flocked to the Met, the Brooklyn Academy, and other venues whereWagner was performed; indeed, Joseph Horowitz asserts without hesitationthat the majority of American Wagnerites were women.84 Yet in New York,these women did not simply attend performances but played a vital role intheir occurrence. Women formed various societies to support Wagner’s musicdramas, as well as those conductors who programmed the pieces. In the mid-1890s, women formed a Wagner Society to support Walter Damrosch’sWagner season, which toured the country for five weeks before settling at therented Metropolitan Opera House in February of 1895.85 Perhaps most no-table, though, was Laura Langford’s female Seidl Society, which sponsoredWagner conductor Anton Seidl’s nine-week summer season of concerts at

81. Ibid., 62.82. Ritter, Music in America, 466–67; Horowitz, Wagner Nights, 62.83. See, for example, Cather, “Wagner Matinee”; Twain, “What Is Man?”; and Wiggin,

Bluebeard. For a more general account of Wagner’s impact on American literature, see Briggs,“Richard Wagner and American Music-Literary Activity,” 56–120.

84. Horowitz, Wagner Nights, 336.85. Ibid., 178.




Brighton Beach after the Brighton Beach Association pulled out.86 Programsoffered “Wagner in limitless quantities,” and women came in seemingly limit-less quantities, arriving by the trainload to attend the performances.87

Early twentieth-century Americans were not only familiar with and knowl-edgeable about Wagner and his music dramas, however, but also actively ap-propriated his works and theories, interpreting them within the contemporaryAmerican cultural context. For American audiences, Wagner’s music dramaswere perceived as sacred and transformative, exciting and intense, and genteeland wholesome all at the same time.88 In the eyes of many Americans, Wagnerpersonified American character and self-expression: determined, forward-looking, “a molder of great edifices, and a cultural entrepreneur,” Wagner wasan object of identification and aspiration.89 Wagner also represented democ-racy: as dramatist and critic Charles Henry Meltzer commented in the forwardto a set of libretti published in 1904, “Wagner was the Composer of thePeople, moved by a great understanding of their struggle.”90 The Gesamt -kunst werk promised a unified society striving together towards a commongoal: the pursuit of happiness.91 This promise was deeply appealing to manylate nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Americans, who were acutelyaware that the diverse populace lacked a common cultural background, andactively sought to define distinctly American artistic and cultural traditions.92

86. For more on Laura Langford’s activities, see Horowitz, Moral Fire, 125–72.87. Horowitz, Wagner Nights, 204. Horowitz infers both popularity and audience size from

a Brooklyn Eagle article, which notes that the 1894 season, which cost approximately $34,000,was covered entirely by ticket revenues; tickets sold for as little as fifteen to twenty-five cents; ibid.,199.

88. Ibid., 326. Horowitz acknowledges that American Wagnerism was aligned in some wayswith the antimodern impulses that Lears describes in No Place of Grace, but is quick to point outthat most contemporary discussions of Wagner and his music did not refer to this sort of yearningfor the past, nor was Wagnerism always as subversive as Lears’s account implies. See ibid., 100 and282. Further, Horowitz notes that while Wagner did play a role in the late nineteenth-centurysacralization of culture that Levine describes in Highbrow/Lowbrow, it was far more complicatedthan Levine’s sacralization allows. Following the First World War, Horowitz notes, “sacralizationmetastasized into an insidiously popular movement—a mid-culture based on mass snob appeal—which rejected contemporary culture, enshrined celebrity performers, and canonized agedEuropean masterworks,” including those of Wagner; ibid., 326.

89. Peretti, “Democratic Leitmotivs,” 35.90. Meltzer, foreword to Librettos of the Wagner Operas; quoted in Peretti, “Democratic

Leitmotivs,” 35.91. Finger, “Poetics of Cultural Unity,” 138 and 133–34.92. Ibid., 70. This quest for unity can also be connected to Transcendentalism; as Finger

notes, Transcendentalists stressed the need to “integrate race, class, and culture” in order to “ob-viate differences by tying American experience, any American experience, to the soil.” Americanwriters including Thoreau and Emerson frequently stressed this sort of Transcendentalist desirefor harmony; ibid., 86. For more on the relationship between Transcendentalism and artistic aes-thetics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Geselbracht, “TranscendentalRenaissance.”




Perhaps most importantly, though, especially for female Wagnerites, werethe various sorts of spiritualism that Wagner’s music dramas seemed to offer.For some Americans, the mythological, fantastic worlds of Wagner’s librettiserved as a powerful antidote to what many educated and affluent Americansperceived as an increasingly secular, sterile, industrial world. Wagner’s worksoffered them an escape into the premodern spiritual world, with all of the in-tensity, mystery, excitement, and titillation that many craved, and, for some,served as proof that such sensations had a place in modern life.93 For others,Wagner’s mythology became a religion in itself. The spiritual truths thatAmericans found in Wagner’s dramas—and in Wagnerism more generally—could be closely aligned with Christian belief systems. As theologianWashington Gladden wrote in 1903, Wagner’s works were Bibles in and ofthemselves, sacred and exalted, “a source of refinement and moral invigora-tion.”94 Perhaps most crucially, however, late nineteenth-century AmericanWagnerism served as a shield against change and the impending modernworld; as Horowitz has convincingly argued, Americans understood Wagner’smusic dramas as therapeutic and comforting, associated with uplift, gentility,and above all, morality.95

