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The Greek classics would influence Duncan’s dancing for the rest of her life. She gave up formal school at 10, but read incessantly: Thackeray, Dickens and Shakespeare, Greek Classics as well as trashy novels. The family, still being poor, moved often, and Isadora by her own account being the most courageous would inveigle the butcher or baker to extend credit.

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By 12 years old, she was already a feminist, anti marriage and pro having children– when and how it suited women– outside wedlock. Whilst Isadora’s mother gave piano lessons and sewed, Isadora began teaching young children in the neighbourhood to dance. Isadora’s mother, Mary Isadora Duncan, divorced her husband and the family now in distressed straits, moved to Oakland. Her father, Joseph Charles Duncan, was a banker and engineer who fell from grace soon after Isadora’s birth after being exposed in illegal banking practices.

Born in San Francisco on May 26th, 1877, Isadora was the youngest of four children (siblings were August, Raymond and Elizabeth). Isadora Duncan was no stranger to poverty. An obsession that carried her through countries and continents, feted by the rich and famous, artists and writers and poets– she was a favourite of Rodin- but who would never compromise her form of dancing for any amount of money, despite often being in dire need. She was never, from an early age, to be deflected from this obsession. Her dancing, which she always referred to as ‘my art,’ was her way of expressing truth through gesture and movement. Isadora Duncan’s life however was just as dramatic and singular as her death. (There were other theories that in fact the force of the strangulation would have decapitated her.) Her long silk scarf, caught up in the wheels of a speeding, open topped Amilcar in Nice in 1927, caused her to be flung from the car breaking her neck on impact.

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The second installment in a series about famous Americans who lived and died in Paris.Įveryone knows how Isadora Duncan died.

Isadora duncan life