![]() Duncan's artistic, intellectual, and personal self-association with Richard Wagner-a mythological being in the contemporary American imagination-also captured the attention of many audience members. Audiences were taken with her striking persona and nontraditional conception of dance, and impressed by her success in Europe. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007.During the first two decades of the twentieth century, dancer Isadora Duncan (1877-1927) regularly appeared on concert hall and opera house stages in New York and other American cities. Traces of Light: absence and presence in the work of Loïe Fuller. Read them aloud and compare these descriptions with the historical information about these dances.Īlbright, Ann Cooper. Perform the works and have the audience write a description of what they saw. Move: Based on the research project, have students in the two groups create a short (3 minute) dance evoking some aspect of the two choreographies.Research: Divide the class into two groups with one group researching Loïe Fuller’s “Fire Dance” and the other group researching Isadora Duncan’s “Ave Maria.” Discuss the differences between a dance with realistic imagery (of a mother and child) and one that is inspired by a more general and abstract concept (fire).If we shift the dynamic of their comparison from an either/or to a continuum, we can begin to discuss their differences and similarities without setting up a hierarchy of importance. And yet in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century, both dancers were seen as enterprising, independent, and eminently American women. One was perceived as androgynous or masculine, the other as highly feminine. Fuller’s body disappeared under a mass of silk, while Duncan’s body was shockingly revealed by her light tunics. If Fuller is categorized as a modernist, Duncan is seen as a romantic. If Duncan is mythologized standing, waiting for divine inspiration, Fuller is pictured with her sleeves rolled up, ready to experiment with the latest lighting effects. If Fuller is aligned with theatrical artifice and modern technology, Duncan is seen as the embodiment of nature and the ancient Greeks. Indeed, Fuller and Duncan are often portrayed as the polar opposites. Many discussions comparing the work of Loïe Fuller and Isadora Duncan quote Louis Vauzcelles’s famous quip: “Isadora sculpts, Loïe paints. Duncan was deeply influenced by the Hellenistic revival in the late-nineteenth century and her evocation of classical Greek culture helped elevate dancing from being mere entertainment to being considered an art in its own right. Like many of her contemporaries, Isadora Duncan felt the draw of Europe and soon she left for London and then Paris where she first saw Loïe Fuller dance at the 1900 Universal Exposition. Fuller’s serpentine motif is also visible in much of the decorative imagery of Art Nouveau. One of the most famous dancers of her time, Fuller starred as the main act of the Folies Bergère, inspiring a host of contemporary fashions and imitators. She embodied the fin-de-siècle images of woman as flower, woman as bird, woman as fire, woman as nature. In the 1890s Loïe Fuller created an extraordinary sensation in Paris with her manipulations of hundreds of yards of silk, swirling high above her and lit dramatically from below. ![]() ![]() Reconfiguring Ability: Limitations as Possibilities.Ability and Autonomy / Re-conceptualizing Ability.Exploring the Connections Between Technology and Technique.Exploring the Connections Between Bodies and Machines.Expanding through Space and into the World.Local Case Study: Early Dance at Oberlin College.“Natural” Movement and the Delsarte System of Bodily Expression.New Dance for New Audiences: The Global Flows of Bharatanatyam.Social Reform and the Disenfranchisement of Devadasis.Thanjavur and the Courtly Patronage of Devadasi Dance.Creating American Identities Primary Sources.Creating Contemporary American Identities Through Movement: Martha Graham’s American Document.Creating Contemporary American Identities Through Movement: Jawole Willa Jo Zollar.Pearl Primus’s Strange Fruit and Hard Time Blues.The Search for Identity Through Movement: Pearl Primus’s The Negro Speaks of Rivers.The Search for Identity Through Movement: Martha Graham’s Frontier.
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