Duncan’s own appropriation of Wagner’s music and ideas, then, was hardlyalien to American audiences; moreover, her 1908 tour had prepared concert-goers for her use of existing art music as accompaniment for her “absolute”dances.96 As critic Carl Van Vechten reported following a Carnegie Hall performance in February of 1911:

It has long been the custom for Miss Duncan to do her dances to music whichoriginally belong either to the opera house or the concert room. In years goneby she has lifted her feet to Chopin’s measures; to dances from the Gluck op-eras; and even to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. This last was considered bymany as a desecrating escapade, but many others paid money to see her do it,and Miss Duncan achieved some of her greatest popular success with the sym-phony which Wagner called the “apotheosis of the dance.” Doubtless manypeople thereby became acquainted with a work of Beethoven which they neverwould have heard otherwise.97

The American embrace of Duncan’s Wagner interpretations was not onlythe effect of a well prepared audience, though. Her choreographies carried an

93. Lears, No Place of Grace, xiii, 173.94. Gladden, Witnesses of the Light, 22; quoted in Sessa, “At Wagner’s Shrine,” 265. See also

Lears, No Place of Grace, 23, 170–73.95. Horowitz, Wagner Nights, 282–83.96. After her first tour in 1908, debates raged as to whether Duncan’s dances were or were

not “mutilating” the musical compositions she chose as accompaniments; the furor died downquickly and Duncan’s practices were widely accepted. See Musical Review (November 1908),quoted in Blair, Portrait of the Artist, 184.

97. Van Vechten, “Miss Duncan Dances to Wagner Music,” New York Times, 16 February1911, 11.




air of legitimacy and authority that awed American audiences and critics alikebecause she could claim “authenticity” and a direct source of inspiration. Afterall, Cosima Wagner herself had invited Duncan to dance as the first Grace inTannhäuser performances at Bayreuth in the summer of 1904.98 As the NewYork Times reported, Duncan “so profoundly impressed Frau Wagner with herskill in dancing that she was invited to spend a fortnight at Wahnfried” andperform at the festival theater.99 Duncan readily proclaimed to her Americanfollowers that the stay at Bayreuth not only earned her the friendship and respect of Wagner’s widow, but also gave her unfettered access to Wagner’sown mind and music. Throughout her career, Duncan related an anecdote in which Cosima, after disagreeing with Duncan’s conception of her“Bacchanale” dance, came across long-misplaced notes of Wagner’s thatmatched Duncan’s own interpretation quite precisely, and told her, “My dearchild, you are surely inspired by the Master himself. See what he has written. Itcoincides exactly with your intuition. Hereafter, I will never interfere, but willgive you free rein over the dance in Bayreuth.”100 And it was not just theTannhäuser dance that was a product of Bayreuth.101 While there, Duncan

98. Breckbill has suggested that Duncan’s invitation came in part because Cosima Wagnerand others involved in the festival’s management were concerned that Americans would cease toattend after Parisfal entered the repertory of American opera companies; it premiered at theMetropolitan Opera on 25 December 1903; “Cosima Wagner’s Bayreuth,” 466. Most accountsof Duncan’s Bayreuth performance simply note that Siegfried Wagner met Duncan and saw herdance in Munich in 1903, and encouraged his mother to extend an invitation. That it was in theTannhäuser “Bacchanale” that Duncan danced is not surprising; as is well known, Venus’s part inthe opening scene was rewritten and the “Bacchanale” expanded for the piece’s Parisian premierein 1861 in order to satisfy demands for ballet, particularly among members of the Jockey Club.See Abbate, “Parisian ‘Vénus.’ ”

99. “Notes of the Week,” New York Times, 1 November 1903, 25. Reports of her perfor-mance and its reception also appeared in numerous other American newspapers and magazines; aTheatre Magazine writer, for example, noted that because of Duncan’s performance, Tannhäuser,“next to Parsifal and the Ring excites the greatest interest,” and went on to comment, “The seri-ous beauty of this dancer is something quite conspicuous”; Davidson, “Bayreuth Revisited,” 256.The American press also connected Duncan to Cosima Wagner in other contexts, perhaps less ac-curately. In 1914, for example, a Washington Herald article on Duncan’s dancing schools noted,“Women like Cosima Wagner, men like Humperdinck, the composer; von Lenbach, the painter;and Rodin, the sculptor, believe in Isadora Duncan and her school. They expect the children whoare being taught there some day to show the world the real Greek ideal of health, physical beautyand grace which will inspire the next generation to greater artistic endeavor.” See “America, theHaven of Classic Dancing,” Washington Herald, 29 November 1914, 14.

100. Duncan, My Life, 162. It is unclear what these notes were; in her autobiography,Duncan writes only that Cosima Wagner had “found among the writings of Richard Wagner asmall copy-book containing a description, more accurate than any yet published, of what he hadmeant by this Dance of the Bacchanal.” Given Duncan’s looseness with details, however, it isquite possible that the description was part of a published work. It might, for example, have comefrom Wagner’s detailed description of the scene drafted in May of 1860; see Richard Wagner,“Venusberg-Szene im Tannhäuser,” in Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtung, 11:414–17.

101. Blair, Portrait of the Artist, 86.




carefully studied all of the operas being performed, drawing herself and herdance, she implies, closer to Wagner’s music, aesthetic, and spirit. “I learnedall the text of the operas by heart,” she wrote, “so that my mind was saturatedwith these legends and my being was vibrating with the waves of Wagner’smelody . . . every atom of my being, brain, and body had been absorbed inenthusiasm . . . for Richard Wagner.”102 For American audiences in 1911,then, it is quite possible that Duncan’s Wagner interpretations were receivedas embodiments of Bayreuth, carrying the sacred seal of the festival, and by extension, of Wagner himself.

Yet Duncan’s performances to Wagner’s music were not merely “interpre-tations,” but also critiques. Wagner’s music, Duncan believed throughout hercareer, “understood and expressed the rhythm of the human body” to an un-paralleled degree.103 “In the depths of every musical theme of Wagner,”Duncan wrote in a 1921 essay, “dances will be found: monumental sculpture,movement which only demands release and life.”104 As much as Duncan ap-preciated Wagner’s music, though, she quickly came to disagree with his con-cept and execution of the music drama. While at Bayreuth, Duncanannounced that Wagner had made a major mistake in his theories of the musicdrama. “Frau Cosima,” Duncan recounts in her autobiography, “fixed mewith startled eyes. There was an icy silence.”105 Gazing “innocently around . . . to meet expressive visages of absolute consternation,” Duncan continuedundeterred. “The speaking is the brain, the thinking man. The singing is emo-tion. The dancing is the Dionysian ecstasy which carries away all. It is impossi-ble to mix in any way one with the other. Musik-Drama kann nie sein.”106

In seeking to combine dance with music and poetry, Duncan believed,Wagner let music “absorb everything,” weakening dance to such a degree thattrue unity of the arts became impossible.107

This kind of critique was quite common among nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century artists and thinkers. Nietzsche, for example, believed trueunity to be impossible: Wagner’s music dramas, even in their most synthesizedform, continued to require spectators to divide their attention, attending

102. Duncan, My Life, 147.103. Pruett, “Study of the Relationship,” 154–55.104. Isadora Duncan, “Richard Wagner,” in Art of the Dance, 105.105. Duncan, My Life, 85.106. Ibid., 151–52. Duncan does not discuss Cosima’s reaction to her pronouncement, and I

have found no record of any discord arising from Duncan’s statements. Duncan also implies thatthere were others in attendance during the conversation, but I have found no record of who,specifically; in her autobiography, she notes that during her summer at Bayreuth, various Germanartists and musicians, “young officers” and royalty including King Ferdinand of Bulgaria were fre-quently present, but she does not note who heard this conversation specifically; Ibid., 154–55.

107. See Duncan, “Richard Wagner,” in Art of the Dance, 105–6. As Cheney notes, this essaywas originally part of a manuscript or set of program notes written in French, but it is likely thatthe original is lost. The French translation is available in Isadora Duncan, La danse.




“now to the music, now to the drama, now to the scenery in isolation.”108

Perhaps not coincidentally, Nietzsche’s writings, particularly Thus SpokeZarathustra, strongly influenced Duncan’s conceptions of and vocabulary fordescribing her art; Nietzsche, Duncan believed, valued dance in a way thatWagner failed to, as both an expressive means and a religion unto itself.109

Similarly, Duncan’s colleague and lover Gordon Craig radically alteredWagner’s ideals to formulate his vision of modernist theater. Craig’s The Artof the Theatre, published just two years after Duncan’s “The Dance of theFuture,” adopts the call for complete integration in the hands of a powerful di-rector, but simultaneously envisions the theater of the future as a “masterpieceof mechanism,” “a self-reliant and creative art,” characterized by symbolism,innovative lighting strategies, and careful use of color.110 When Duncan uttered that “Musik-Drama kann nie sein,” and set about realizing her own vision of the total artwork, then, she joined Nietzsche and others in simultane-ously appropriating and contradicting Wagner’s works and writings.

Duncan’s Tannhäuser “Bacchanale,” first conceived as part of the Bayreuthopera production, and then performed in concert settings throughout her ca-reer, offers a striking example of this ambivalent relationship. Unfortunately,there is no known extant choreography for any of the Wagner dances, andthey were not performed by any of the original Duncan dancers, nor have theybeen revived by any of the Duncan “granddaughters” who continue to dancein the Duncan style.111 As a result, it is necessary to rely on Duncan’s own

108. “. . . weil man bald auf die Musik, bald auf das Drama, bald auf die Scene allein Achtgiebt.” Nietzsche, “Nachgelassene Fragmente, 1875–1879,” in Sämtliche Werke, 8:542. Quotedin translation in Liébert, Nietzsche and Music, 67. For discussion of the relationship betweenNietzsche and Wagner, see also Borchmeyer, Drama and the World of Richard Wagner, 288–307;and Gary Zabel, “Wagner and Nietzsche,” 407–9.

109. LaMothe, Nietzsche’s Dancers, 109. I would go so far as to posit that the influence ofNietzsche’s philosophical writings on Duncan’s art approached the influence of Wagner’s writ-ings. Interestingly, though, Duncan never discusses Nietzsche’s critiques of or relationship (eitherpersonal or ideological) with Wagner, leaving me to wonder whether it is possible that she herselfwas not aware of the connection. Though beyond the scope of this study, the aesthetic “triangle”that can be constructed between Duncan, Wagner, and Nietzsche is fascinating, particularly in re-lation to conceptions of dance and gesture, and I hope to explore it further in the future. For fur-ther discussion of Nietzsche’s conceptions of dance, see Atwell, “Significance of Dance”; andCrawford, “Nietzsche’s Dionysian Arts.”

110. Craig, On the Art of the Theatre, 176. Craig was not the first to revise Wagner’s ideas fortheater; Swiss designer and theorist Adolphe Appia suggested staging strategies such as the aboli-tion of the proscenium arch, two-dimensional backdrops, and naturalistic settings as a route to-ward achieving a theatrical Gesamtkunstwerk (Die Musik und die Inscenierung). For more onWagnerism and theater, see Carnegy, Wagner and the Art of the Theatre.

111. I spoke with Elyssa dru Rosenberg of isadoraNOW, Inc., in June of 2009 aboutDuncan’s Wagner dances, and have also exchanged emails with Duncan Dancers Lori Beliloveand Andrea Seidel. All confirmed that the Wagner dances were not passed down to them and, intheir knowledge, are not currently performed. All three also expressed their curiosity as to whythey have not been recreated.




writings and the descriptions of contemporary critics, both of which are oftenmore poetic than substantive, in order to imagine the dances.112

Even in concert, Duncan’s “Bacchanale” seemed at first a version ofWagner’s original drama. The piece was performed on a bare stage covered ina blue-gray carpet, with long draperies of a similar color surrounding it onthree sides, falling in pools on the floor, reminiscent of the cliffs, waterfalls,and bluish haze indicated in Wagner’s libretto. Rose-colored lights in thewings replaced harsh footlights, creating pockets of shadow and light acrossthe stage and echoing the rosy half-light that streamed through the grotto to fall on Venus in the Tannhäuser stage design. Emerging from one of theseshadows as the music began, though, Duncan did not portray a singleWagnerian character but attempted to portray an abstract amalgamation ofcharacters and ideas: a chorus.113 For Duncan, immersed in an artistic mo-ment that regularly seized upon an imagined Greece as a model of beauty andphilosophy, the failure to understand and maintain the role of the Greek cho-rus was near sacrilege. “Richard Wagner re-found the drama, but he mistookthe role of the Chorus,” Duncan railed in an undated essay entitled “TheDance of the Greeks.”114 “The drama lives in the fortune of the characters . . .but Wagner thought to lift the characters above the drama, to give them therole of the chorus.”115 Not surprisingly, Nietzsche had articulated a similarconcern years earlier: it was not just the chorus that Wagner omitted, inNietzsche’s mind, but the entire sacred nature of the Greek festival. NeitherWagner’s music dramas, nor Bayreuth, with its gaudy, bourgeois spectatorsand almost carnivalesque atmosphere, offered space for audience members toimagine themselves as members of the chorus and actually participate in thedrama before them.116

112. American dance criticism was in its infancy in the first two decades of the twentieth cen-tury; many critics writing on dance performances were not trained in dance and lacked the experi-ence or vocabulary to describe fully what they saw; as a result, clichés and metaphors abound.Additionally, I have found no record of contemporary reviews by any of the major early twentieth-century writers on Wagner’s music such as Henry Krehbiel or Henry Finck.

113. It is important to note that Duncan’s interest in individual gestures that evoked massmovement was not an attempt to compensate for her solo performances, or a means of creatingthe illusion that there were many dancers on stage. When performing in Bayreuth, Duncan wasaccompanied by the Berlin Opera Ballet corps, and yet remained dedicated to this aesthetic ofevocation. Duncan, My Life, 144.

114. Duncan, “Dance of the Greeks,” 93.115. Ibid., 93–94.116. “In their [Greek] theaters,” Nietzsche wrote in The Birth of Tragedy, “The terraced

structures of concentric arcs made it possible for everybody to actually overlook the whole world ofculture around him and to imagine, in absorbed contemplation, that he himself was a chorist.”The physical architecture and ideological mindsets among audiences at Bayreuth, Nietzsche laterimplied, did not allow for this sort of experience. “In ihren [Griechen] Theatern war es Jedem, beidem in concentrischen Bogen sich erhebenden Terrassenbau des Zuschauerraumes, möglich, die gesammte Culturwelt um sich herum ganz eigentlich zu übersehen und in gesättigtem




In the “Bacchanale,” Duncan thus strove to create an abstract sense of“bacchantic tumult” that enveloped the audience and rendered them bothobservers and participants. Each of her gestures was intended to evoke a tideof movement, expressing the “mad longing, the passionate languor, in short,the whole cry of desire in the world” that she felt in the music. A single armdepicted a “thousand extended arms,” her head, tossed back, was to suggestthe wild, riotous scene.117 As the music rose to a climax, so did her gestures;the desire she depicted swelling forth in “an irresistible torrent” of movementand sound that critic H. T. Parker could only describe as “a lascivious rout offauns and satyrs.”118 Then, suddenly, following Wagner’s narrative outline forthe dance, there was peace and the “languor of satisfied amorous sensuality”in the form of the Three Graces. Alone on the stage, Duncan simultaneouslybecame all Three Graces, and then Leda, Europa, and the departing nymphsas well. Many critics disliked the first section of the dance: writing in Boston,Parker noted that Duncan was less effective when miming a particular narra-tive for the audience than when dancing “for herself, in solitude,” highlighting“the spirit and not the flesh”; critics in Washington, DC, complained thatDuncan’s movements were overwhelmed by the power of the music.119 Yetmost praised the calmer second section of the piece. Writing for theWashington Times, critic J. R. Hildebrand noted that in these “lighter move-ments to which dancing seems a logical accompaniment, Miss Duncan againestablished her supremacy.”120 Others were even more effusive: “Here,”Parker raved, “she compassed a clear, soft beauty of sensuous rapture, a still ecstasy, a languour that was like a slow and lovely relaxation into sleep anddreams.”121 Her movements depicted the interlacing and separating of theGraces, their joining and parting, a “multiplicity of almost simultaneous incar-nations.”122 In movement, Three Graces in one body “sing their loves of Zeus. . . they tell of his adventures, of Europa carried over the waves. Their heads

Hinschauen selbst Choreut sich zu wähnen.” Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie in SämtlicheWerke, 1:59; trans. in Nietzsche, “Birth of Tragedy,” 62–63. See also Liébert, Nietzsche and Music,106.

117. Duncan, My Life, 144.118. Parker, “Miss Duncan Dances to Bach and Wagner,” Boston Evening Transcript, 24

February 1911; repr. in his Motion Arrested, 65.119. A critic for the Washington Herald wrote, “When the mighty throat of the orchestra

burst into Wagner’s ‘Bacchanale’ from Tannhäuser, the dancer’s cavorting figure sank into in-significance under the domination of music . . . no single dancer can fittingly ‘interpret’ the mean-ing of those crashing dissonances and torrential outpouring of Wagner’s Musical soul. It is likewatching the pitiful flutters of a golden butterfly caught under the impact of a sudden summerstorm.” See Parker, “Miss Duncan Dances to Bach and Wagner,” in Motion Arrested, 65. See alsoE. R. S., “Gives New Dances,” Washington Herald, 8 March 1911, 5; and Hildebrand, “MissDuncan Seen in a New Program,” 9.

120. Hildebrand, “Miss Duncan Seen in a New Program,” 9.121. Parker, “Miss Duncan Dances to Bach and Wagner,” in Motion Arrested, 65.122. Levinson, “Art and Meaning of Isadora Duncan,” in Ballet Old and New, 32.




incline with love. They are inundated, they are drowned in the desire of Ledain love with the white swan. Thus, they order Tannhäuser to repose in thewhiteness of Venus’s arms.”123

Duncan’s other Wagner interpretations were even more distantly related toWagner’s original conceptions. Devised for and always performed in concertsettings, these dances had little to do with Wagner’s characters and narratives;indeed, the libretti effectively disappeared, emerging only when Duncan be-lieved that channeling Wagner’s characters would heighten her emotional re-sponse to the music. Instead, the dances were nonrepresentational expressionsof the motion and passion that Duncan heard and felt in Wagner’s music.Through her choreography and performances, Duncan sought to release themovement she believed was trapped within Wagner’s score, to fulfill her dutyto both the music and the dance it inspired. “It is an offense artistically todance to such music,” she readily acknowledged, “but I have done it by neces-sity, because this music is awakening the dance that was dead, awakeningrhythm. I have danced to it, driven by it as a leaf is driven before the wind.”124

The “Dance of the Flowermaidens” from Parsifal, for example, was per-formed both as a solo and with her troupe of female students. Here, Duncaneschewed any hint of Wagner’s Parsifal stage design. Instead, she danced thispiece against what had become her standard backdrop: Tannhaüser-esqueblue-grey curtains and carpet bathed in rosy light and shadow.125 In doing so,Duncan subtly evoked Wagner’s music dramas even as she distanced herselffrom their details. The same was true of her roles: performing with her troupeof students, Duncan became a sort of abstract Kundry, dressed in a “long,cream-colored satin gown, a flowing red velvet cape, and a crown of red andwhite roses in her auburn hair,” surrounded by her girls as flower maidens,dressed in flesh-colored outfits wrapped with floral garlands of red, purple,and white anemones.126 In solo performances, Duncan herself evoked theflower maidens through her costume of white gauze, her hair full of pinkishflowers. Given the close relationship Duncan generally established betweenher movements and the musical accompaniment, her dance of small, airy gestures and light movements probably loosely traced Wagner’s repeatedrhythmic patterns and short, arc-like melodic phrases. “The sensual becamesensuous,” one critic wrote, “raised to the utmost power of fine intoxication. . . . She danced in reiterated sensuous touches. The subdued glow of the

123. Duncan, My Life, 144–45.124. Duncan, “Dance of the Greeks,” 96.125. It is not clear when Duncan began using this stage setup. Accounts of her performances

dating from 1908 mention it with regularity; biographical and critical literature, which tends tofocus on Duncan’s middle and late career without much discussion of her early performances, de-scribes the curtains, carpet, and lighting as a trademark without establishing their origins or firstappearance. I am inclined to believe, given the similarities it bears to the Tannhäuser stage, thatDuncan created it for concert performances of Tannhäuser after her appearance at Bayreuth, andthen began using it for all of her performances.

126. Irma Duncan, Duncan Dancer, 201.




music was in her.”127 It was not just Wagner’s music that reemerged in herdanced interpretations, however, but a new sort of Gesamtkunstwerk that posi-tioned dance, rather than drama, at its center. Critics, audiences, and Duncanherself were quick to acknowledge that, despite the connection between hergestures and the music’s motives and rhythms, her movements did not conveythe music, per se, or even the music’s emotional trajectory. Rather, her danceapproached a modernist aesthetic: it was intended to be both ambiguous andself-referential, expressing that which Duncan felt within the music. And in-deed, music and movement seemed to emerge, united, from Duncan’s body.Onstage—or at least in the imaginations of Duncan and her audiences—danceand music were synthesized into an organic, danced expression: the musiclived in Duncan and was released through her movements.

The “Liebestod” from Tristan und Isolde, first performed in New Yorkwith Walter Damrosch’s Symphony Society in February of 1911, departedeven further from Wagner’s conception. Indeed, here, Duncan did not depictIsolde (or Tristan, for that matter); rather, she strove to create an original, au-tonomous dance piece comprised of the movements she felt were embodiedin, but failed to emerge from, Wagner’s score. Clad in white, her gestures wereminimal; she was spurred into brief passages of movement only occasionally.128

Indeed, Duncan was so static, a New York Sun critic asked if the performance“could possibly be described as a dance.” Bending forward to the floor,Duncan collapsed downward to lie on her stomach, then slowly rose to herknees, and eventually, straightened upward, face raised toward the ceiling.129

“With the orchestra’s every crescendo,” one European critic noted, “sheshakes her uplifted arms and finally throws them vigorously up and forward.This extreme tension is broken by the sinuous and smooth vibration of herhorizontally extended arms which seem to be carried by an invisible wave.”130

For dance writer Caroline Caffin, Duncan’s “Liebestod” offered “flashes ofexquisite beauty, so ethereal that they could not be held for more than a mo-ment.” Yet, Caffin continued, “in some of her ideas, no doubt Miss Duncanhas run so far ahead of her age” that audiences were “left in doubt as to the di-rection of her path.”131 In this dance especially, Duncan’s choreography wasnot intended to be a retelling of Wagner’s narrative, a representation ofWagner’s characters, or the story of Wagner’s music; indeed, given the staticstage action and psychological—as opposed to physical—drama of the oper-atic “Liebestod,” such approaches would be difficult to imagine. Rather, in adistinctly modernist experiment, Duncan sought to reveal, through ambigu-ous, abstract movement, the gestures and expressive potential she believed tobe hidden within Wagner’s compositions.

127. Parker, “Miss Duncan Dances to Bach and Wagner,” in Motion Arrested, 65.128. Levinson, “Art and Meaning of Isadora Duncan,” in Ballet Old and New, 31.129. Untitled clipping, New York Sun, 16 February 1911, Irma Duncan Collection.130. Levinson, “Art and Meaning of Isadora Duncan,” in Ballet Old and New, 31.131. Caffin and Caffin, Dancing and Dancers of Today, 67.




Duncan’s Wagner interpretations puzzled American dance writers, most ofwhom were experienced music critics whose knowledge of dance was largelylimited to the few visiting ballerinas and spectacular vaudeville dancers popularat the turn of the century. Duncan offered no tricks, no spectacle, no elaboratestage setting, and perhaps most importantly, only the most abstract outlines ofplot and character. Reviewers’ attempts to describe what they saw on stage, asa result, frequently dissolved into rhapsodies about Duncan’s “poetic” move-ments.132 The Wagner interpretations added an extra difficulty for these crit-ics, the majority of whom were well acquainted with the original musicdramas: how to negotiate the relationship between Duncan’s nonnarrativedance and the Wagnerian narrative and characters conjured by the musical se-lections? Recounting the Parsifal selection, Van Vechten situates Duncan’sperformance not as a recreation of Wagner’s scene in dance, but rather, an in-terpretation of “the spirit of the scene in Klingsor’s garden.”133 Yet he cannotwholly refrain from narrative reference in his account: “She evidently dancedwith an imaginary ‘Guileless Fool’ standing in the centre of the stage. To himshe appealed with all of her gestures and all of her postures.”134 In descriptionsof the “Liebestod,” such slippages between Duncan and the Tristan narrativebecome even harder to avoid. “The artist,” one review explained, “with ges-tures of mournful tenderness, bends down over the body of her beloved untila storm of ecstasy straightens her bent stance and turns her clouded gazealoft.”135 That Duncan must—on some level—be portraying Isolde was fre-quently implied in such accounts, even as critics explicitly differentiated be-tween the two, and between Duncan’s art and Wagner’s music drama. Evenwhen such associations were not assumed, the question was inevitably raised:how did Duncan’s dance relate to Wagner’s music drama? Van Vechten com-mented that Duncan “puzzled those who knew the music drama”; though hecould not “profess to know” what her interpretations meant to those not fa-miliar with Wagner’s works, he only assumed that her dances “did not interest[them].” Therefore, he concluded, “one must ask, Why?”136

Yet for American audiences, Duncan’s interpretations were not nearly sotroubling. At the American premiere of her “Liebestod” dance, conductorWalter Damrosch conscientiously placed the piece last on the program, announcing to the audience mid-concert that Duncan’s “Liebestod” was “sointeresting that I think it only fair to set them before the public,” and then encouraging anyone who found the “idea of giving pantomimic expression to the ‘Liebestod’ . . . horrifying,” to leave Carnegie Hall before it began. Nomass exodus occurred, though; rather, audience members remained in theirseats through the end of the concert, “except possibly,” Van Vechten noted

132. Daly describes this trend in Done Into Dance, 63.133. Van Vechten, “Miss Duncan Dances to Wagner Music,” 11. Emphasis mine.134. Ibid.135. Levinson, “Art and Meaning of Isadora Duncan,” in Ballet Old and New, 31.136. Van Vechten, “Miss Duncan Dances to Wagner Music,” 11.




in his review, “the usual few who are obliged to catch trains.”137 Duncan’sconcerts, many of which sold out, were met with “loud applause” and de-mands for encores.138 When she restaged her Wagner repertoire in 1922, thedances were received with even more excitement: reviews note “enthusiasticapplause” and repeated encores, and one particularly rapturous report men-tions “gardens of flowers and thronging admirers.”139 Indeed, IsadoraDuncan was readily, if briefly, embraced as an American-grown “artist of thefuture” who had captured the imaginations and won the approval not only ofCosima Wagner and crowds at Bayreuth, but of London, Paris, Berlin, andVienna. Duncan’s Wagner dances seamlessly mixed the familiar with the new,finding in Wagner’s music the space in which to explore turn-of-the-centuryAmerican fascinations with the body, motion, nature, unity, and spirituality, aswell as newly flowering modernist aesthetics.

Performing Wagnerism, Performing Modernism

“American Wagnerites,” Horowitz writes in Wagner Nights, “had nothing todo with modernism.”140 Though he points to several markers of Wagner’sreach into the twentieth century, including Duncan and soprano OliveFremstad, the Gilded Age’s meliorist interpretations of Wagner’s music and its therapeutic, sacralized vision of art do seem fundamentally incompatible

137. Ibid. It is possible that Damrosch’s announcement was not merely intended to “warn”audiences but also to address a misunderstanding with the media. Before the first performance ofDuncan’s 1911 tour, her management released a statement noting that Duncan would performthe “Liebestod” from Tristan und Isolde, and this fact was reported in most major newspapers.Damrosch reportedly wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Tribune (and presumably otherpapers) stating that their reporter was mistaken and that no such performance would occur;Damrosch blamed the “misinformation” on an “overenthusiastic press agent.” When Duncan did perform the “Liebestod,” eyebrows were raised; however, as the Tribune noted in a follow-upreport, “A disposition toward amiability permits Mr. Damrosch’s statement that he did not arriveat his decision ‘to give Miss Duncan an opportunity to give a public demonstration of her experi-ment’ until after a private rehearsal on Tuesday to stand unquestioned.” “Music,” New YorkTribune, 18 February 1911, 7.

138. See, for example, Hildebrand, “Miss Duncan Seen in a New Program,” 9.139. “Isadora Duncan Gives Striking Dance Program,” Evening Public Ledger (Philadelphia),

18 October 1922, 14; “Isadora Duncan Gives Final Recital at Carnegie Hall,” New York Tribune,15 October 1922, 16. One exception to this favorable reception was in Boston, where, despitecritic H. T. Parker’s enthusiasm, audiences were lukewarm toward Duncan. As Parker wrote,“The boxes yawned in emptiness, above the stairs and below, the audience was scanty; the socialand aesthetic contingents that used to profess the utmost joy in Miss Duncan were lacking; thethrong of the merely curious had declined into scattered hundreds of spectators, many of whomwere elderly women.” Parker goes on to puzzle over the lack of interest, noting that Duncan’sdance was just as powerful as it had always been; “She can still,” he wrote, “make the passing mo-ment of her dance of a rare and ideal beauty”; “Miss Duncan Dances to Bach and Wagner,” 62.

140. Horowitz, Wagner Nights, 282.




with forward-thinking, change-oriented modernism.141 At first glance,Isadora Duncan hardly seems to challenge this claim. Like Anton Seidl and hisnineteenth-century contemporaries, Duncan represented a continued link toWagner, his music, the dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk, and the mythicalBayreuth. Duncan, too, was intimately familiar with Wagner’s music, stagings,ideas, and Wagner himself: though she hadn’t worked with him directly, shecarried the imprimatur of his wife and son, and a unique ability to intuitWagner’s own vision. Perhaps most importantly, Duncan embodied preciselythe freedom, excitement, and passion that Wagner’s music dramas carried fornineteenth-century Wagnerites. The very demographic of elite, respectablewhite women who flocked to Wagner performances in the late nineteenthcentury in search of intense emotions attended Duncan’s concerts in search ofthe same, and Duncan delivered. Audiences and critics accorded Duncan’sdances the same type of intensity and realness, the same sort of physical andemotional freedom, the same sense of spirituality and soulfulness that they de-scribed experiencing at Anton Seidl’s Wagner performances. Finally, Duncanvalidated the artistic and creative potential of the American culture. Wagnerhimself had recognized in the United States a future artistic utopia, notingthat the “New World” was poised to open “a new realm for the exercise of un-conquerable vigor and strength” in the development of art.142 Duncan actu-ally performed this American potential, personifying for her audiencesprecisely the dedication, innovation, and expression that American audiencescelebrated in Wagner. Duncan, in short, offered Americans the “cultural en-trepreneur” that they had so long sought.

Despite these resonances, Isadora Duncan’s American career offers us aview of another kind of Wagnerism. Duncan did not maintain the same sort ofworshipful stance towards the composer as was common among nineteenth-century Wagnerians. While she heartily acknowledged Wagner’s innovationsand “genius,” Duncan also freely (and regularly) objected to many ofWagner’s ideologies, goals, and staging decisions. Duncan was not interestedin recreating Wagner’s music dramas as exactly and “authentically” as possible;simply to perform Wagnerian music dramas for new audiences, as nineteenth-century Wagner disciples like Seidl did, would hardly have been enough.Instead, Duncan worked on creating a new sort of art, which, though tingedwith Wagner’s own influence, simultaneously took its own unique shape. Both

141. Ibid., 336. As Horowitz notes, Olive Fremstad, the Met’s leading Wagnerian sopranofrom 1906 on offers a fascinating figure to compare with Duncan; both were important as artistsand as representatives of the “New Woman” in the first decades of the twentieth century, and thetwo often performed in close proximity, both in terms of venue and time. In the future, I hope toexplore further the “dialogue” that these artists created in performance, with each other and withWagner’s music, aesthetics, and person, as well as the ways in which both Fremstad and Duncanmodeled similar and yet quite contrasting gender identities and “feminisms” for American womenduring the first decades of the twentieth century.

142. Wagner, “Work and Mission of My Life, Part I,” 109.




Seidl and Duncan positioned themselves as heirs to Wagner’s innovations,music, and imaginations, bearers of a divine stamp of approval. Duncan simul-taneously assumed a spot alongside of Wagner: she, like he, considered herselfa creator and visionary, and represented herself as a new author. Though in-spired by Richard Wagner (and indeed, validated through her association withhim), she transformed his ideas into a distinct vision of her own.

American modernism, scholars including George Cotkin and MichaelLevenson have argued, is less a new phenomenon than an extension of nineteenth-century ideologies and assumptions laced with new possibilitiesand shifting aesthetics.143 Isadora Duncan’s dances and writings offer com-pelling evidence for this claim. In many ways, Duncan’s performances alignedwith early modernist aesthetics. Performing an utterly new kind of opposi-tional, weighted movement that spiraled outward from her loose and suppletorso almost as if driven by a motor, Duncan, in true modernist fashion, challenged balletic—and artistic—assumptions regarding beauty, nonnarrativerepresentation, and the expressive and kinetic possibilities of the humanbody.144 Duncan’s work, like that of many of her contemporaries, integratedearly twentieth-century excitement about scientific advance and ongoing debates regarding gender roles and racial identity. Onstage, Duncan’s bodybecame the site of expression that many modernists imagined the female bodyto be, and more: her dancing body was a means of recognizing, sustaining,and liberating one’s true self.145 Yet Duncan’s modernist tendencies combinedseamlessly with sounds, aesthetics, and ideologies of the nineteenth century.Wagner’s music accompanied her experimental movements; Wagner’s wordsand theories were knit into her discussions of evolution and women’s rights.For Duncan, organicism was inseparable from evolutionary theory, and theautonomous, unified work was necessarily abstract.

A rebellious Wagner disciple, Isadora Duncan carried Wagnerism forwardinto the twentieth century, offering American audiences the compositions,

143. Cotkin, Reluctant Modernism, 153; Levenson, Cambridge Companion to Modernism;idem, Genealogy of Modernism. Certainly, this is not the only understanding of modernism; a suc-cinct summary of various conceptions is offered in Mao and Walkowitz, Bad Modernisms, 1–18.

144. Schwartz argues that this type of fluid movements that radiate outward from the centerof the body can be described as torque, and was part of the “new kinaesthetic” that emerged inthe early decades of the twentieth century; “Torque,” 71–77. Duncan’s conception of dance wasalso modern in its invocation of the motor. As Carrie Preston has noted, Duncan’s choreographystaged a joining of “motorized movement and soulful expression.” Preston, “Motor in the Soul,”273.

145. Modernist use of the female body, particularly the female nude is critiqued in Daly, DoneInto Dance, 172–74. Duncan’s sense of the liberating potential of dance is described in“Emotional Expression,” New York Herald, 20 February 1898, quoted in Daly, Done Into Dance,27. As Daly notes, Duncan’s “expressive body” modeled a route towards the origin of the self, aself “independent and individual, unencumbered by external pressure but capable of outwardprojection. The force of its depths streamed outward, unconstrained . . . in obliterating bound-aries [between inner and outer], it held the promise of personal, political, and religious liberation”(120).




performance practices, and artistic visions that so captivated them, recut andaltered to suit the new century. Yet Isadora Duncan’s Wagnerism also tugs the twentieth century backward a bit, reminding us that early modernism wasnot necessarily characterized by the sort of radical rejection of the past oftenassumed. Just as her colleague and lover Gordon Craig adapted Wagner’sideals to formulate his vision of modernist theater, so too did Duncan reincar-nate Wagner’s principles in the emerging American modern dance concert,joining Wagner’s compositions, vision and performance practice with earlytwentieth-century aesthetics.146 As Duncan wrote in her 1903 treatise, “If weseek the real source of the dance, if we go to nature, we find that the dance ofthe future is the dance of the past.”147 Duncan’s vision of the “dance of the fu-ture,” which helped to inspire and shape twentieth-century modern danceaesthetics, grew and flowered from Wagner’s nineteenth-century principles,practices, and art.

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Periodicals

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Abstract

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, dancer Isadora Duncan(1877–1927) regularly appeared on concert hall and opera house stages inNew York and other American cities. Audiences were taken with her strikingpersona and nontraditional conception of dance, and impressed by her successin Europe. Duncan’s artistic, intellectual, and personal self-association withRichard Wagner—a mythological being in the contemporary American imagination—also captured the attention of many audience members.Duncan danced to excerpts from Tristan und Isolde, Parsifal, and other workswhile rejecting Wagner’s conception of dance; she borrowed language andideological formulations from his writings while dismissing his aesthetic theo-ries. The American Wagner cult has long been associated with the Gilded Ageand conductor Anton Seidl (1850–1898). Isadora Duncan’s American perfor-mances demonstrate that American Wagnerism persisted well into the twenti-eth century, albeit in a different form. Conjuring herself as a rebellious discipleof Wagner, Duncan modeled a second generation of American Wagnerismthat combined contemporary cultural debates and early modernist aestheticswith strains of Wagner’s art and ideologies.

Keywords: Isadora Duncan, Richard Wagner, Dance of the Future, Earlymodern dance aesthetics, American modernism



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